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Brains of adolescents with obesity highly reactive to food commercials
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The brains of adolescents with overweight are disproportionately stimulated by TV food commercials, which may simulate unhealthy eating habits, according to recent findings.
The researchers used functional MRI to examine brain responses to 2 dozen fast food commercials as well as non-food commercials in adolescents with overweight and healthy-weight adolescents aged 12 to 16 years.
Brain regions involved in attention and focus and in processing rewards were all more active when viewing food commercials compared with non-food commercials among all participants. Greater reward-related activity was revealed in adolescents with higher body fat compared with healthy-weight adolescents. The brain region that controls the mouth was also more activated among the adolescents with overweight.
“This finding suggests the intriguing possibility that overweight adolescents mentally simulate eating while watching food commercials,” Kristina Rapuano, a graduate student at Dartmouth University’s Brain Imaging Lab, said in a press release. “These brain responses may demonstrate one factor whereby unhealthy eating behaviors become reinforced and turned into habits that potentially hamper a person’s ability to lose weight later in life.”
The researchers wrote that the findings may reveal clues into how unhealthy eating habits are formed.
“Unhealthy eating is thought to involve both an initial desire to eat a tempting food, such as a piece of care, and a motor plan to enact the behavior, or eating it,” Rapuano said. “Diet intervention strategies largely focus on minimizing or inhibiting the desire to eat the tempting food, with the logic being that if one does not desire, then one won’t enact. Our findings suggest a second point of intervention may be the somatomotor simulation of eating behavior that follows from the desire to eat. Interventions that target this system, either to minimize the simulation of unhealthy eating or to promote the simulation of healthy eating, may ultimately prove to be more useful than trying to suppress the desire to eat.”
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