The brains behind the obesity problem
Research during the past two decades has raised public awareness of the brain's role in regulating how much food we eat and why we overeat, the agency reports.
Almaty. January 26. Kazakhstan Today - Research during the past two decades has raised public awareness of the brain's role in regulating how much food we eat and why we overeat, the agency reports.
As concerns grow about the nation's obesity problem, BBC science presenter Michael Mosley explains the science behind pleasure-seeking urges such as eating and having sex, BBC reports.
Inside your brain there are a number of different pleasure circuits that control food intake, but one of the most important is the dopamine reward system.
This system is particularly important when it comes to triggering the desire to eat, so much so that if you block the activity of dopamine in animals they stop eating altogether and soon starve to death.
Volunteers were asked to eat as much chocolate as they comfortably could while lying in a brain scanner.
The researchers were particularly interested in the orbito-frontal cortex (OFC), the part of the brain behind the eye sockets that tells us how much we like something.
So the participants ate and ate, and at the very moment that they signalled to the experimenters that they had had enough, activity in the OFC changed. This was the moment that enjoyment turned to revulsion. It's this reaction that gives pleasure its defining feature - transience.
Over half the population in the UK is overweight and part of the problem is that people go on eating long after they have ceased getting pleasure from it. The switching off of pleasure is an important signal and we ignore it at our peril.
The neurotransmitter, dopamine, is heavily involved in prompting us to eat, but it does far more than that. It links up neural circuits deep inside our brains that are associated with not just pleasure and reward, but also novelty seeking.
We do many things in life, including eating, having sex, gambling and risk taking, because doing them results in our brains being flooded by feel-good dopamine.
In addition, a recent study found that these urges to do new things are associated with higher levels of dopamine in the brain, which may explain why people who constantly crave stimulation are at greater risk of addictive behaviour, such as drug abuse and gambling, than the rest of the population.
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Images | primeminister.kz
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Images | Astana Mayor's Office
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Images | Kazakh MFA
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The Honorary Consulate of Kazakhstan in Plovdiv has been open since December 15, 2023.
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