Your Brain on Potato Chips

Or, more accurately, a rat's brain on potato chips.  Last week, PLoS One published a very interesting paper by Dr. Tobias Hoch and colleagues on what happens in a rat's brain when it is exposed to a highly palatable/rewarding food (1).  Rats, like humans, overconsume highly palatable foods even when they're sated on less palatable foods (2), and feeding rats a variety of palatable human junk foods is one of the most effective ways to fatten them (3).  Since the brain directs all behaviors, food consumption is an expression of brain activity patterns.  So what is the brain activity pattern that leads to the overconsumption of a highly palatable and rewarding food?

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Salt Sugar Fat

I'd just like to put in a quick word for a book that will be released tomorrow, titled Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, by Pulitzer prize-winning author Michael Moss.  This is along the same lines as Dr. David Kessler's book The End of Overeating, which explains how the food industry uses food reward, palatability, and food cues to maximize sales-- and as an unintended side effect, maximize our waistlines.   Judging by Moss's recent article in New York Times Magazine, which I highly recommend reading, the book will be excellent.  I've pre-ordered it.

Food Reward Friday

This week, Food Reward Friday is going to be a little bit different.  I've received a few e-mails from people who would like to see me write about some of the less obvious examples of food reward-- foods that are less extreme, but much more common, and that nevertheless promote overeating.  Let's face it, even though they're funny and they (sometimes) illustrate the principle, most people reading this blog don't eat banana splits very often, much less pizzas made out of hot dogs.

So this week's "winner" is something many of you have in your houses right now, and which was also the subject of an interesting recent study... potato chips!

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Body Fatness and Cardiovascular Risk Factors

I recently revisited a really cool paper published in the Lancet in 2009 on body fatness, biomarkers, health, and mortality (1). It's a meta-analysis that compiled body mass index (BMI) data from nearly 900,000 individual people, and related it to circulating lipids and various health outcomes.  This is one of the most authoritative papers on the subject.

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Food Reward Friday

This week's "winner"... the Banana Split!

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Food Reward Friday

This week's lucky "winner"... an unnamed hot dog-laden Pizza Hut monstrosity with tempura shrimp and mayonnaise!

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Why Do We Eat? A Neurobiological Perspective. Part VIII

In the (probably) last post of this series, I'll take the pieces that I've gradually outlined in previous posts, and put them together into a big-picture, common-sense framework for thinking about human eating behavior, and why we eat more today than ever before.

Why is Eating Behavior Regulated?

Let's start at the most fundamental level.  To be competitive in a natural environment, organisms must find rational ways of interacting with their surroundings to promote survival and reproduction.  One of the most important elements of survival is the acquisition of energy and chemical building blocks, either by photosynthesis, or (in the case of animals) eating other organisms.  This imperative drove the evolution of rational food seeking behaviors long before the emergence of humans, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, worms, and even eukaryotes (organisms with nuclei).

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