What can neuroimaging studies tell us about obesity?

Food is readily and abundantly available in the industrialised world. Yet, despite the many cafés, restaurants, supermarkets and corner shops we pass every day, not all of us over-eat and become obese. To find out why some people become obese and others don’t, it might be useful to evaluate how people’s brains respond to food. A recent review of the available brain imaging studies has suggested that over-activity in brain areas associated with reward and emotion, in conjunction with reduced activity in brain areas involved in signalling fullness, may lead to over-eating and obesity. A common way to examine activation in these brain areas is to recruit a group of obese individuals (e.g., BMI > 30) and a group of slim individuals (e.g., BMI 20 – 25) and show them pictures of food, typically after they have not eaten for several hours. These kinds of studies indeed show that obesity is linked to increased activity in a network of brain regions involved in reward and emotion when viewing pictures of food. As well as showing pictures of food, brains can also be scanned while participants are actually eating. One such study showed that an area of the brain called the hypothalamus, which is involved in regulating food intake, was slower to respond to food in a group of obese compared to slim men. This ‘sluggish’ response may result in obese individuals not realising they are full, which could maintain patterns of over-eating. Understanding these differing patterns of brain activation in obese vs. slim individuals will hopefully help in identifying who might be at risk of become obese. Early interventions targeted at these at-risk individuals, which include focusing on internal signals of fullness rather than on the many external food cues we are continually surrounded by, may prevent them from becoming obese.
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For more information, see: Carnell, S., Gibson, C., Benson, L., Ochner, C. N., & Geliebter, A. (2012). Neuroimaging and obesity: current knowledge and future directions. Obesity Reviews, 13, 43-56.