https://goo.gl/fyVfBs
A low-carb diet might do more than affect your health – it could make you a more tolerant person. People who ate fewer carbohydrates for breakfast made more forgiving decisions in a money-sharing game they played a few hours later.
“Extreme [low-carb] diets might be influencing people’s behaviour,” says Soyoung Park of the University of Lübeck in Germany. This could be because less starchy meals tend to have more protein, which boosts levels of dopamine in the brain, involved in decision making.
Standard advice is that we should base our meals around starchy carbohydrates, such as bread, potatoes and pasta. Low-carbers tend to have a higher protein intake because they replace these foods with protein-rich meat, dairy and nuts.
Dietary protein affects the levels of an amino acid that is a precursor to dopamine in our blood. Since increasing the amino acid increases dopamine, and dopamine affects decision-making, Park wondered if a low-carb diet might change people’s behaviour. To find out, her team asked people to participate in the “ultimatum game”, in which you are split into pairs and your partner is given some money and they decide how much to share with you. If you accept the offer, both of you get the cash, but if you reject it, no one gets anything.