Apparently, when a thin person sips a milkshake, they get more pleasure from the experience of eating than the heavier counterpart. Am I the only one that seems really unfair too?! :-)
They did MRIs on a bunch of young women and teens while they sipped small amounts of chocolate milkshakes. When a thin person drank the shake, the dopamine releasing center of their brain lit up like a Christmas tree and flooded their body with pleasure-inducing hormones. When an overweight woman drank the same shake, the dorsal striatum (the dopamine drip of the human brain) showed less activity than in the thinner test subjects. And for those heavier people with a gene called TaqlA1, the decreased response was even more pronounced. Can you imagine being in that study . . . you'd totally feel like they kept just piling it on, "Well, you're already overweight, and apparently our MRI shows you don't really enjoy eating food as much as that 19 year old cheerleader sitting out in the waiting room, and your genetic tests show an obesity gene is also apparent. Um, have a nice day. You can the rest of that shake if you want . . . just don't expect to enjoy it all that much."
This was kind of depressing . . . I was gonna go eat ice cream or something in response, but now I know that's just a moot point.
3 comments:
I think this is sad, but possibly true. Icecream doesn't bring me the joy it should. Cheese fries do. They should do a study with cheese fries. I'd so be involved in that. Also... Maybe the reason we don't release (we being chubby people) the right hormones is because while we are eating that delicious and fattening shake we are also experianceing a vicious shame spiral.
That cracked me up!
Would it make you feel better to know that this chubby chica gets way more enjoyment out of milkshakes (and all food, really) than anyone else she knows?
I love ice cream, I could eat it daily and I would never get sick of it and regardless of anything else that happened that day, it would always be the highlight. I am assuming then, according to this study, that I am skinny. It only makes sense.
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