Yale Study: Fat women are learning disabled when it comes to food

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Obese women may have a "food learning impairment" that could explain their attitude to food, research from Yale School of Medicine suggests.

Tests on groups of obese and healthy-weight people found that the obese women performed worst when asked to remember a sequence of food picture cards.

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Study author Ifat Levy, assistant professor at Yale School of Medicine, said the difference in the performance of the obese women compared with the other groups was "really striking" and "significant"

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The results showed that obese women performed worst because they overestimated how often the pictures of food, including pretzels or chocolate, appeared.

Even after researchers had accounted for other factors, there was still a large difference in their learning performance.

Prof Levy said: "This is not a general learning impairment, as obese women had no problem learning when the reward was money rather than food.

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