Food is among oxygen and water one of the most important things our body needs. Ever since the prehistory we work every day with the main reason being to get food in order to stay alive. However, we have come to the point where half of the populations of the industrialized world are overweight due to the increase of food availability. Overweight and obesity are both a huge risk to global health, and are already the second major cause of death in the United States. It might be possible to tackle this vital health issue, if we are able to understand in what aspect of consuming foods gives the feeling of pleasure, thus we might be able to improve this among obese and overweight people. Thereby creating a ‘cure’ for overweight people and obesity might be possible and if so the public health of society will be improved by decreasing the populations’ risks of several diseases caused by being overweight or obese (ie. obesity).

It is commonly claimed that chocolate has the capacity to lift spirits, to create highs and make people feel good” (Parker et al., 2006).

Furthermore it is widely known that certain foods trigger certain emotions. For example can sugar induce excitement, and chocolate can induce happiness (Parker et al., 2006). There are even cases where people 'eat to be happy', which can lead to sever overeating, with a result in being overweight or obese. The above quote is of interest do study further, why our research will focus on the object, chocolate and investigate the different senses when seeing, touching, hearing and consuming chocolate. Our research question is built on the knowledge that food triggers emotions with the help of our senses. Additionally it is of interest to study which type of sense result in the highest scale of long-term (LT) excitement when looking at brainwaves with the use of EEG. Moreover it is important to look into the placebo effect in order to study its effect on the LT excitement when sensing the chocolate in one way or the other. In addition to this it might be that people will get more excited when thinking about chocolate, however it could be that consuming the chocolate do not have further effect on LT excitement compared to the pure thought of chocolate.

 The final report of our group can be see here:

http://staff.science.uva.nl/~ghebreab/ICC2010/MakesYouWonder.pdf

 The final presentation is included in the attachment below.