Why You Can't Stop Eating Your Favorite Food

As most of you already know, the human body is by default primed to letting you know when you've had enough to eat. But, somehow, this integrated mechanism fails when we eat something that is to our liking, such as our favorite ice cream. A new scientific paper, by experts at the Southwestern University (SU), shows exactly why this is happening, and yields new insight into how some of your favorite tastes can alter the brain within minutes, e! Science News reports.

The study reveals that it's not your stomach you should blame for eating extra scoops of ice cream, but rather your brain. The SU team, led by Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine Dr. Deborah Clegg, the senior author of the new study, says that changes in the brain's natural response to food occur within minutes of consuming your favorite foods. The cortex starts sending chemical messages throughout the body, telling the cells to ignore the action of insulin and leptin.

These two hormones are in charge of letting the brain know when the body has had enough to eat. During normal meals, their action dictates when you stop eating. But the new study has determined that certain kinds of fat, especially the palmitic acid, tend to override these naturally occurring impulses. “Normally, our body is primed to say when we've had enough, but that doesn't always happen when we're eating something good,” Clegg says.

“What we've shown in this study is that someone's entire brain chemistry can change in a very short period of time. Our findings suggest that when you eat something high in fat, your brain gets 'hit' with the fatty acids, and you become resistant to insulin and leptin. Since you're not being told by the brain to stop eating, you overeat,” she adds. Detailed results of the investigation appear in the September issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

“We found that the palmitic acid specifically reduced the ability of leptin and insulin to activate their intracellular signaling cascades. The oleic fat did not do this. The action was very specific to palmitic acid, which is very high in foods that are rich in saturated-fat,” the expert concludes. The new research was conducted on lab mice and rats.