Science now has an answer to why you ate that whole birthday cake and 3 pizzas, 2 burgers after smoking pot (Oh! I forget that you had fries with the burgers). To rephrase it, scientists have the answer to why you feel extremely hungry and tend to feed off a lot of junk food after smoking marijuana.
In the Urban/Modern world, we call this hunger as Munchies. Here's the Urban Dictionary's explanation to what Munchies mean:
When you get hungry after smoking weed. Usually people will eat a lot of junk food.
Two kids are getting stoned:
"...and ice cream, and a whole pizza just for me, and some chips, and a soda, and some chocolate...maybe some Chinese food, gummy worms, lasagna, rice, ramen, chicken and a hamburger...oh yeah, I almost forget I wanted some fries with that..."
"Damn...that's some serious munchies you have!"
Yes, that's why it is called Urban Dictionary.
After smoking marijuana, there are a series of reactions going throughout your body along with some neurological effects.
For many years, scientists have been researching about what kind of influence smoking marijuana has on your brain, and why does it makes you feel hungry.
And finally it seems like we had a breakthrough, and now the scientists can exactly point to where the impact is taking place and why it makes you feel hungry even after you had a heavy meal.
If you might have paid a little bit of attention in the biology class during high school, you might know that there is a region in your brain called the hypothalamus region. Well, that's the region that controls your normal feelings such as the sexual arousal, levels of alertness and the need to eat.
And there are these other types of neurons that are called the POMC neurons that suppress those instincts and our desire to eat.
So, when you eat, after a certain point, your POMC neurons fire a signal that tells us that we are full. And you can already guess what would happen if those neurons were absent.
The hypothesis was that when someone smokes pot, these POMC neurons are prevented from firing that signal which leads to hunger and excessive eating. Everything sounded great until the scientists actually tried that experiment on a mice.
They gave a chemical compound called cannabinoids, which is usually found in the marijuana, and what they found surprised everyone. The cannabinoids actually increased the frequency with which the POMC neurons fired.
The result?
The increase in their frequency, the POMC neurons actually caused the hunger to substantially increase in the mice. Very strange indeed. Regardless, these findings can be used to help people regain their lost appetite for medical reasons, such as cancer patients.
Currently, Marijuana is illegal by the federal law, but the medicinal use of it is legalized in 23 states and Washington, DC. Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Alaska. Washington, DC has also legalized the recreational use of marijuana.
We guess that it is just a matter of time before marijuana is legalized for medicinal use by all the 50 states.
