ChiefsPlanet - View Single Post - News "Obesity is a disease not a decision"

Frosty · 07-08-2013, 11:39 AM

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Originally Posted by Buck

My conspiracy theory is that all the shit preservatives in food drastically reduces your sex drive, which means you don't care about attracting the opposite sex.

When I first started my diet, and stopped eating shit, I got a tingle in my dick that still hasn't gone away. I want to eat healthy because I want to procreate.

My conspiracy theory is that modern technology has made food both cheaper and more palatable, making it much, much tougher to resist.

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I recently read an interesting review paper by Dr. Edmund T. Rolls titled "Taste, olfactory and food texture reward processing in the brain and the control of appetite" that I'll discuss in this post (1). Dr. Rolls is a prolific neuroscience researcher at Oxford who focuses on "the brain mechanisms of perception, memory, emotion and feeding, and thus of perceptual, memory, emotional and appetite disorders."

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Dr. Rolls then moves on to discuss what has changed about our environment that has increased food intake. You might find this familiar:

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The fundamental concept this leads to about some of the major causes of obesity is that, over the last 30 years, sensory stimulation produced by the taste, smell, texture and appearance of food, as well as its availability, have increased dramatically, yet the satiety signals produced by stomach distension, satiety hormones, etc. have remained essentially unchanged, so that the effect on the brain's control system for appetite is to lead to a net average increase in the reward value and palatability of food which over rides the satiety signals, and contributes to the tendency to be overstimulated by food and to overeat.

Again referencing the mismatch between our evolutionary context and modern environment, Dr. Rolls discusses the ability of food palatability to increase food intake beyond the body's normal 'stop signal' that would ordinarily constrain food intake when an appropriate number of calories have been eaten:

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A factor in obesity (as described in section ‘Brain processing of the sensory properties and pleasantness of food’) is food palatability, which with modern methods of food production can now be greater than would have been the case during the evolution of our feeding control systems. These brain systems evolved so that internal signals from for example gastric distension and glucose utilisation could act to decrease the pleasantness of the sensory sensations produced by feeding sufficiently by the end of a meal to stop further eating. However, the greater palatability of modern food may mean that this balance is altered, so that there is a tendency for the greater palatability of food to be insufficiently decreased by a standard amount of food eaten, so that extra food is eaten in a meal.

He also covers sensory-specific satiety, another factor in food intake. This phenomenon is the reason why we eat more total food when food variety is high, as explained here.

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Sensory-specific satiety is the decrease in the appetite for a particular food as it is eaten in a meal, without a decrease in the appetite for different foods, as shown earlier. It is an important factor influencing how much of each food is eaten in a meal, and its evolutionary significance may be to encourage eating of a range of different foods, and thus obtaining a range of nutrients. As a result of sensory-specific satiety, if a wide variety of foods is available, overeating in a meal can occur. Given that it is now possible to make available a very wide range of food flavours, textures and appearances, and that such foods are readily available, this variety effect may be a factor in promoting excess food intake.

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.co...-epidemic.html

Note that this isn't an excuse, nor does it make it a disease. Food reward is simply a factor in why some people overeat. Knowing about it can help to develop strategies to avoid it, making it easier to eat less.