The bizarre science behind your snack preferences

Do you prefer salty or sweet? Fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies or a bowl full of sour cream chips or peanuts?

While cravings will always come and go, we all have our go-to snack preferences and guilty pleasures—and as it turns out, there’s actually a scientific reason to back up our individual taste and preferences when it comes to snacking.

The study

A 2019 neuroscientific study published in the Neuropsychologia journal used electroencephalography (EEG) to record the brain’s response to various snacks. Authors Jutta Peterburs, Lena Sannemann, and Christian Bellebaum measured the brain’s electrical activity with electrodes fixed to an elastic cap-like headpiece. 

The research team from Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf, Germany found that individual preferences for both milk chocolate and white chocolate, as well as edible wafer paper, were visibly reflected in brain responses of participants.

Sweet vs. savory

In a recent follow-up study led by Jutta Peterburs and published in the Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience (CABN) journal, researchers in Düsseldorf as well as MSH Medical School Hamburg took it one step further: studying how the neural coding of snack preferences can be affected by the consumption of an individual’s favorite snack.

The study followed healthy adult volunteers whose preference for sweet, savory, and neutral snacks (like rice wafers or crispbread) had been assessed, and participated in a variety of test sessions that involved recording brain responses to snacks.

In each session, the volunteers were asked to perform an experimental task on the computer while brain responses were noted with the EEG. The task involved participants opening virtual doors to reveal either a sweet, savory, or neutral snack. Volunteers were then informed that they would receive the snack they “found” the most often at the end of the session.

The ‘fast’ life

Before every session, participants were instructed to fast for six hours—and were then allowed to eat as much as they want of the preferred snack prior to the brain recordings.  Participants were also allowed to watch a TV show to encourage even further snacking.

The study ended up showing that reward processing in the brain is not just affected by stand alone factors—like individual preferences or cravings—but also by the motivational state of the given individual.

The brain’s response to snacks and given preferences depends highly on prior consumption and rewards, which researchers see as a promising breakthrough when it comes to treating eating disorders, including binge eating, anorexia nervosa, and obesity.

What does this mean for your own everyday snacking preferences?

Basically, while your brain does react differently to your typical go-to snack and definitely has its own preferences, it gets tired of eating the same flavors over and over again just like your taste buds! 

As such, feeling sick of a certain snack after binge eating or opting for the same type of chips or chocolate for days on end is, well, scientifically proven to make you crave your preferences or see said food as a type of reward, much less prominently from a neurological level.