Question: why are you so interested in how happiness effects food choices and do you think this research will translate onto humans

Amy Warnock answered on 14 Jun 2018:

I’m interested in obesity and how certain factors can change what and how much we eat. At the moment scientists know quite a lot about how negative moods such as stress and anxiety can change food choices but we still know very little about how good mood can change what we eat. Lots of people assume being happy might lead to healthier food choices but if we think about it during celebrations like birthdays when we are happy we usually eat lots of food – sometimes foods that aren’t very healthy. There are links between obesity and certain mood disorders so it seems very likely that mood could influence our food choices! I’m currently using rats to look at this because it’s very hard to accurately study mood and feeding in humans because they can be influenced by a wide variety of factors such as social situations, whereas in rats we can control for these. If my research does result in finding that happiness can lead to changes in food choice this could be used to further study certain treatments for obesity and give us more information on the exact mechanisms that can lead to changes in food choice.