High fat diet leads to overeating, obesity: study

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Weight management is one of the biggest issues most people face in their daily lives.While overeating can be considered as a factor for obesity, a new study reveals that a defective brain signal may be the actual reason behind overconsumption of food, especially after digesting a big and high fat meal.

Eureka Alert reports that based on a research done at Vanderbilt University, the researchers that are part of the Neuroscience Program in Substance Abuse discovered how defective brain signal leads to overeating and eventually obesity. Biologically, food intake is controlled by the brain through the balancing of need for survival and pleasure. However, due to a faulty signal, the brain allows pleasure to take over thus making the individual eat more even when he's technically full, resulting to overconsumption.

Dr. Aurelio Galli, lead author of the study, states that high fat diet may be the main reason for the faulty brain signal, making obese people unable to control their desire to eat, which leads to an inability to maintain weight loss.

University Herald writes that the researchers analyzed insulin signaling in the brain to check how it will affect the rewards and hemostatic mechanisms of the body. They identified it in a group of mice by altering their brain cells and taking out Rapamycin complex 2 (mTORC2), a group of protein that is involved in insulin signal of the brain.

The researchers discovered that these mice ate high fat foods in excess but when given a low-fat diet, they stopped overeating. Incidentally, the researchers also noted that mice without a function mTORC2 also have a lesser amount of dopamine in their brain. Low dopamine level is associated with obesity and substance abuse.

Dr. Galli believes that their study will be beneficial in building weight management techniques and developing weight loss treatments that are essential for people who struggle with obesity, weight issues and overeating, Science World Report adds. This could at least lessen the growing obesity problem in the world, which has doubled in prevalence since 1980.

Further studies are being conducted by the team, starting with an experiment on restoring the missing mTORC2 in overweight mice to check and verify if it will lead to normal caloric consumption and eventually, weight loss.

The study was published in the open access journal Heliyon entitled “Impaired mTORC2 signaling in catecholaminergic neurons exaggerates high fat diet-induced hyperphagia” last September 21st.