Or, more accurately, a rat's brain on potato chips. Last week, PLoS One published a very interesting paper by Dr. Tobias Hoch and colleagues on what happens in a rat's brain when it is exposed to a highly palatable/rewarding food (1). Rats, like humans, overconsume highly palatable foods even when they're sated on less palatable foods (2), and feeding rats a variety of palatable human junk foods is one of the most effective ways to fatten them (3). Since the brain directs all behaviors, food consumption is...
Wednesday, 27 February 2013
Monday, 25 February 2013
Salt Sugar Fat
Posted by Admin in: Food reward
I'd just like to put in a quick word for a book that will be released tomorrow, titled Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, by Pulitzer prize-winning author Michael Moss. This is along the same lines as Dr. David Kessler's book The End of Overeating, which explains how the food industry uses food reward, palatability, and food cues to maximize sales-- and as an unintended side effect, maximize our waistlines. Judging by Moss's recent article in New York Times Magazine, which I highly recommend reading,...
Friday, 22 February 2013
Food Reward Friday
Posted by Admin in: Food reward Food reward Fridays
This week, Food Reward Friday is going to be a little bit different. I've received a few e-mails from people who would like to see me write about some of the less obvious examples of food reward-- foods that are less extreme, but much more common, and that nevertheless promote overeating. Let's face it, even though they're funny and they (sometimes) illustrate the principle, most people reading this blog don't eat banana splits...
Tuesday, 19 February 2013
Body Fatness and Cardiovascular Risk Factors
Posted by Admin in: Cardiovascular disease overweight
I recently revisited a really cool paper published in the Lancet in 2009 on body fatness, biomarkers, health, and mortality (1). It's a meta-analysis that compiled body mass index (BMI) data from nearly 900,000 individual people, and related it to circulating lipids and various health outcomes. This is one of the most authoritative papers on the subject. Read more...
Friday, 15 February 2013
Food Reward Friday
Posted by Admin in: Food reward Food reward Fridays
This week's "winner"... the Banana Split!Read more...
Friday, 8 February 2013
Food Reward Friday
Posted by Admin in: Food reward Food reward Fridays
This week's lucky "winner"... an unnamed hot dog-laden Pizza Hut monstrosity with tempura shrimp and mayonnaise!Read more...
Tuesday, 5 February 2013
Why Do We Eat? A Neurobiological Perspective. Part VIII
Posted by Admin in: Food reward hyperphagia overweight
In the (probably) last post of this series, I'll take the pieces that I've gradually outlined in previous posts, and put them together into a big-picture, common-sense framework for thinking about human eating behavior, and why we eat more today than ever before. Why is Eating Behavior Regulated?Let's start at the most fundamental level. To be competitive in a natural environment, organisms must find rational ways of interacting with their surroundings to promote survival and reproduction. One of the most important...
Monday, 4 February 2013
Why Do We Eat? A Neurobiological Perspective. Part VII
Posted by Admin in: Food reward hyperphagia
Welcome back to the series, after a bit of a hiatus! In previous posts, we covered the fact that humans eat because we're motivated to eat, and many things can motivate us to eat. These include factors related to energy need (homeostatic factors), such as hunger, and factors that have little to do with energy need or hunger (non-homeostatic factors). These many factors are all processed in specialized brain 'modules' that ultimately converge on a central action selection system (part of the reward system);...
Sunday, 3 February 2013
Why Do We Eat? A Neurobiological Perspective. Part VI
Posted by Admin in: Food reward overweight superstimuli
In previous posts in this series, I explained that the brain (primarily the mesolimbic system) integrates various factors to decide whether or not to drive food seeking and consumption behaviors. These include homeostatic factors such as hunger, and non-homeostatic factors such as palatability and the social environment. In this post, I'll examine the reward system more closely. This is the system that governs the motivation for food, and behavioral reinforcement (a form of learning). It does this by receiving...
Saturday, 2 February 2013
Why Do We Eat? A Neurobiological Perspective. Part V
Posted by Admin in: Food reward hyperphagia superstimuli
In previous posts, I explained that food intake is determined by a variety of factors that are detected by the brain, and integrated by circuits in the mesolimbic system to determine the overall motivation to eat. These factors include 'homeostatic factors' that reflect a true energy need by the body, and 'non-homeostatic factors' that are independent of the body's energy needs (e.g. palatability, habit, and the social environment). In this post, we'll explore the hedonic system, which governs pleasure. This includes...
Friday, 1 February 2013
Why Do We Eat? A Neurobiological Perspective. Part IV
Posted by Admin in: diet leptin overweight
In this post, I'll follow up on the last post with a discussion two more important factors that can affect energy homeostasis and therefore our food intake and propensity to gain fat: age and menopause.AgeAlthough it often isn't the case in non-industrial cultures, in affluent nations most people gain fat with age. This fat gain continues until old age, when many people once again lose fat. This is probably related to a number of factors, three of which I'll discuss. The first is that we tend to become less...
