When food’s the reward, obese women’s judgment fails them
At the risk of inspiring offensive commentary from misogynists and
fat haters, I bring you this intriguing finding about obese women from
researchers at Yale University: Compared to their normal-weight peers,
obese women – but not men – appear to have a highly specific learning
deficit around the issue of food.
Fatand thin, or cognitively different? A new study suggests that obese
women have a learning impairment that’s very specific to food. (Ronaldo
Schemidt / AFP/Getty Images) When a tasty reward is dangled before them, obese women’s powers of learning and decision-making appear to get short-circuited in a way not seen in women of normal healthy weight, or in men of any weight, a new study shows. When it comes to maximizing a monetary payout, however, these same women are every bit as sharp as their thinner peers or any male peer. [lol]
The research, published this week in the journal Current Biology, may be taken by some as evidence to support the broad stereotype of the obese – and especially obese women – as stupid, sad and self-defeating, a view widely held even by physicians who treat such patients. But the study’s senior author suggests instead that the perceptual impairment identified by the study is narrow indeed: Take tasty food out of the equation, and these obese women are as cognitively nimble as anyone else, says Yale University’s Ifat Levy.
