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A deficit discovered in reward-based learning, specific to food, among women with obesity highlights the behavioral aspects of the epidemic and holds potential for combating it, according to a report published in Current Biology.
"Women with obesity were impaired at learning which cues predict food and which do not, but had no trouble learning similar associations with money," Ifat Levy, PhD, of the Yale School of Medicine, told Endocrine Today.
The impairment was markedly different in women with obesity vs. those with normal weight, and not seen in men, in an appetitive reversal paradigm conducted by Zhihao Zhang, a PhD candidate at Yale University, and colleagues, including Levy.
"Although we do not know whether this impairment is a cause for obesity or its effect, this finding provides a link between reward learning and obesity, which can now be used to further probe these questions," Levy said.
The journal article is paywalled, but an abstract is available.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday July 19 2014, @11:21PM
There was an episode of Minoriteam [wikipedia.org] which featured the villian The Black Coq [album-art.net], who was the son of a Hatian colonialist as well as talented hypnotist. What he would do was break into womens' apartments, and when they saw him he would dangle his watch and it would swing back and forth pendulously in front of the ladies' faces , hypnotizing them until they became uncontrollably hungry and ate everything in sight, showing the first victim eating a jar of Mayonnaise, with "mayonnaise" slopily around her cheeks.
Later, on the news, the anchorman reveals that the city is suffering an epidemic of women becoming obese, and one of the Minoriteam becomes suspicious when his trophy wife gets all fat and leaves for the night, telling him, "*lip smack smack smack* My girlfriends and I are going out to a buffet *smack smack smack* tonight." The Minoriteam eventually catch on to the Black Coq and go after him, but their leader Dr. Wang warns them ominously that "if you die under hypnosis, you also die in real life!"
When Jewcano [nocookie.net] (he has the superpowers of both a volcano and a Jew) finally confronts the Black Coq sneaking inside a woman's apartment, the Black Coq pulls out his watch and starts hypnotizing Jewcano, saying, "You will eat the Black Coq..." and a hypnotized Jewcano repeats, "I will eat the black....NOOOOOOOOO!" and snaps out of his hypnotism. Knowing that Jewcano is way more powerful, the Black Coq gives up and Jewcano reveals that his secret weapon is Gifelte fish [sdfoodtravel.com], holding up the jar as the female occupant sticks her head in the scene and says, "Eww, that's disgusting!*"
That's not what happened verbatim in the episode, but the general idea. See the episode yourself here [adultswim.com] if you can stand ads and flash garbage.