A study on the power of suggestion found that people could be falsely persuaded that they had once become sick eating strawberry ice cream as children -- and they later said they would avoid this food.

"We believe this new finding may have significant implications for dieting," said Loftus, a distinguished professor who specializes in memory and suggestion at the University of California Irvine.

Loftus and colleagues at the University of Washington and Kwantlen University College in Washington experimented with more than 200 volunteers, mostly students, who did not know the goal of the study.

They used what is called a false feedback technique.

"You gather data from the subject," Loftus said in a telephone interview. "It just so happens that these were data about personality and childhood experiences about food. You tell them you fed the data into a very smart computer and it comes out with profile about childhood experiences with food."

In fact, the researchers crafted a printout with predictable associations, such as a childhood dislike of spinach and love of pizza.

"Then you add in (that) you got sick on strawberry ice cream. You want them to think about the getting sick aspect of the experience," Loftus said.

Then the volunteers were asked to describe what may have happened -- for instance, eating strawberry ice cream at a birthday party and becoming ill.

"Most of our subjects came up with a belief that this had happened as opposed to developing an actual memory," Loftus said.

SAYING 'NO, THANKS'

Up to 40 percent of the students fell for it, and most of them lowered their preference for strawberry ice cream on a later questionnaire, Loftus and colleagues reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Some of the volunteers got no suggestion, and their food preferences did not change. And some of the volunteers were told they had a bad chocolate chip cookie experience.

"It didn't work in chocolate chip cookies and it didn't work in a previous experiment we did with potato chips, either," Loftus said.

But strawberry ice cream is a rarely eaten food for most people and might be susceptible, the researchers decided.

So can dieters try it now?

"A few things would need to be ironed out before you could take this out to the real world. You would have to show that the effects are longer lasting than just an hour," Loftus said. "Then you would also like to show that this would work when real foods are put in front of you," she added.

But parents might try it with their children, she suggested.

And now her team is working on a study trying to help people eat more healthy food instead of avoiding fattening treats.

"The flip side of this is we convince them they had a really positive experience with asparagus," she said.

Reference Source 89
August 2, 2005

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