A team of researchers have successfully been able to predict a person's weight gain and sexual activity, from the use of MRI scans, giving you a heads up in advance to just how many charms of temptation you may fall for (be it fatty foods or sexual conquests).

Scientists at Dartmouth College have been studying nucleus accumbens: a region of the brain most commonly called the "reward centre," as it is thought to play an important role in expressions of reward, pleasure and laughter.  The team begun their research on a group of first year university students, scanning their brains while showing them either a set of neutral images (eg landscape pictures), or something a little more alluring (food porn or porn porn).

The data is then processed from the scans, and test subjects are invited back six months after to fill in a questionnaire about their eating habits and sexual activity.  With this, the researchers found a strong correlation between those whose reward centres showed a strong response to pictures of food and their weight gain.  The same can be identified for those who responded strongly to erotic images, who went on to have more sex.

After processing the data from the scans, the researchers waited six months before asking each participant to fill in a questionnaire. They found that those people whose reward centers responded most strongly to pictures of food had gained significantly more weight than the others. Likewise, those whose brains had responded most strongly to erotic images had gone on to be more sexually active.

The research is to appear in tomorrow’s issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. 

With this research, its clear to see just how implanted into the general thought processes of the brain these urges for sustenance or...coital desires really are.  So the only advice we could give off the back of that is to learn what triggers these moments of unrelenting need, whether its the cashier asking if you'd want to go large or something a little more 'risque,' and practice resistance.

Either that or you could give into temptation, which is probably what most of the freshers tested in this study did.

Source: The Journal of Neuroscience