Children can learn to control their powerful sweets cravings: study

CTV News:

For children, the lure of cookies and fast food is distinctly more powerful than for adolescents and adults, although children’s cognitive wiring is well suited to train such cravings, according to researchers hailing principally from Columbia University.

“These findings are important because they suggest that we may have another tool in our toolbox to combat childhood obesity,” says psychological scientist and lead researcher Jennifer A. Silvers, a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University in the laboratory of Professor Kevin Ochsner.

Indeed, the study is unique because other research in the area has pointed the finger at advertising and the ready availability of sweets and high-fat foods, focusing more on an environment that is unlikely to change rather than asking if the individual child is capable of overcoming the influence.

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