Fatty foods can lead to obesity but it’s all in your brain — and not the way you may have thought.
Researchers have found that regularly eating high-fat and high-caloric foods can change the neurological pathways in your brain, reducing the brain’s ability to regulate calorie intake and can lead to overeating and weight gain.
Researchers, whose findings were published Wednesday in the Journal of Physiology, tested a high-fatty diet in rats, showing the astrocytes cells that control a chemical pathway to the stomach were disrupted when fatty and sugary food was ingested.
“Calorie intake seems to be regulated in the short-term by astrocytes,” lead author Dr. Kirsteen Browning from Penn State College of Medicine, in a media release.
“This disrupts the signaling to the stomach and delays how it empties,” Browning explained. “[It triggers] the normal signaling pathway to control the stomach and over time, astrocytes seem to desensitize to the high-fat food.”
The study monitor the food intake in more than 200 lab rodents who were fed either a normal or high-fat diet for one, three, five, or 14 days, observing how it affected their digestion and appetite.
While a “brief exposure” of three to four days of fatty foods didn’t appear to affect the pathways between the brain and stomach, the researchers found that 10-14 days of eating high-fat and calorie diets saw a decline in the astrocytes’ reaction as well as the brain’s ability to regulate calorie intake.
Browning said they are let to find out if the loss of astrocyte activity is the cause of overeating or that it occurs in response to the overeating, but says the discovery of the disruption of a pathway between the brain and stomach could pave the way for an anti-obesity pill that targets the neurons in the brain.
“We are eager to find out whether it is possible to reactivate the brain’s apparent lost ability to regulate calorie intake,” Browning said. “If this is the case, it could lead to interventions to help restore calorie regulation in humans.”
According to the CDC, over 41% of adults in America are obese, which increases their risk of cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes.