Eating Attentively: Episodic Memory & Eating Behaviour

Obesity is now a major biosocial issue that affects most of the developed world. Rises in obesity have been caused primarily by increases in the amount of food people have been eating. However, the long-term reductions to food consumption which are required to promote weight loss are difficult to achieve for most people on their own. Recent work has shown that memory for recent eating experiences is an important determinant of eating behaviour; by having an accurate memory representation of what we have been eating throughout the day, we can make better decisions about how much to eat. This raises the possibility of developing intervention tools that target memory for recent eating in order to help people eat more healthily. In line with this, initial results suggest that encouraging individuals to eat in a more 'attentive' manner, by ensuring attention is paid towards meals being eaten, improves memory for recent eating and reduces the amount of food people tend to eat. These finding are promising as even modest reductions to food consumption can promote weight loss and therefore have positive effects on health and well-being.
Although it has been suggested that memory informs food consumption, how this process occurs is unclear. If we are able to understand how 'attentive' eating reduces food consumption, this may have public health benefit. Thus, a thorough investigation of how memory influences eating behaviour is now required. Memory for recent eating consists of multiple episodic 'elements', such as visual memory for meal size and memory for how filling a meal is remembered to have been. Understanding which episodic 'elements' determine how much food we consume and explain why eating attentively reduces food consumption will provide us with novel theoretical information. This in turn will also enable us to design effective intervention tools to target memory for recent eating, so we can help overweight individuals eat less and lose weight, which will be of wider public health benefit.
This research will be the first to develop a theoretical account of how memory for recent eating influences eating behaviour and the process by which an 'attentive' eating style reduces food consumption. This new knowledge will then guide a translational 'real world' intervention study; taking the findings from initial promising laboratory studies and using cross-disciplinary methods to test whether 'attentive eating' principles can be applied in a public health intervention setting to help overweight people eat less and lose weight. Studies 1 and 2 use laboratory feeding methods to manipulate and interfere with memories for recent eating, in order to test and understand the influence that different memory elements have on food consumption. Study 3 tests whether targeting memory for recent eating and promoting a more 'attentive' approach to eating through the use of smartphone technology can help overweight and obese individuals eat less and lose weight.
The present project will address an important biosocial question and benefit from cross-disciplinary research methods. By the end of the research we will have developed a better understanding of how memory for recent eating influences food consumption and examined the applied relevance of this new knowledge. These novel insights will have the potential to help tackle the widespread obesity problem faced by the majority of the developed world.

As this work will provide a novel theoretical contribution to the area of appetite regulation, it has the potential to impact the work of scientists who study appetite regulation from behavioural, physiological and cognitive backgrounds. Given that we will also be investigating a translational approach to achieving sustained reductions to energy intake and weight loss, the methods used and findings of this grant will also be of use to public health researchers developing behavioural interventions for obesity. To reach these academic beneficiaries we will focus on regular conference presentations, publication in leading journals and develop a dedicated grant website.
The translational nature of this research means that it will have applied relevance and the potential to be far reaching in its impact. Obesity is now a widespread problem in most of the developed world and research clearly shows that even modest reductions in body weight can promote meaningful improvements in quality of life. However, these reductions are difficult to achieve with the current tools to which the general public have access. The development and testing of the 'attentive eating' mobile phone intervention in Study 3 directly addresses this issue. If shown to be effective in this grant, this theory driven intervention will have real potential to benefit public health and it would be suitable for larger scale testing. As we are using a simple and scale-able platform to deliver our intervention (the majority of UK adults now own mobile phones), this work has real potential to benefit a wide spectrum of society. For example, if shown to be effective in the long-term, such a tool could eventually be made available to medical practitioners as a treatment option for weight loss or the general public. Because of this, an important part of this grant is the networking opportunities and links the planned study visits will afford the PI. For example, as well as being linked to key stakeholders by his mentor, the PI will spend time working on dissemination activities with collaborator Aveyard, a science advisor on obesity to the Department of Health and contributor to NICE guidelines for the treatment of obesity. In addition, the PI will maintain regular dialogue with key stakeholders (e.g. Public Health England) and plan a flagship dissemination event to target both local and national public health stakeholders and advisory boards.
We are also aware that the cross-disciplinary approaches used and focus on obesity means that our work will be of interest to the general public. We have a number of planned activities to engage with this audience, including local and national media engagement and attendance at a UK public science dissemination event (British Science Festival). See Pathways to Impact for more information.