14 DAY TRIAL // Whenever a woman tries to take up a diet, only to fall off it within days, a feeling of failure and personal disappointment appears. This, in turn, leads to overindulging, more gain weight, guilt and so on and so forth, in a vicious circle that, doctors tell us, is what keeps the fitness industry going strong. However, it could not be that the woman in herself is at fault for not being able to stick to the diet, a new study shows, but her very brain, which cannot suppress hunger and fight temptation.
The study, carried out at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, started from the premise that, currently, there are more overweight and (morbidly) obese women than men, while also the latter find it very easy to lose pounds, while women struggle incessantly. Similarly, it is also women who are the most prone to developing some eating disorder or another, which again, must be connected to the way their brain reacts to food, researchers believed.
And so it turned out to be. The study involved 23 healthy, slim volunteers, who were asked to fast for 17 hours. At the end of it, they were presented with large plates with goodies, including burgers, bacon and eggs, chocolate cookies and ice cream, and asked to try to suppress their hunger by thinking of neutral things. All this while, Dr. Gene-Jack Wang, who conducted the research, studied the volunteers’ brains using PET scans, and found that, in men, the part of the brain dealing with desire registered less activity than before. Oppositely, in women, there was no difference in brain patterns, which meant they had not succeeded in their task of fighting off temptation.
“The decreased inhibitory control in women could underlie their lower success in losing weight while dieting when compared with men. Lower cognitive control of brain responses to food stimulation in women compared to men may contribute to gender differences in the prevalence rates of obesity and other eating disorders.” Dr. Wang explained, as reported by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Nevertheless, the study does not explain why women find it so hard to resist food, or whether men can do it because they are constructed as such, or if it’s something that depends on their lifestyle and upbringing. Its findings are insightful nonetheless.