Gut Hormone Makes Food Look Even Yummier
May 7, 2008 – 8:56 amA gut hormone that causes people to eat more does so by making food appear more desirable, suggests a new report in the May issue of Cell Metabolism, a publication of Cell Press. In a brain imaging study of individuals, the researchers found that reward centers respond more strongly to pictures of food in subjects who had received an infusion of the hormone known as ghrelin. The findings suggest that the two drives for feeding--metabolic signals and pleasure signals--are actually intertwined. "When you go to the supermarket hungry, every food looks better," said Alain Dagher of the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University. "Your brain assigns a cost versus benefit to every food item. Now, we've found that it is ghrelin that acts on the brain to make food more appealing." Such a hedonic feeding behavior, which can occur in the absence of nutritional or caloric deficiency, may have once provided an adaptive ...
