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‘Feed’ Your Brain by Smelling Food!!!
March 22, 2008 at 11:52 AM
Research News
“We believe that these findings add to our understanding of chemosensation and food reward and will have important implications in addressing the obesity epidemic,” said lead author Dana Small, assistant professor of psychiatry and associate fellow of the John B. Pierce Laboratory.
Small and her colleagues are interested in understanding how sensory processing interacts with behavioral choices such as decisions to eat or stop eating in healthy individuals and in people with eating disorders. Theorists have postulated that overeating results from a heightened sensitivity to food reward. Others, Small said, have argued that people overeat because they experience less pleasure from eating and eat to boost a sluggish reward system. She said these two seemingly contradictory theories may be reconciled if food reward is considered as multifaceted.
“For example, it could be that some people are more sensitive, and less able to resist, food cues, such as an aroma of freshly baked bread, and that these same people also experience less pleasure when actually eating the food,” Small said.
In this study Small and her co-authors describe the circuits that code the properties of these two facets of food reward. The study was based on two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies in which subjects sniffed food aromas and drank the drinks associated with the aromas while undergoing scanning. The food odors were pineapple and peach in the first experiment and pineapple and chocolate in the second experiment. The drinks were pineapple, peach, and a chocolate milkshake.
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