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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: 4, Interesting) by Reziac on Sunday July 20 2014, @02:53PM
The individuals I'm thinking of were perfectly capable of doing the math. They understood the concepts. But when it came to ladling it out, well, "their eyes were bigger than their stomachs". There was a fundamental disconnect between the volume in the dish and the *concept* of "how much should I eat", like it was a specific blindness. If you pointed out "that's too much" their response would be on the order of "what?? it's just one serving" with complete bafflement. Basically, the dish has to look "full" to be a serving in their eyes. (I guess one solution might be to only keep very small dishes in the house.)
As to the gender bias, I expect that like just about every other 'psychological problem' that's really been examined at the biochemical level, it will prove to be genetic, and in this case strongly influenced by the hormone balance. (Quite possibly it's a =symptom= of a hormone imbalance.) DNA to RNA to enzymes to every bodily process is a direct chain of events, and a defective enzyme can have broad effects which vary depending on where the defect impacts a metabolic process. Frex, I know someone who had been misdiagnosed with a variety of mental issues, but what did the real problem prove to be? Porphyria, and because she has the "least defective" form of the relevant enzyme, it didn't announce itself as porphyria, but rather displayed a bunch of vague and largely psychological symptoms that went undiagnosed for years.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday July 20 2014, @07:05PM
FWIW, dish size is important enough that weight watchers, e.g., recommends using smaller plates. I'm not sure whether it's an always true or just for some people, but it's true often enough to have been noticed.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday July 20 2014, @08:33PM
Doesn't surprise me, and good on WW! Yeah, it's probably not every dieter, but enough of 'em to notice, obviously.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.