Protecting families from contaminated food and water
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Protecting families from contaminated food and water
Posted in Our Blog on May 9, 2025
Food poisoning memories can not only drum up phantom feelings from just the smell of a certain dish or ingredient. But also create aversions to certain foods. Even permanently.
Is this preference based on science? Psychology? Or both?
Scientists from the Princton Neuroscience Institute devised a study to explain this phenomenon.
How are food poisoning memories formed?
Let’s explore!
Food poisoning is a universal experience. At least once in your life you have consumed something that later made you sick.
Whether it was something risky, like my experience with Chinese buffet sushi offerings. Or something innocuous like potato salad at a family BBQ that was left out too long in transit. We’ve all been there.
Study researchers explain that the gap between eating something and the symptoms later experienced is the basis of the study. The phenomenon these scientists dubbed the “meal-to-malaise delay.” Unlike touching a hot stove burner, they explain, there is sometimes hours between stimuli and experience.
Even a single experience can have a lasting impact.
They wanted to better understand what neuroscientists refer to as “one-shot learning.” Essentially, a phenomenon where a single traumatic incident burns itself into memory. Creating a long-term response to a single experience stimulus.
These scientists were curious about where those memories were stored.
While it makes sense when you think about it, the location of these food poisoning memories were initially surprising.
The results of this study was published in the journal, Nature. “A Neural mechanism for Learning from Delayed Postingestive Feedback,” explains how these researchers used grape kool-aid to track this information.
Scientists studied this phenomenon by offering mice a drop of a novel liquid. In this case, grape kool-aid. It doesn’t taste like anything the mice had encountered and has a distinct flavor profile.
This type of novel stimulus built into the study helps the test subject easily categorize the potential source. Future studies may include more commonly consumed foods. But for now, scientists wanted to see clear responses.
Hence the use of grape kool-aid. Not generic sugar or sugar water.
Shortly after the mice consumed the grape kool-aid, scientists injected mice with a solution that would simulate the symptoms of foodborne illness.
Yes. In the name of science, they made mice vomit.
The next time the mice were offered the purple beverage and their tiny noses took in the scent, they avoided the it. Opting for plain water instead.
A memory was formed. But where are these food poisoning memories stored in the brain?
Turns out, it is in an unlikely location.
The central amygdala.
Logically, you would expect these food poisoning memories to be stored alongside other long-term memories. In the neocortex.
Nope.
It is stored in the small, almond-shaped amygdala.
What else is stored there?
Memories used in basic fight-or-flight emotions and fear.
But it also stores a lot of information from the environment. Namely, tastes and smells.
When you think about it, that makes a little bit of sense. An automatic response to a potentially dangerous stimulus. Even from food. Or rather especially from food that could impact your health and well-being.
Genius!
Lead author and postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute Christopher Zimmerman explains, “If you look across the entire brain, at where novel versus familiar flavors are represented, the amygdala turns out the be a really interesting place because it’s preferentially activated by novel flavors at every stage in learning.”
“It’s active when the mouse is drinking, when the mouse if feeling sick later, and when the mouse retrieves that negative memory days later,” says Zimmerman.
Was the mouse response due to the faux food poisoning response? Or were factors, such as the actual injection at play?
Researchers had a solution to test that variable.
There are certain neural switches that are activated in the brain when you experience food poisoning symptoms. Instead of the emetic shot, researchers stimulated those cells.
They received the same outcome. Aversion to grape kool-aid.
“It was as if the mice were thinking back and remembering the prior experience that caused them to later feel sick,” said researchers in a press release. “It was very cool to see this unfolding at the level of individual neurons.”
When questions are answered, more questions are formed. When it comes to scientific studies, this is usually, “where does the research go from here?”
“Often when we learn in the real world, there’s a long delay between whatever choice we’ve made and the outcome. But that’s not typically studied in the lab, so we don’t really understand the neural mechanisms that support this kind of long delay learning,” Zimmerman said. “Our hope is that these findings will provide a framework for thinking about how the brain might leverage memory recall to solve this learning problem in other situations.”
Understanding how this stimuli forms may lead to potentially removing the response. If a negative response leads to aversion. Could a positive response lead to removing those aversions?
Alas, you may be able to eat oysters again. Just eat them cooked this time! Have you learned nothing from our Make Food Safe blog?
How about potential applications beyond food? What about other traumatic memories? Like those involved in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Could a study reversing food aversions using food poisoning memories help develop therapies to ease PTSD symptoms. Or cure it altogether?
Only time will tell!
If you’d like to know more about food safety topics in the news, like “Scientists Use Grape Kool-Aid to Study Food Poisoning Memories,” check out the Make Food Safe Blog. We regularly update trending topics, foodborne infections in the news, recalls, and more! Stay tuned for quality information to help keep your family safe, while The Lange Law Firm, PLLC strives to Make Food Safe!
By: Heather Van Tassell (contributing writer, non-lawyer)