Memories of eating influence your next meal: study

PanARMENIAN.Net - To date, the scientific effort to understand how the brain controls eating has focused primarily on brain areas involved in hunger, fullness and pleasure. To be better armed in the fight against obesity, neuroscientists, are starting to expand our investigation to other parts of the brain associated with different functions. A recent research focuses on one that’s been relatively overlooked: memory, The Conversation says.

For many people, decisions about whether to eat now, what to eat and how much to eat are often influenced by memories of what they ate recently.

Memories of recently eaten foods can serve as a powerful mechanism for controlling eating behavior because they provide you with a record of your recent intake that likely outlasts most of the hormonal and brain signals generated by your meal. But surprisingly, the brain regions that allow memory to control future eating behavior are largely unknown.

Studies done in people support the idea that meal-related memory can control future eating behavior.

When researchers impair the memory of a meal by distracting healthy participants while they eat – such as by having them play computer games or watch television – people eat more at the next opportunity. The opposite is also true: enhancing meal-related memory by having people reflect on what they just ate decreases future intake.

Patients suffering from amnesia do not remember eating and will eat when presented with food, even if they have just eaten and should feel full. And memory deficits are associated with overeating and increased weight in relatively healthy people.

The researchers focused on a brain region called the hippocampus, which is absolutely vital for personal memories of what, where and when something happened to you.

Interestingly, hippocampal cells receive signals about hunger status and are connected to other brain areas that are important for starting and stopping eating, such as the hypothalamus. The researchers reasoned that if hippocampal-dependent memory inhibits future eating, then disrupting hippocampal function after a meal is eaten, when the memory of the meal is being stabilized, should promote eating later on when these cells are functioning normally.