| Services |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
| News |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Channels |
| Home & Family |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Leisure |
|
|
|
|
| Technology |
|
|
|
|
|
| Business |
|
|
|
|
| Science |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Site Search  |
|
|
|
|
| Free email |
|
|
|
|
 |
Food quality can re-wire young appetite control |
| TheAllINeed.com |
(NC&T/UA) William Colmers, a pharmacology professor and AHFMR Medical Scientist, monitored brain signals in rats in an effort to discover if appetite-control mechanisms in the brain change between the time a rat is weaned and the time it begins to forage for its own food.
His findings reveal, for the first time, that the area of the brain that tells us if we are hungry or full is 'plastic' - that it adapts to changing food sources at least once in our lives.
Colmers and his team made the discovery by measuring the sensitivity of certain types of brain cells to hormones that tell us we're hungry and hormones that tell us when to stop eating. At the age of about three weeks, some brain cells became markedly less sensitive to the hormone that tells them to eat.
"When you're a baby, all you need to know is that you're full, because the quality of the food is a given. You're eating mother's milk. It's all the same," said Colmers. "But when they start to forage, they have to start assessing the quality of the food they are eating because they need to know what they are full on; it's a different thing from being full on mother's milk."
That's where sensitivity to the 'stop-eating' hormone comes into play. Colmers says the research results suggest that the hormone "is involved in assessing the quality of the food you've eaten."
 | | William Colmers. (Photo: U. Alberta) |
"This suggests that at the time of weaning there is a reorganization of the brain that allows you to assess the quality of the food you're eating as you begin to supplement your diet of mother's milk with other foods," said Colmers.
"The important implication of this is that this area of the brain is plastic, that it can change with time - the fundamentals change with time, and it means that at least at one point in your life it has the ability to change with the environment."
"That means appetite control might indeed be vulnerable to changes in the environment. It plays into the whole story about childhood obesity."
|
| About the Author |
©2006 All rights reserved
|
|
|
| Quotes | I will not expose the ignorance of the faculty. - Bart Simpson.
I want an Internet. Can I have one of those? -- Spice Girl Mel B.,aka Scary Spice, pointing to a monitor during an AOL press conference
I want to get a tatoo of myself on my entire body, only 2 taller. -- Steven Wright
I think you should defend to the death their right to march, and then go down and meet them with baseball bats.-Woody Allen, on the KKK
|
| Writers | | If you are a writer and want to see your article published at Theallineed.com, just click here to submit. |
|
Myanmar: UN agency moves ahead with assessing how to help cyclone-impacted children
Fabulous Fremantle: Western Australia's shoppers paradise