Discovery Of The Brain's Calorie-Sensing System

Now we can make food labels go away since the brain can sense Calories.

"The brain can sense the calories in food, independent of the taste mechanism, researchers have found in studies with mice. Their finding that the brain's reward system is switched on by this "sixth sense" machinery could have implications for understanding the causes of obesity."

Well, it cannot have any implications, let alone important ones, "for understanding the causes of obesity." Obesity only happens when more Calories are consumed than burned.

"In their experiments, the researchers genetically altered mice to make them "sweet-blind," lacking a key component of taste receptor cells that enabled them to detect the sweet taste.

The researchers next performed behavioral tests in which they compared normal and sweet-blind mice in their preference for sugar solutions and those containing the noncaloric sweetener sucralose. In those tests, the sweet-blind mice showed a preference for calorie-containing sugar water that did not depend on their ability to taste, but on the calorie content.

In analyzing the brains of the sweet-blind mice, the researchers showed that the animals' reward circuitry was switched on by caloric intake, independent of the animals' ability to taste. Those analyses showed that levels of the brain chemical dopamine, known to be central to activating the reward circuitry, increased with caloric intake. Also, electrophysiological studies showed that neurons in the food-reward region, called the nucleus accumbens, were activated by caloric intake, independent of taste."

Simple, eh?

"'In summary, we showed that dopamine-ventral striatum reward systems, previously associated with the detection and assignment of reward value to palatable compounds, respond to the caloric value of sucrose in the absence of taste receptor signaling,' concluded the researchers. 'Thus, these brain pathways do not exclusively encode the sensory-related hedonic impact of foods, but might also perform previously unidentified functions that include the detection of gastrointestinal and metabolic signals,' they wrote."

Not too far to go to deal with caloric irresponsibility.

These researchers are onto something.

More grant money for useless crap.