Why People Tend to Overeat?
Jul 18, 2009
Do you know what makes people to overeat? A dysfunction of ‘reward circuitry’ in the brain causes people to overeat. Usually the gene associated with dopamine signaling causes this ‘reward circuitry’ dysfunction in the brain. Every time we eat something, it results in the release of dopamine. Our eating pleasure or satiation is determined with the amount of dopamine released when we eat. The dopamine so released then works as a neurotransmitter in the brain and completes the ‘reward circuitry’. What this points to is that the satiation from eating is lesser in people with a dysfunction in this ‘reward circuitry’ which makes them overeat. This fact has conclusively brought out in a very recent study at University of Oregon’s Lewis Center for Neuroimaging.
There have been studies that observed lesser dopamine release in obese people as compared to lean people and thus resulting in prevalent overeating in obese.
For this study that was conducted on women, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used. The women were given chocolate milkshakes to eat that are known to produce less than normal dopamine. The results established that the women with weaker "reward circuitry" were at a higher weight gain risk and were eventually prone to become obese, more so in case of women having the genes which are associated with a weakened dopamine signaling in the brain.
Senior researcher and lead author Eric Stice observed "Although recent findings suggested that obese individuals may experience less pleasure when eating, and therefore eat more to compensate, this is the first prospective evidence for this relationship," Eric said further "The evidence of temporal precedence suggests it is a true vulnerability factor that predates obesity onset. In addition, the evidence that this relation is even stronger for individuals at genetic risk for compromised signaling in these brain regions points to an important biological factor that appears to increase risk for obesity onset."
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July 18th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
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August 8th, 2009 at 3:09 am
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