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Childhood obesity is a growing issue throughout the world. Since childhood obesity can increase the risk of future health complications, programs set up in several countries have tried to find many ways of encouraging children to eat healthy. In a new study, researchers suggested that if children are taught early on to pay less attention to food, they might end up eating less food.

For this study, the research team headed by Kerri Boutelle, Ph.D., professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego examined the effects of using attention modification programs in curbing overeating. These programs are often used to help people with behavioral problems, such as substance abuse or anxiety issues, by teaching them how to ignore certain triggers.

"Attentional bias is a long-studied psychological phenomenon. Attentional bias to food means that food grabs a person's attention. If two people were in a room with potato chips on the table, the person with attentional bias would be paying attention to, maybe looking at, the chips and the person without the bias would not really notice or pay attention to them," said Boutelle reported by Medical Xpress. "We believe that there is a group of people who are inherently sensitive to food cues and, over time, eating in response to paying attention to food makes them pay even more attention. It's based on Pavlovian conditioning."

For this study, the team had recruited 24 children who were either overweight or obese. The children were between the ages of eight and 12. The researchers divided the children into two groups. The first group of children received the attention modification program. In this group, the researchers presented the children with one food word and one non-food at the same time on a computer screen. Both words were taken off the screen at the same time and replaced by a new word. When the new word flashed on screen, the children had to push either the left or right button depending on where the word was located.

"This is called 'implicit training' as it happens so fast that some people might not realize what is happening," said Boutelle. "The AMP trained attention away from food words because the letter always appeared in the spot of the non-food word while in the other group, the condition trained attention was split with the letter appearing half of the time in the food word location and half in the non-food word location."

The other group of children did not receive any intervention methods. The researchers concluded that just one session of AMP was effective in getting the children's attention diverted from food. The researchers are optimistic that this kind of therapy could potentially help children stop overeating.

The study was published in the journal, Appetite.