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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: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Sunday July 20 2014, @04:08PM
Yes, that is probably true. A more general problem, that was not addressed, is that the fact that so much food is prepackaged in quantities that are not necessarily "natural". By natural, think of a piece of fruit (an orange, apple etc..) and the sort of equivalent calorie source e.g. 50-100 calories. Now look at packages of fruit drinks, the concentration in the package makes them much more calorific.
Some of this is learned behavior. Candy bars when you are a child, predispose us to think that is the quantity. But of course the industry wants to sell us more, so they mess with theses sizes. Sometimes to make us buy more (smaller per unit), but I strongly suspect they know that it will make some proportion buy more (to compensate for the smaller size).
Fundamentally, the FDA propagates misinformation as their simply is insufficient data for actual basal metabolism. Checkout the table
on page 14 of this usda document.
http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/Publications/DietaryGuidelines/2010/PolicyDoc/Chapter2.pdf [usda.gov]
3 levels of physical activity; sedentary, moderately active, active. Maximum ranges, Adult females 1800-2200 kCals/day , males 2000-3200, for ALL activities.
This is clearly problematic, and here is an illustrative example. There have been clinical studies of marathon runners (>5000) to determine how much energy they consumed (actual consumption) and it was determined to be apx 3500kCals. Try running non-stop for an hour, that's about 900kCals (measured using my smartphone, but it is clearly not an outrageous estimate)
Let's put this in context. This is 1 lb of fat (453g), minimum. The sedentary MALE range is 2400-2600 for all ages. Does this seem at all possible? You can sit around all day, and that is equivalent to 2/3 of a marathon?
I know of examples of sedentary worker friend (in IT) who had his basal metabolism measured at 1200 kCals/day - he lost 100 lbs/18 months, with just diet. This is a non trivial personal change.
It would appear the USDA numbers are highly optimistic, or otherwise the measurement criteria are not sufficiently diverse. There is unfortunately a perverse incentive for food/drink companies to promote consumption, perhaps even the government (they love our tax revenues).
The science is there, the politics is always looking at ways of ignoring facts to suit opinion, or bribes.....