How motivational interviewing shifts food choices and craving-related brain responses to healthier options

Abstract

Changing one's habits is challenging. Motivational interviewing (MI) has been proposed as a communication-based approach to overcome this challenge. Here, we tested how change and sustain talk suggestions, elicited by MI, influenced value-based dietary decision-making and responses of a recently developed neurobiological craving signature (NCS) in healthy female adults. We found that following change talk, compared to sustain talk, participants' food choices and activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex were more driven by the healthiness and less by the tastiness of food. These findings were paralleled by lower NCS responses to tasty food after change compared to sustain talk. Further, following change talk, participants' body mass indices moderated the NCS decoding of healthy and tasty food choices. These results show that MI can shift value-based decision-making and reduce craving-related brain marker responses to highly palatable food items. The findings contribute to a better understanding of behavioral change toward healthier eating.