The worse we eat, the more desire to continue. If you eat a hamburger, you associate it with fries and a soda. If he goes out for a snack with some bravas or some tapas ‘the body asks for’ a beer. And so everything. A vicious circle of which our brain becomes a prey. And it is useless to list over and over again the virtues of a healthy diet, if the origin is in the complex mechanisms of neurobiology.
For this reason, scientists look for the keys in neurons. What mechanisms are those that promote some habits or others? An investigation published in PNAS It is one of the last that tries to offer an answer. Its author, Michiru Hirasawa, from the Memorial University of Newfoundland (Canada), specializes in understanding the fundamental mechanisms underlying the regulation of body weight by the brain.
Abundance of Tasty, high-fat diets in modern societies it has contributed to the epidemic increase in obesity, as stated in the publication. This is believed to be due in part to HFD-induced inflammation in the hypothalamus, a brain region critical in energy balance.
However, it is not clear how inflammation, typically associated with the disease, can cause excessive weight gain. Here, “we show that an inflammatory molecule prostaglandin E2 is induced in the hypothalamus by high-fat diets and directly activates a group of appetite-promoting neurons,” Hirasawa summarizes in the paper. The work has analyzed this scheme in an animal model.
“Blocking this activation protects mice from obesity and fatty liver. This identifies a direct link between hypothalamic inflammation and weight gainwhich can serve as a potential therapeutic target for obesity and metabolic syndrome,” the researcher points out.