If you are fond of a particular food or that drink, it is not your age-old habit or your pampering granny to be blamed, but one of your own ‘hormones’. It is the same hormone - leptin - which is responsible for triggering your hunger and killing your appetite.
Yes, it has been recently found that the appetizing properties of food effect the same emotions and desires-triggering key brain regions strongly. Thanks to a group of scientists for showing the lighting up of the concerned brain areas when individuals suffering from leptin deficiency are shown images of food.
For their research the researchers used brain imaging technology. Thus, understanding eating behavior leads to taking into account not only the physiological and hormonal pathways, but also the processes inside the brain, which is evoked by either, sight, smell, taste, or even just thought for food!
More challenging still is to develop an understanding of the ways in which these two sets of processes — the physiological and the brain/neural — interact to shape our patterns of eating.
Thus, not just our physiology, but also neurology or brain shapes our patterns of eating - interestingly both in unison. Can this new discovery help in finding an answer to the treatment and prevention of obesity? - The prevailing worry of the medical fraternity.
