Obese Britain 2015.pdf
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
People with obesity are known to be leptin resistant<br />
and thereby unable to regulate energy. Ghrelin<br />
levels are known to decrease with eating, essentially<br />
producing the effects of satiety but increase before<br />
meal times producing the effects of hunger. The<br />
regulation of the two hormones combined with other<br />
neurotransmitters is essential in regulating food intake<br />
and body weight,” ays Dr Bijal.<br />
Obesity and over-eating involve both physical and<br />
psychological facets so treatment – and educating<br />
adults in how they feed their children - should bridge<br />
the gap and address both aspects. Currently there is<br />
also too much focus on food with fad diets rather than<br />
addressing the eating process, which causes obesity.<br />
Similar effects have been shown for chronic stress,<br />
but to date, we do not know how this comes about.<br />
Does stress contribute to forming bad habits about<br />
eating, which bias people more towards snack<br />
food? Does stress change how our brains<br />
make decisions? And can we make these<br />
changes visible, or even reverse them?<br />
Interestingly, not everyone reacts the<br />
same way when stressed: While most<br />
people would eat more, German<br />
researchers found roughly one<br />
third of the population they tested<br />
refused eating under stress<br />
altogether. What is it that keeps<br />
these “stress skippers” away<br />
from the buffet, while “stress<br />
munchers” go for an extra<br />
serving of their favourite snack?<br />
We can ask a similar question<br />
when it comes to emotions:<br />
When subjects experience<br />
unpleasant emotions in a<br />
laboratory experiment, they<br />
tend to eat more, and less<br />
healthy snacks after the<br />
study than their peers who experience pleasant<br />
emotions. This seems to support the popular notion<br />
of “emotional eating”, but if one looks closer into<br />
the scientific literature on this topic, we do not have<br />
a good toolkit yet that could help us describe what<br />
exactly is happening. Did emotional eaters learn to<br />
silence their emotions with eating? How do their brains<br />
decide differently if they are in different emotional<br />
states? And why are some people more affected by<br />
this than others? It’s vital that we develop tools to help<br />
us better measure the changes that emotions cause<br />
in the way the brain makes decisions. We hope<br />
this will eventually help us explain why emotional<br />
eating happens and how emotions may affect our<br />
food choices.<br />
31
Change language