Most parents want their kids to eat healthy, but one memory expert had a somewhat disturbing solution.
As part of his ongoing series on memory modification, Slate‘s William Saletan describes Dr. Elizabeth Loftus’s research into food memories. She found that telling people they’d become sick in childhood from eating certain foods — supposedly based on information from a survey but actually a total fabrication — could make them avoid those foods (or at least say they would — whether they actually did avoid them later wasn’t within the scope of the study). While she initially tried the experiment with hard-boiled eggs and pickles, she quickly expanded to false memories about “fattening” foods (the term itself is somewhat problematic), arguing that “we can, through suggestion, manipulate nutritional selection and possibly even improve health.”
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