You Can Reach A Woman's Heart Through Food

Researchers at Drexel University in the journal Appetite, explain that for a woman's brains to respond to romance, a full stomach works better than an empty one.

Brain circuitry was explored in various women. Some were hungry and other were full, while some had dieted in the past.

The study's first author Alice Ely, PhD, completed the research while pursuing a doctoral degree at Drexel, and is now a postdoctoral research fellow at the Eating Disorders Center for Treatment and Research, part of the UC San Diego School of Medicine. Michael R. Lowe, PhD, a professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at Drexel University, was senior author.

"We found that young women both with and without a history of dieting had greater brain activation in response to romantic pictures in reward-related neural regions after having eaten than when hungry," said Ely. All of the study participants were young, college-age women of normal weight.

Surprisingly, the results seem to contradict earlier studies showing people being more sensitive to "rewarding stimuli when hungry", which might include food, money and drugs.

"In this case, they were more responsive when fed," she said. "This data suggests that eating may prime or sensitize young women to rewards beyond food. It also supports a shared neurocircuitry for food and sex."

Earlier, Ely and her Drexel colleagues had probed how the brain changes its reaction to food cues. Hence, they examined whether the brain's reward response to food was different in women at risk for gaining weight versus those who had never dieted. They had published their earlier study in Obesity in 2014, finding that the brain of past dieters responded "more dramatically" to positive food cues when fed, as compared to women who had never gone on a diet.

"In the fed state, historical dieters had a greater reaction in the reward regions than the other two groups to highly palatable food cues versus neutral or moderately palatable cues," she said. Highly palatable cues meant objects like chocolate cake, while "neutral cues" could mean carrots.

Ely explained that historical dieters, may seem predisposed by their brain reward circuitry to long for food.

"Based on this study, we hypothesized that historical dieters are differentially sensitive -- after eating -- to rewards in general, so we tested this perception by comparing the same groups' brain activation when viewing romantic pictures compared to neutral stimuli in a fasted and fed state," she said. Testing was done using MRI imaging.

Both groups responded more sharply after a feed, but the historical dieters' neural activity was different from the others in the brain region that had turned up in the earlier experiments.

"The pattern of response was similar to historical dieter's activation when viewing highly palatable food cues, and is consistent with research showing overlapping brain-based responses to sex, drugs and food," said Ely.

According to dailymail, the researchers suggested that, when hungry, the woman would be paying attention only on eating food. However, once that is satisfied, she becomes interested in sex. "Across cultures, food and romantic reward are closely intertwined,' the psychologists wrote in the journal Appetite.

"Courtship rituals frequently involve meals or the presentation of food, and while it is certainly a socially-influenced practice, it is seen in the animal kingdom as well."