Junk food highjacks the brain’s ability to control intake: study

January 26, 2023

Fatty foods can lead to obesity but it’s all in your brain — and not the way you may think.

Researchers have found that regularly eating high-fat and high-caloric foods can change the neurological pathways in your brain, reducing the brain’s ability to regulate calorie intake and can lead to overeating and weight gain.

Researchers, whose findings were published Wednesday in the Journal of Physiology, tested a high-fat diet in rats, showing the astrocytes cells that control a chemical pathway to the stomach were disrupted when fatty and sugary food was ingested.

“Calorie intake seems to be regulated in the short-term by astrocytes,” said lead author Dr. Kirsteen Browning, from Penn State College of Medicine, in a media release.

Fatty foods can lead to over eating -- but not in the way you may have thought. — Fatty foods can lead to overeating — but not in the way you may have thought.

“This disrupts the signaling to the stomach and delays how it empties,” Browning explained. “[It triggers] the normal signaling pathway to control the stomach and over time, astrocytes seem to desensitize to the high-fat food.”

The study monitored the food intake in more than 200 lab rodents who were fed either a normal or high-fat diet for one, three, five, or 14 days, observing how it affected their digestion and appetite.

Researchers have found regularly eating high fat and high caloric foods can change the neurological pathways in your brain. — Researchers have found that regularly eating high-fat and high-caloric foods can change the neurological pathways in your brain.

While a “brief exposure” of three to four days of fatty foods didn’t appear to affect the pathways between the brain and stomach, the researchers found that 10 to 14 days of eating high-fat and high-calorie diets saw a decline in the astrocytes’ reaction as well as the brain’s ability to regulate calorie intake.

Browning said they are yet to find out if the loss of astrocyte activity is the cause of overeating or if it occurs in response to the overeating, but says the discovery of the disruption of a pathway between the brain and stomach could pave the way for an anti-obesity pill that targets the neurons in the brain.

“We are eager to find out whether it is possible to reactivate the brain’s apparent lost ability to regulate calorie intake,” Browning said. “If this is the case, it could lead to interventions to help restore calorie regulation in humans.”

According to the CDC, over 41% of adults in America are obese, which increases their risk of cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes.