Dr. Alia Crum

But they matter because they're shaping, they're synthesizing and simplifying the way we're thinking.

But they're also shaping what we're paying attention to, what we're motivated to do and potentially even how our bodies respond.

Certainly.

Yeah, this was a study that I ran as a graduate student at Yale University.

I was working with Kelly Brownell and Peter Salovey.

Peter Salovey had done a lot of work on really coining the term emotional intelligence.

He's now the president of Yale, right?

I had come in doing some previous work on mindsets about exercise and placebo effects and exercise.

And it really occurred to me that there was a very simple question that hadn't been probed yet.

And that was, do our beliefs about what we're eating change our body's physiological response to that food, holding constant the objective nutrients of that thing?

So that question might sound outrageous at first, but it's really not outrageous if you're coming from a place of having studied in depth placebo effects.

Placebo effects are this robust demonstration in which simply taking a sugar pill, taking nothing, under the impression that it's a real medication that might result

relieve your asthma, reduce your blood pressure, boost your immune system, can lead to those physiological effects even though there's no objective nutrients.

And we have more evidence on placebo effects than we have for any other drug because of the clinical trial process in which all new drugs and medications are required to outperform a placebo effect.

So we have a lot of data on the placebo effect.

But anyways, going back to this question, it was like, all right, we've moved from, you know, medications solving our health crises to behavioral medicine solving our health crises, increase people's exercise, get them to eat better.

To what degree are these things influenced by our mindsets or beliefs about them?

So to test this question, we ran a seemingly simple study.

This was done at the Yale Center for Clinical and Translational Research.

And we brought people into our lab under the impression that we were designing different milkshakes with vastly different metabolic concentrations, nutrient concentrations, that were designed to meet different metabolic needs of the patrons of the hospital.