Food Reward Friday

This week's lucky "winner"... ice cream!! Read more »

Food Reward Friday

This week's luck winner(s)... pastries!! Read more »

Why Do We Eat? A Neurobiological Perspective. Part VI

In previous posts in this series, I explained that the brain (primarily the mesolimbic system) integrates various factors to decide whether ...

Why Do We Eat? A Neurobiological Perspective. Part V

In previous posts, I explained that food intake is determined by a variety of factors that are detected by the brain, and integrated by circ...

Food Reward Friday

This week's winner: the Taco Bell Doritos Locos Taco! Read more »

Two Great Quotes About Obesity (technical)

By Dr. Hans-Rudolf Berthoud, from a recent paper, "The Neurobiology of Food Intake in an Obesogenic Environment" ( 1 ).  I came ac...

Palatability, Satiety and Calorie Intake

WHS reader Paul Hagerty recently sent me a very interesting paper titled "A Satiety Index of Common Foods", by Dr. SHA Holt and co...

60 Minutes Report on the Flavorist Industry

A reader sent me a link to a recent CBS documentary titled " Tweaking Tastes and Creating Cravings ", reported by Morley Safer. Sa...

The Case for the Food Reward Hypothesis of Obesity, Part II

In this post, I'll explore whether or not the scientific evidence is consistent with the predictions of the food reward hypothesis, as o...

Humans on a Cafeteria Diet

In the 1970s, as the modern obesity epidemic was just getting started, investigators were searching for new animal models of diet-induced ob...

Simple Food: Thoughts on Practicality

Some people have reacted negatively to the idea of a reduced-reward diet because it strikes them as difficult or unsustainable.  In this pos...

Food Reward: a Dominant Factor in Obesity, Part VII

Now that I've explained the importance of food reward to obesity, and you're tired of reading about it, it's time to share my id...

Food Reward: a Dominant Factor in Obesity, Part II

How to Make a Rat Obese Rodents are an important model organism for the study of human obesity. To study obesity in rodents, you have to ma...

Food Reward: a Dominant Factor in Obesity, Part I

A Curious Finding It all started with one little sentence buried in a paper about obese rats. I was reading about how rats become obese whe...

Rats on Junk Food

If diet composition causes hyperphagia, we should be able to see it in animals. I just came across a great study from the lab of Dr. Neil ...

Superstimuli

During the 1940s and 50s, an Austrian psychologist named Konrad Lorenz studied the behavioral patterns of geese. One of the things he observ...