Interesting New Research ! EAT YOUR BREAKFAST!!!!!

Skipping the first meal of the day triggers brain activity that makes you prefer high-calorie foods, according to data presented at the Endocrine Society annual meeting.

Although some people try to lose weight by missing meals, past studies have shown that those who skip breakfast actually tend to eat more high-calorie foods and be at increased risk of weight gain. But now researchers in England believe they may have one explanation of how this happens.

A group from the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre Imperial College in London, led by Dr. Tony Goldstone, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show that when people skip breakfast their brain reward centres were activated more by the sight of high-calorie foods than low-calorie foods.

However, when the same 20 healthy, non-obese subjects ate breakfast on another day, fMRIs obtained about 90 minutes after eating showed no significantly greater activation of the brain’s reward centres while subjects viewed pictures of high-calorie foods. The high-calorie foods included cake, chocolate and pizza, whereas low-calorie foods included salad, vegetables and fish.

The researchers found that fMRI images correlated with the subjects’ ratings of how much the food pictures appealed to them. The order in which subjects fasted or ate breakfast was determined randomly to avoid bias.

Dr. Goldstone said the findings may hold hope for future treatments of obesity by developing devices that directly affect the brain’s reward circuitry. Brain reward centres are areas of the brain that are involved in monitoring the pleasure and rewarding value of food and in signalling the motivation to eat. The taste, smell and sight of food activate these reward centres, according to Dr. Goldstone.

“Looking way ahead, I think there may be a possibility for something that may sound a bit drastic, and that is treatment with deep-brain stimulation,” he told the Medical Post.

This treatment involves the implantation of a medical device called a brain pacemaker, which sends electrical impulses to specific parts of the brain. Although its underlying principles and mechanisms are still not clear, “this approach is already being used in Parkinson’s disease and in intractable headaches and depression,” Dr. Goldstone said.

(Reposted from facebook)