I'm a brain scientist - this is how food companies try to make you eat more

A brain scientist who worked at the heart of the food industry for 15 years has shed light on how food companies try to sell more of their products, potentially making yourself overweight and less healthy in the process. Appearing on the BBC documentary Irresistible: Why We Can't Stop Eating, a former lead neuroscientist at Unilever described what he said were the tactics that food producers use to find out more about our eating habits.

Unilever is one of the world's biggest food companies, owning brands including Ben and Jerry's, Pot Noodle and Hellmann's. Professor Francis McGlone, who worked there between 1994 and 2009, said he had been keen to move away from typical customer-led focus groups and interviews to a much deeper dive into the chemical effects food has on our brain, providing more scientific information about the effect of food, and not relying so much on what individuals were telling them. Recounting his time there, Prof McGlone said: "One of my remits when I first joined the company was the way they would get information and that would be always word of mouth, it would be focus groups, it would be questionnaires and I just railed against that stuff.

"I'm a neuroscientist, I introduced brain scanning to Unilever. I'm not interested in talking to a consumer, I want to find out what they like by digging deeper, because we are not really aware of why we like what we like, and one way to get that is with the neuroimaging capabilities."

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As a result, he said people would be put into a brain scanner and given foods to see exactly how their brains would react to each one, giving the company a scientific insight into what foods the brain enjoys and what it doesn't.

He said one particular study into ice cream found the reward system in the brain "glowed like a furnace", leading to ice cream companies marketing the sweet treat as something that scientifically makes you happy. He added the practice has "grown and grown and grown as a way to predict what products are going to be successful and what isn't".

The documentary also revealed that in the fight for "stomach space", texture is a particularly important factor. They found that hard, crunchy foods that force you to chew your food for longer periods trigger a response that makes you feel full and more nourished, while softer foods have the opposite effect - skipping your fullness mechanism and making you want to eat more.

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This could have damaging effects given the often soft nature of ultra-processed foods. Prof McGlone said: "One things many people don't realise is that factory processing changes the textural properties of food. Now that makes the food much softer and an intersting fact about soft food is you don't chew it as much. That short-circuits the normal satiety mechanisms that you would have if you were actually chewwing food properly.

"You're bypassing a normal mechanism that tells you that you're full. Once you've worked out that playing around with the texture of a food and making it softer tricks that normal satiety or fullness mechanism, clearly there's an opportunity there for some kind of scurrilous behaviour in making food softer so people will eat more and therefore you sell more of your product."

Even foods that would typically be thought of as hard, crispy or crunchy may be hiding their softness. For example, a cheese puff although crunchy, almost instantly dissolves into a soft mixture that is high in calories.

What effects do ultra-processed foods have on us?

In the UK and US, more than half the average diet now consists of ultra-processed food (UPF), with the negative impacts thought to be wide-ranging. A study published in the British Medical Journal found the consumption of UPF was linked to 32 harmful effects on our health, including increasing the risk of heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, harming mental health, and reducing life expectancy. You can see what happened when one writer gave up UPF for a year here.

The British Heart Foundation added: "Ultra-processed foods often contain high levels of saturated fat, salt and sugar and when we eat them, we leave less room in our diets for more nutritious foods. It’s also been suggested that the additives in these foods could be responsible for negative health effects."

Unilever has been contacted for comment.