A new study found that people could recall a false memory of becoming sick from eating strawberry ice cream as children, and later avoid the food.
"We believe this new finding may have significant implications for dieting," says Loftus, a distinguished professor who specializes in memory and suggestion at the University of California Irvine to Reuters.
Up to 40 percent of the 200 students who volunteered for the study fell for the implanted memory, and most of them lowered their preference for strawberry ice cream on a later questionnaire, Loftus and colleagues reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Some of the volunteers did not receive a bad memory about strawberry ice cream, and their food preferences did not change. And some of the volunteers were told they had a bad chocolate chip cookie experience.
"It didn't work in chocolate chip cookies and it didn't work in a previous experiment we did with potato chips, either," Loftus said.
But strawberry ice cream is a rarely eaten food for most people and might be susceptible, the researchers decided.
