Neural indicators of food cue reactivity, regulation, and valuation and their associations with body composition and daily eating behavior

Exposure to food cues activates the brain’s reward system and undermines efforts to regulate impulses to eat. During explicit regulation, lateral prefrontal cortex activates and modulates the activity in reward regions and decreases food cravings. However, the extent to which between-person differences in the recruitment of regions associated with reward processing, subjective valuation and regulation during food cue exposure—absent instructions to regulate—predict body composition and daily eating behaviors is unclear. In this preregistered study, we pooled data from five functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) samples (N = 262) to examine whether regions associated with reward, valuation and regulation, as well as whole-brain pattern expression indexing these processes, were recruited during food cue exposure and associated with body composition and real-world eating behavior. Regression models for a single a priori analytic path indicated that univariate and multivariate measures of reward and valuation were associated with individual differences in body mass index and the enactment of daily food cravings. Specification curve analyses further revealed reliable associations between univariate and multivariate neural indicators of reactivity, regulation and valuation and all outcomes. These findings highlight the utility of these methods to elucidate brain–behavior associations and suggest that multiple processes are implicated in proximal and distal markers of eating behavior.