CUTTING ON SWEETS AFFECTS BEHAVIOUR

WASHINGTON: Are you following any diet plan currently? Maybe you’re cutting off all sweets and carbohydrates or trying to control your late-night cravings. These are examples of behaviour changes, and avoiding those diet cues when it comes to food can be challenging. To understand what drives people to overeat, scientists are looking more closely at a brain structure involved in motivation, called the nucleus accumbens. This small region drives reward-seeking behaviors underlying the pursuit of sex, recreational drugs like nicotine and alcohol, and food. “These brain motivation centers evolved to help us survive; finding food and having sex are essential to the survival of an individual and of a species,” said Carrie Ferrario, PH.D., associate professor in the Department of Pharmacology at U-M Medical School. “What was advantageous when food was hard to find has become a disadvantage and unhealthy in the current food dense environment.

This is compounded by the over-abundance of over-processed, low nutrition foods that may satisfy our taste but leave our bodies unnourished. People don’t tend to find it difficult to turn down an extra serving of broccoli, but just one more french-fry or making room for a bit of chocolate dessert...that’s a different story. The real challenge is overcoming these urges and changing our behavior when it comes to food,” Ferrario added. Given the immense toll obesity takes on virtually all body systems, Ferrario, Peter Vollbrecht, PH.D., of Western Michigan University, and their colleagues are using rat models to understand potential brain differences between animals who are prone to overeating and obesity and those who are not.