Neural Representations of Food-Related Attributes in the Human Orbitofrontal Cortex in Health and Disease

Decisions about what to eat recruit the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and involve the evaluation of food-related attributes, such as taste and health. These attributes are utilized differently by healthy individuals and patients with disordered eating behavior, but it is unclear whether these attributes are decodable from activity in the OFC in both groups and whether neural representations of these attributes are differentially related to decisions about food. We used fMRI combined with behavioral tasks to investigate the representation of taste and health in the human OFC and the role of these representations in food choices in healthy individuals and patients with anorexia nervosa (AN). We found that subjective ratings of taste and health could be decoded from patterns of activity in the OFC in both groups. However, health-related patterns of activity in the OFC were more related to food choices and the magnitude of preferences among patients with AN than healthy individuals. These findings suggest that maladaptive decision-making in AN is associated with more consideration of health information represented by the OFC during deliberation about what to eat.