Your stomach rumbles and you’re daydreaming about cheeseburgers – committing to your diet isn’t easy. New research suggests those hunger pangs and cravings are tied to certain neurons in the brain and there’s potential to silence our instinct to binge when we’re hungry.
American researchers say that a set of neurons are to blame for our struggle with sticking to a diet. When the cookie jar is just steps away, the urges are hard to ignore but they come from evolution: they were a signal to our ancestors to go hunt for food.
For them, heading into the wild to forage for their next meal meant potentially risking their safety, scientists out of Howard Hughes Medical Institute say. They needed some encouragement.
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“We suspect that what these neurons are doing is imposing a cost on not dealing with your physiological needs,” lead researcher, Dr. Scott Sternson, says. Your stomach is growling in protest and you’re uncomfortable – for a caveman, that’s enough to leave the nest for food.
Certain neurons – called agouti-related peptide neurons or AgRP – are designed to make sure animals eat when they need energy. For their research, Sternson’s team singled out AGRP neurons – once our weight takes a dip and we need calories, these neurons rev up, urging us to find sustenance. That’s when you start fantasizing about what you’ll order at the drive-thru.
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“We suspect that these neurons are a very old motivational system to force an animal to satisfy its physiological needs. Part of the motivation for seeking food is to shut these neurons off,” Sternson said.
We eat for energy, but we’re also eating to silence those hunger pangs and the discomfort of a concave stomach. It doesn’t help that the researchers found that these neurons increase our feel-good sensations about food – when we’re hungry, food tastes even better, he suggests.
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He says there’s even a separate set of neurons that spark thirst.
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Sternson and his team tested out their theories on mice, feeding them flavoured capsules that muted the neurons or left them turned on. The mice had a tendency to feed on the capsules that left their AgRP neurons on, but if they were hungry, they had a taste for the capsules that would silence the feel-hungry cells.
Hungry rats didn’t even need to eat food. Simply being in the presence of food was enough to calm them down. But if they weren’t allowed to fill up, the neurons would kick in again, reminding the rodents that they didn’t eat.
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Sternson says that he wants to look into the possibility of quieting down the AgRP neurons. It could help consumers who are trying to lose weight by eating less.
His full findings were published Monday in the journal Nature.
carmen.chai@globalnews.ca
Follow @Carmen_Chai
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