Category: Neurofeedback

Summary: A new study reports when certain brain areas react more strongly to food rewards than financial rewards, children are more likely to overeat, even if they are not hungry or overweight.

Source: Penn State.

The reason why some people find it so hard to resist finishing an entire bag of chips or bowl of candy may lie with how their brain responds to food rewards, leaving them more vulnerable to overeating.

In a study with children, researchers found that when certain regions of the brain reacted more strongly to being rewarded with food than being rewarded with money, those children were more likely to overeat, even when the child wasn’t hungry and regardless of if they were overweight or not.

Shana Adise, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Vermont who led the study while earning her doctorate at Penn State, said the results give insight into why some people may be more prone to overeating than others. The findings may also give clues on how to help prevent obesity at a younger age.

“If we can learn more about how the brain responds to food and how that relates to what you eat, maybe we can learn how to change those responses and behavior,” Adise said. “This also makes children an interesting population to work with, because if we can stop overeating and obesity at an earlier age, that could be really beneficial.”

Previous research on how the brain’s response to food can contribute to overeating has been mixed. Some studies have linked overeating with brains that are more sensitive to food rewards, while others have found that being less sensitive to receiving food rewards makes you more likely to overeat.

Additionally, other studies have shown that people who are willing to work harder for food than other types of rewards, like money, are more likely to overeat and gain weight over time. But the current study is the first to show that children who have greater brain responses to food compared to money rewards are more likely to overeat when appealing foods are available.

“We know very little about the mechanisms that contribute to overeating,” Adise said. “The scientific community has developed theories that may explain overeating, but whether or not they actually relate to food intake hadn’t yet been evaluated. So we wanted to go into the lab and test whether a greater brain response to anticipating and winning food, compared to money, was related to overeating.”

For the study, 59 children between the ages of 7 and 11 years old made four visits to the Penn State’s Children’s Eating Behavior Laboratory.

During the first three visits, the children were given meals designed to measure how they eat in a variety of different situations, such as a typical meal when they’re hungry versus snacks when they’re not hungry. How much the children ate at each meal was determined by weighing the plates before and after the meals.

On their fourth visit, the children had fMRI scans as they played several rounds of a game in which they guessed if a computer-generated number would be higher or lower than five. They were then told that if they were right, they would win either money, candy or a book, before it was revealed if they were correct or not.

The researchers found that when various regions of the brain reacted more to anticipating or winning food compared to money, those children were more likely to overeat.

“We also found that the brain’s response to food compared to money was related to overeating regardless of how much the child weighed,” Adise said. “Specifically, we saw that increased brain responses in areas of the brain related to cognitive control and self control when the children received food compared to money were associated with overeating.”

Adise added that this is important because it suggests there may be a way to identify brain responses that can predict the development of obesity in the future.

Kathleen Keller, associate professor of nutritional sciences, Penn State, said the study — recently published in the journal Appetite — backs up the theory that an increased brain response in regions of the brain related to rewards is associated with eating more food in a variety of situations.

“We predicted that kids who had an increased response to food relative to money would be the ones to overeat, and that’s what we ended up seeing,” Keller said. “We specifically wanted to look at kids whose brains responded to one type of a reward over another. So it wasn’t that they’re overly sensitive to all rewards, but that they’re highly sensitive to food rewards.”

Keller said the findings give insight into how the brain influences eating, which is important because it could help identify children who are at risk for obesity or other poor eating habits before those habits actually develop.

“Until we know the root cause of overeating and other food-related behaviors, it’s hard to give good advice on fixing those behaviors,” Keller said. “Once patterns take over and you overeat for a long time, it becomes more difficult to break those habits. Ideally, we’d like to prevent them from becoming habits in the first place.”

Source: NeuroScience

It’s not a great feeling to know that you scared your doctors. Unfortunately for a man in the U.K, he recently did so: he displayed a case of gonorrhea that so dramatically resisted treatment that it chilled his physicians.

That’s partially because gonorrhea isn’t the best thing to leave untreated. But another reason: this case is a harbinger of a looming crisis.

Gonorrhea is an infection caused by a bacteria. Usually antibiotics can kill it. But after some time, the bacteria evolves to become resistant to that treatment. It also happens to be one of the world’s most common STDs, with 78 million new cases every year. 30 percent of all gonorrhea infections are resistant to at least one antibiotic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

We’ve known this was coming. In 2017, the WHO raised a worldwide alarm about the rising spread of resistance to older and cheaper antibiotics. Some countries with better monitoring systems, the UN agency said in a statement, found cases of resistance to all known antibiotics.

This case is one of the first of its kind. The man is reported to have visited a clinic earlier this year, and was given a combination of two antibiotics, azithromycin and ceftriaxone, that was known to be effective in getting rid of the disease. After the cocktail failed to wipe out the infection, the patient is now being treated with injections of a stronger antibiotic called ertapenem and will be tested again next month, PHE said in a report.

As reported by The Guardian, the U.K. government agency Public Health England (PHE) revealed that the patient who caught the highly resistant strain had a female partner in the country, but might have been infected during a trip in Southeast Asia. Authorities are tracking down the man’s partners to try and contain the spread of the disease.

Have you ever had that gut feeling? A feeling that makes you suddenly feel anxious or feel like something isn’t right? It’s not just a figure of speech, because there is actually science behind it. This is caused by the microbes in your gut communicating with your brain via something called the vagus nerve, and vice versa. So let’s look at what has to happen in the gut to cause it to start sending signals to the brain that result in problems like depression or anxiety.
Scientific evidence shows a strong connection between chronic diseases and inflammation. Inflammation is most commonly rooted in the gut, where around 70 percent of our immune system resides. Our food choices result in oxidative stress, setting the stage for inflammatory ailments such as depression, anxiety, brain fog, obesity and more. The health of your gut directly impacts the health of your brain.
The gut communicated with our immune system and also communicates with the brain using, among other things, neurotransmitters. One function of neurotransmitters is that they that they send key messages to the brain, resulting in various effects on the body.
Serotonin and dopamine are some well-known neurotransmitters that are typically associated with a good mood. In fact, while many believe that serotonin is primarily produced in the brain, it’s been found that up to 90 percent of serotonin is actually created in the gut.
Dr. Helen Messer, the Chief Medical Officer at Viome, which analyzes the gut microbiome, told Futurism that “the bacteria in the gut make or consume the majority of neurotransmitters in our bodies.”
Essentially, if your gut is producing an adequate amount of mood-improving chemicals like serotonin, then it will send signals to the brain that will result in various benefits such as better sleep and satiety. It’s obviously more complicated than that, but that’s the general rundown. So how do you influence your gut to help it produce the good neurotransmitters and other compounds that make the mind feel better? A lot of it has to do with eating the right diet that your gut needs.

The foods that we eat affect the composition of our microbes and in turn change the products that our gut produces, Dr. Messier said. A fatty diet, especially, can turn on the bad bacteria that like those types of food. These fast food loving organisms produce inflammatory compounds setting the stage for chronic diseases.
The truth is that your gut is incredibly unique. It’s more unique than your fingerprint. It’s important to understand that there is no food that can be considered universally non-inflammatory. The same food that can heal one person and cause inflammation in another person depending the composition of the gut microbiome, Viome CEO Naveen Jain told Futurism. Your gut can metabolize the same food to produce nutrients that your body needs or can produce harmful toxins that cause inflammation. That spinach you’ve been told to eat your whole life may not actually be healthy for you right now.
A healthy diet personalized for you allows your gut not produce inflammatory compounds and instead produce healthy compounds like butyrate and neurotransmitters that positively affect the brain and mind. It’s not just neurotransmitters, though. The bacteria in your gut also produce vitamins and nutrients your brain needs to function properly.
“Neurotransmitter production in the brain is dependent on specific vitamins,” Dr. Messier said. “Folic acid is an example. Our brain absolutely depends on folic acid, and our bacteria make it for us. If they don’t have the right building blocks that come from the food, they won’t be able to make the things we depend on.”
If your brain does not get the nutrients it needs, then nerve signals slow down, and different parts of the brain start having trouble communicating effectively, Dr. Messier explained. The good news is that the microbiome changes. If someone adequately improves their diet, based on personalized recommendations, Dr. Messier says their gut can be rebalanced in a matter of weeks.
To find out what your unique microbiome needs, it’s best to get your gut tested. Viome, where Dr. Messier works, has developed an RNA sequencing method that is affordable and accurately identifies which organisms are active in your gut. Not only what organisms are there, but also what these organisms are doing and what they are producing. We’ve reported on it in the past. Viome offers personalized food recommendations based on the needs of your gut. Not only will your gut thank you, your brain will thank you too.

Source: Futurism