Our Brains Pick Food Based on Colours

You might think that the ultimate sense for deciding what we’re going to eat is smell, after all, if something smells delicious, it gets our mouths watering. However, it turns out that it isn’t just beauty that’s in the eye of the beholder, as sight is the main thing that influences our food decisions.

According to new research from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Italy, our brains are hardwired to choose foods that are certain colours. It seems that if food is red, it’s more likely to look appetising to us when compared to green varieties.

This means that our brains work totally opposite to traffic lights, in that red means go and green means stop. So foods like meat or juicy red apples are going to trigger your brain into wanting to eat them, whereas green foods like lettuce and broccoli leave us wanting pass – perhaps explaining why kids are adverse to eating their vegetables!

Researchers looked at the results from asking study participants to judge how appealing a food was to them based purely on how it looked. They found that people tended to perceive red foods as having more calories when compared to green foods.

According to the study author Giulio Pergola, it was also deemed that processed foods were higher in calories, even if they had lost colour and so this couldn’t be used as indicator. He suggested that the colour preference may be due to evolutionary forces so that we would pick foods that were edible and nutritious to help with survival.

Study coordinator Raffaella Rumiati said: “We are visual animals, unlike others, dogs, for example, who depend on their sense of smell. We are particularly efficient at distinguishing red from green. It is mainly the color of food that guides us, and our experiments show how. To date, only a few studies have been focused on the topic.”

The researchers have suggested that these findings could help people make healthier choices and help curb obesity levels, as foods that are healthy can be coloured red, even artificially.

This could also be a good way to get your Chefs of the Future interested in more food, as adding natural food colouring to green vegetables might make them look more appetising. Of course, it could also be a bit of fun as multi-coloured food is sure to entice little ones no matter what it is.