Scientists Reveal Key To Control The Sweet Tooth. Yes, this is good news for all those who are finding it hard to say no to cookies.  There are many of us who may think "what is a big deal about eating a cookie or two", but in reality these “sweet temptations are a big threat” revealed a new study.

Researchers at University of Texas at Austin say that your ability to say no to sweet depends upon your ability to identify the potential dangers associated with the sweet.  
 

Authors Sz –Chi Huang, Ying Zhang, and Susan M. Broniarczyk have revealed the techniques, which equip you to say no to sweet and other foods. These techniques were perfected towards the end of four experiments. These four experiments established that the people who followed stricter weight goals also got tempted to try out sweets but their inner self-control mechanism forbade them from eating sweets. And this mechanism is known as counteractive construal.  

During one of the experiments half of the female participants were offered cookies as a complimentary gift and whereas the other half weren’t. These female participants were told the approximate calories in a cookie. The results of the studies revealed that the participants who followed stricter diet goals said that the cookie had more calories and were enough for destabilizing their long term weight loss goals.
 

Another study revealed that counteractive construal also bailed the participants out of the situations of self-control conflict.  The authors revealed that people construct their long term-diet goals after getting inspired by some environmental stimuli such as posters, or other social engagements. The environmental stimuli also encouraged them to engage in counteractive construal.

It was found that the female participants who were exposed to posters of their role models or natural scenery were more likely to talk about the high calories in the given tempting drink, and were more likely to consume less of it when offered later.
 

At the end of these studies the authors concluded that "The mental construal of temptations may be distorted when people experience a self-control conflict, and such distorted construal, rather than accurate representations, determines consumers' actual consumption, helping them resist the temptation and maintaining their long-term goal" .
 

These revelations were published in June 2010 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research as an article by Ying Zhang, Szu-Chi Huang and Susan M. Broniarczyk under the name "Counteractive Construal in Consumer Goal Pursuit."

Image courtesy: sweettooth.typepad.com