Increased Weight Reduces The Brain's Response To Tasty Food

Increased Weight Reduces The Brain's Response To Tasty Food.
Most occupy in all likelihood gather drinking a milkshake a pleasurable experience, sometimes powerfully so yourvimax. But apparently that's less apt to be the case middle those who are overweight or obese.

Overeating, it seems, dims the neurological response to the consumption of appetizing foods such as milkshakes, a new study suggests. That feedback is generated in the caudate nucleus of the brain, a quarter involved with reward.

Researchers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) found that that overweight and fleshy people showed less activity in this brain section when drinking a milkshake than did normal-weight people.

"The higher your BMI [body quantity index], the lower your caudate response when you eat a milkshake," said weigh lead author Dana Small, an buddy professor of psychiatry at Yale and an associate fellow at the university's John B. Pierce Laboratory.

The effectuate was especially strong in adults who had a also persnickety variant of the taqIA A1 gene, which has been linked to a heightened imperil of obesity. In them the decreased brain effect to the milkshake was very pronounced. About a third of Americans have the variant.

The findings were to have been presented earlier this week at an American College of Neuropsychopharmacology get-together in Miami.

Just what this says about why colonize overeat or why dieters imagine it's so hard to ignore highly rewarding foods is not unequivocally clear. But the researchers have some theories.

When asked how pleasant they found the milkshake, overweight and obese participants in the study responded in ways that did not deviate much from those of normal-weight participants, suggesting that the explanation is not that obese family don't enjoy milkshakes any more or less.

And when they did brain scans in children at gamble for obesity because both parents were obese, the researchers found the reverse of what they found in overweight adults.

Children at risk of obesity actually had an increased caudate retort to milkshake consumption, compared with kids not considered at jeopardy for obesity because they had lean parents.

What that suggests, the researchers said, is that the caudate return decreases as a result of overeating through the lifespan.

"The reduction in caudate response doesn't precede weight gain, it follows it. That suggests the decreased caudate reply is a consequence, rather than a cause, of overeating."

Studies in rats have had equivalent results, said Paul Kenny, an associated professor in the behavioral and molecular neuroscience lab at the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla.