Suffers not only the figure.
Eating fatty foods change the operation of the pleasure center in the brains of animals, making it more sensitive to the hormone dopamine, which may explain why people gain weight.
“We found evidence that regular consumption of fatty foods in late adolescence increases the sensitivity of the pleasure center to the dopamine. At this time, the brain of humans and animals are maximally vulnerable to the action of fatty foods. Given the fact that teenagers eat more nutritious food and are more likely to suffer from obesity, all this may indicate the primary mechanism of development of such problems,” — says Guillaume Ferreira (Ferreira Guilllaume) from the University of Bordeaux (France) and his colleagues.
In the last few years, scientists are finding indications that obesity and its related problems with metabolism occur not only for genetic reasons or due to problems with willpower of fat people, but due to the fact that eating these foods alters brain function.
For example, two years ago, biologists have found that high calorie foods disrupts the normal operations of the gene controlling the activity of cells in the satiety center in the brain of mice, and a year ago, scientists discovered that obese people have an unusually high sensitivity to the taste of sweet food and consider the food more delicious than other people, because of changes in their taste buds and other regions of the brain.
Ferreira and his colleagues found a possible cause for the development of all these violations, observing changes in the pleasure center in the brain a few rats, they were fed high-calorie and fatty just diet. Change tracking is quite simple and original method is introduced in the body of the rodent amphetamine, a stimulant of the pleasure center, similar in structure to the hormone dopamine, and watched how to react to his nerve cells.
Similar tests are usually used to assess what changes in the brain caused by eating different drugs, including amphetamine. Their essence is very simple — repeated intake of low doses of amphetamine causes similar responses of cells in the brain of a healthy animal, while the brains of drug addicts respond to drug stronger with each use.
As it turned out, fatty foods changes the brain in much the same way — she fed rats were much more responsive to repeated doses of amphetamine than their relatives who were given normal food. This was manifested in increased activity of nerve cells in the pleasure center, and in the behavior of the animals themselves, became much more active after taking the second or third dose.
The hardest change manifested itself in the case if the rats ate greasy food in the past weeks and months, their “teenage” age. All this, according to scientists, indicates greater vulnerability of the adolescent brain to the action of such food, and talks about the need for their extra protection during this critical period.
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