Break The Vicious Circle of Overeating

Previous research studies have reported that obese individuals show differences in brain circuitry related to food reward.  Compared to lean individuals, obese individuals appear to produce less dopamine and have fewer dopamine receptors.  These differences appear to reduce the pleasure associated with eating.

A new obesity research study examined this relationship between food consumption, reward circuitry in the dorsal striatum region of the brain, and weight change.  For this study, the obesity researchers used MRI to measure brain changes in women over a 6-month study period in response to drinking either a chocolate milkshake or an unflavored milkshake.  Changes in brain function in relation to weight change over the 6 months were analyzed.  The obesity researchers reported that women who gained weight during the 6 months of follow-up showed a reduced activity in dorsal striatum in response to food consumption compared to women who did not gain weight.  The study investigators further indicated that reduced activity of the brain's reward system led to overeating and that overeating further reduced the responsiveness of the food reward circuitry.

These are fascinating study results suggesting that overeating can lead to a vicious circle of overeating and weight gain.  According to this study, overeating causes weight gain, which appears to cause a reduction in our ability to sense pleasure when eating good food, which causes us to eat even more to feel that pleasure, which leads to additional weight gain.  This is a vicious circle of overeating and weight gain that is difficult to break.

It is important to remember that food should serve to provide us with health-building nourishment.  We should never put food before our health, which in essence is what we are doing when we overeat.  Continued overeating places our minds and bodies on a direct path towards obesity and disease.  The old axiom “eat to live, don’t live to eat” is as true now as it ever has been.

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High Fat, Energy Dense Foods Can Be Addictive

Our dietary habits are influenced by many, many factors.  Among those factors are the availability and palatability of food.  New obesity research examined how the availability of high fat, energy dense foods (cheesecake, pound cake, chocolate, bacon, and sausage) affected eating behavior and brain changes in rats.

In this new study, free to read online or download, researchers divided rats into the three following dietary groups for 40 days:

1. No access to the energy dense food and fed only standard rat chow
2. Restricted access to energy dense food for 1 hour per day with access to rat chow for the rest of the time
3. Extended access to energy dense food (> 18 hours per day)

During and after this 40-day test period, rats were examined for changes in eating habits, body weight, and brain biology.  Some of the changes the researchers observed in these rats included:

• Body weight increased dramatically in the rats with extended access to energy dense food compared to the two other groups of rats.
• Caloric intake nearly doubled in the rats with extended access to energy dense foods.
• Rats given access to energy dense foods for one hour per day developed binge eating habits such that about two-thirds of their caloric intake occurred during their one hour access to the high fat foods.
• Rats given extended access to these foods consumed nearly all of their calories from these foods and nearly ignored the laboratory rat chow.
• Brain measurements of pleasure/reward from eating these energy dense foods showed that over time it took consumption of greater amounts of the food to get the same level of reward.
• The decrease in the brains ability to feel reward from consuming high fat foods was related to a decrease in the number of receptors for a specific brain chemical called dopamine.

These results suggest that unhealthy eating can become habit forming.  In fact, the researchers report in their paper that the decrease in dopamine receptors seen with eating these unhealthy foods was similar to changes seen in drug addiction.  Overall, these study data suggest a self-perpetuating process where regular, long-term consumption of high fat, energy dense foods over-stimulates the brain's reward system and reduces its ability to derive pleasure from these foods, which causes us to eat more and gain weight. In this study, binge eating habits did not appear to disrupt this system nor effect energy balance; however, it is uncertain how binge eating would have effected these systems in a longer study.  While it remains uncertain how these results translate to people, they do provide some potential insight into at least one possible cause of overeating.  These study results emphasize the need for developing healthy eating habits.  If we get into a habit of giving in to our cravings, this habit of unhealthy eating can become difficult to break over time.

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