A tasty bag of chips, soft-centered cookies, a tall glass of cold fizzy drink, and the creamiest and fruitiest ice cream there is -- Pick your poison, they say.
It is fascinating how people would still dive into food that they know is not so healthy and are in fact only high in calories. Sadly, humans are wired with the drive to overeat. This is made worse by the present situation where people now have easy access to energy-dense food because almost all the food products today are packed with sugar and fat. Noticeably people have grown to love these types of food.
A group of scientists wanted to dig for the root cause of this problem. In their study, they have referenced two types of feeding habits. First is the homeostatic feeding which occurs when animals eat until it is no longer hungry and its energy levels are already restored. The second one is the hedonic feeding which occurs when an animal gets the urge to eat more than its body requires.
Humans have highly evolved brains making self-control fairly easy to attain so that their primal urges are overridden. However not all human beings are able to control overeating. The ability to control one's urge to overeat can be instrumental in avoiding obesity and other associated conditions.
Professor Thomas Kash, Ph.D., author of a new study regarding the neuroscience of overeating, pointed out that there is too much calorically-dense food available all the time and people have not yet overcome the desire to eat as much food as a person can.
The researchers from the University of North Carolina Healthcare in Chapel Hill did a study on this phenomenon by looking into brains of rodents.
This is not the first time that a study on ways to reduce obesity has been conducted. In the past recent years, studies on the topic were done by investigating the mechanisms involved in homeostatic feeding. However, up to the present, no successful interventions have been derived from this approach
This is why the team of Professor Kash looked into hedonic feeding for the solution to obesity.
The team has referenced previous studies showing that nociceptin might be one of the key players in hedonic feeding. The said peptide consisting of 17 amino acids functioning as a neurotransmitter.
They have also referenced research demonstrating that nociceptin receptors do not really affect homeostatic feeding. In contrast, it was confirmed that the receptors play a role in hedonic feeding.
A number of drug companies are very much interested in creating drugs that could battle overeating but there have been no successful conclusions to their researches.
Professor Kash's team are one step closer to this goal.
The team of scientists has pinned down the neural circuit involved in hedonic feeding. However, the scientists pointed out that the research subjects are rodents.
Surprisingly, the particular circuit was seen to originate in the central nucleus of the amygdala. This part of the brain is the main player for the response of an animal to emotional stimuli.
In the next phase of the experiment, the scientists deleted around half of the neurons that produce nociceptin in the circuit, resulting in reduced levels of binge eating.
The researchers have found out that the amygdala has a role to play in regulating pathological feeding, and not just to host emotions such as pain, anxiety, and fear.
J. Andrew Hardaway, Ph.D., the first author to the study, pointed out that their study is the first to describe how the brain's emotional center, the amygdala, contributes to eating for pleasure.
The scientists explained that the next phase of the research is for them to find out how they can derive new therapeutics for binge eating and obesity.
