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Obese People Get Less Satisfaction from Food
Pennino Corp. CEO
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Obese people get less satisfaction from food
By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
Last Updated: 7:11PM BST 16 Oct 2008
Obese people may overeat because they experience less satisfaction from the taste of food, scientists believe.
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New research has found that the taste of food produced less of a pleasureable sensation in the brains of those who are obese and that they may have to eat more to compensate.
In particular the eating of tasty food produced less dopamine in the brain, a hormone which promotes positive feelings of happiness and lowers anxiety.
Scientists feel that it might be that overweight people have to eat more or "comfort eat" in order to produce the same feelings of contentment.
"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," said Eric Stice, lead author and a psychology researcher at The University of Texas.
His team, which included scientists from Yale and Oregon, scanned the brains of 76 volunteer women in two studies as they drank chocolate milkshakes.
They found that the women who were obese or prone to being obese had deficiencies in the "reward circuitry" or striatum of their brains.
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Gene Mutation Predicts Future Weight Gain
Gene mutation predicts future weight gain
- 19:00 16 October 2008 by Ewen Callaway
It would be nice to blame that chubby belly on genes rather than greed. And indeed, a new study suggests that a gene mutation can cause people to overeat.
But things are never that simple. The same study shows that people with the standard gene can also put on weight if their brains get a bigger hit from snacking.
The common mutation, in a gene called DRD2 that senses a pleasure-providing brain chemical called dopamine, causes people to get less of a high from food - and then compensate by eating more.
"Eating the same éclair is going to be less rewarding to obese people than to lean people," says Eric Stice, a clinical psychologist at Oregon Research Institute in Eugene who led the study.
His team scanned the brains of 43 female university students and 33 teenage girls as they sipped a chocolate milkshake or a tasteless substitute while in a functional-MRI machine.
In all the participants, the milkshake lit up an area of the brain called the striatum that senses rewards, whether food, drugs or money.
Scant reward
Women and girls with a higher body mass index (BMI) - an indicator of obesity - saw less striatum activity from the milkshake than skinny participants with low numbers. In other words, overweight women with and without the mutation get less of a hit from the food they eat.
This difference was even starker in women with the gene mutation that blunts the brain's response to dopamine. Previous research has shown that people with the mutation are more likely to be obese.
To see the mutation in action, Stice's team weighed the teens a year later. On average, their BMI's jumped by 3.6% - a difference of about 2.5 kilograms for a 170 centimetre-tall woman initially weighing 70 kg.
Girls with the mutation gained more weight the less active their striata were, Stice's team found. But conversely, girls with normal copies of DRD2 gained more weight the more their striata lit up.
When the team looked at all the subjects together, high BMI correlated with low striata activation.
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Obesity Driving up Hypertension Rates
Oct. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Obesity is driving rising rates of hypertension in the U.S., with the stroke-causing condition affecting almost three in 10 Americans, researchers found.
A 1999-2004 survey found 28.9 percent of U.S. adults had high blood pressure when measured on an age-standardized basis, the most ever recorded, according to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. The number increased from 24.4 percent in 1988- 1994, according to the study reported today in Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association.
High blood pressure increases the risk of developing heart disease, stroke and other serious conditions, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. The researchers said being overweight or obese accounted for part of the increase in high blood pressure among different age and race/ethnicity groups. Two-thirds of Americans are considered overweight or obese, the CDC has said.
``We see that much of the magnitude in men is accounted for by obesity, but less so in women, possibly because of some unexplored changes in risk factors for hypertension,'' Paul D. Sorlie, co-author of the study and epidemiology branch chief in the institute's division of prevention and population sciences, said in a statement.
The rates increased in all age groups starting at age 40 in women and 60 in men, Sorlie and colleagues said in a statement today. During 1999-2004, 72 percent of Americans with hypertension were aware they had the disorder, 61 percent were undergoing treatment, and 35 percent had their blood pressure under control.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=aXNePWl9.Jkc&refer=science#