Want to be Happy? Eat Some Vanilla Yogurt, Study Says

The taste of food can affect a person and a new research found out that certain taste and type of yogurt can make a person happy.

According to the report by Medical News Today, the research, which was published at Food Research International, highlighted that eating vanilla yogurts make people happy while low-fat yogurts elicit a strong positive emotional response from the participants.

Additionally, the study, conducted by a team of researchers from the Netherlands, Austria and Finland, emphasized that being pleasantly surprised or disappointed to the taste of food can change the person's mood.

In order to arrive at this conclusion, the researchers used four measuring techniques to determine the emotional response of the participants when eating. The researchers used yogurt as the primary food to taste in order to identify the emotional effects the food cause to people.

With three groups composed of at least 24 participants joining the study, the researchers used Face Reading technique, Autobiographical reaction time test based on mood congruency as well as Eye Tracking test.

Furthermore, the Emotive Projection Test (EPT) was also used in order to determine the effect of yogurt on the mood of people. The test was done by showing photos of people to other participants. Before and after eating yogurt, the participants were then asked to give six positive and six negative traits of the people in the photos.

The theory behind the test was that people's emotions to others reflect their own moods.

From these tests, the researchers do not only discover that vanilla yogurt and low-fat diet has positive effects to the participants, they were also able to conclude that a person's familiarity or liking to a certain taste or product does not affect the person's emotion. Instead, it was the change in attitude after tasting the food that affects the person's emotion.

"We were surprised to find that by measuring emotions, we could get information about products independent from whether people like them. This kind of information could be very valuable to product manufacturers, giving them a glimpse into how we subconsciously respond to a product," Lead Author Dr. Jozina Mojet of Food & Biobased Research of the Netherlands said via Elsevier.

The report by Elsevier also pointed that this new research could help better understand and obtain information about a food product before being commercially produced.

"I strongly believe that sensory and consumer research should be conducted in an ecologically valid way. This sort of implicit method can reveal the complex interactions between the different factors involved in a situation," Dr. Mojet furthered.