What drives us to choose certain food? How do we come to trust certain brands? Most importantly, why? Can our nutrition control our thoughts and decisions? Researches from different disciplines have attempted to investigate the underlying motives of food-related decisions such as consumer decisions, reward processing or trust behavior with diverging results.

Here, I will present a series of recent studies from my lab, in which I shed light on the psychological, neural, economic and metabolic motives and modulators of human choices.

In the first part, I will present a series of studies, investigating the neuroanatomic and neurofunctional mechanisms underlying reward-based decisions in humans. In the second part, I will present strategies, in which I use the knowledge from consumer science, psychology, neuroscience and metabolism to change and intervene decisions. In the third part, I will show you novel data, in which I show how our nutrition controls our mind.

Affiliation: Deutsches Institut für Ernährungsforschung