Coming up October 16, 2012: Second Presidential Debate @ 7pm ET

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney may have been gobbling their way through the greasy spoon grub and deep-fried fare of the campaign trail, but today - it's crunch time. The two men need to be firing on all cerebral cylinders for tonight's presidential debate at the University of Denver, and can use every advantage they can get.

Voters will be hanging on every word that comes out of the candidates' mouths, so in these final hours, it's crucial what goes into them. We turned to David Solot, a Ph.D. student in organizational psychology at Walden University, with a Masters in clinical psychology to share his top tips for maximizing mental performance via food.
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David Solot is a Ph.D. student in organizational psychology at Walden University, with a Masters in clinical psychology.  His background includes the study of animal sensation and perception, and conditioned responses to sweetness in foods. This is part two in a series on "The psychology of food aversions."

From peanut butter cookies to macaroni and cheese, there sure are a lot of food aversions out there. Hundreds of people took the time to tell us their own stories.

Lisa told us about how when she was pregnant she walked past a store selling candied pecans. The pecans got associated with her morning sickness, and now she avoids any food with cinnamon and sugar on it. Ann overdid it on Heath Bar cookies, and today she can’t even look at a Heath Bar wrapper. This leads us to our first question about food aversions:

Why does the sight and smell of these foods make us sick?
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David Solot is a Ph.D. student in organizational psychology at Walden University, with a Masters in clinical psychology.  His background includes the study of animal sensation and perception, and conditioned responses to sweetness in foods.

Is there a food you just don’t like, and you can’t explain why? Or perhaps a food that made you sick once, and now you can’t come near it? It could be the result of a million-year-old survival mechanism.

When I was about six years old, I started hating cherry Jell-O. There was no apparent reason for it. I liked cherry Kool-Aid and shaved ice, and I was fine with other flavors of Jell-O. But the sight or smell of cherry Jell-O would instantly make me nauseated.

My reaction to it was so bad that my parents used to tell people I was allergic to it, just to avoid my reaction. They even wrote it down under “allergies” on a school form. I just couldn’t touch it without feeling sick.
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