Yes, eating a tub of ice cream (while crying over chic-flick movies) may heal and be good for your broken heart but NOT FOR YOUR HEALTH. A new study just found a new comfort (and healthy) food that can make you especially happy. Bonus: It comes in vanilla flavour.
A recent study by a team of researchers from Wageningen UR Food and Biobased Research in the Netherlands, the VIT Technical Research Centre of Finland LTD., and the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) in Austria looked into and measured people's emotional responses to food, specifically yogurt. The researchers used various methods and specifically pointed out that eating vanilla yogurt can make you happy. Moreover, eating yogurts with lower fat content even elicit a stronger, more positive emotional response. Way to go for low fat vanilla yogurt!
Lead author Dr. Jozina Mojet of Food and Biobased Research in the Netherlands related that by measuring emotions, we could get information about products independent from whether people like them. For example, the study showed that yogurt with fruits in it did not affect the participants' emotional states, even when they reported differences in their liking for it.
To prove their theory, the researchers used emotive projection test to observe how different types of yogurt affected people's moods. After making the participants taste different flavours and types of yogurt, the researchers showed them photos of people then asked them to rate the people in the photos based on six positive and negative traits. The researchers then based the participants' overall mood on their projected emotions onto the people in the photos.
The participants showed no significant emotional responses after tasting strawberry and pineapple flavours. However, more positive emotional responses were observed from the participants after consuming low-fat yogurts with the same flavours. Meanwhile, vanilla-flavoured yogurt elicited the strongest positive emotional response. Tadah! This just shows vanilla yogurt can make you smile and happy anytime (without making you fat!).
