A High-Fat Diet Makes You Overeat Due To Faulty Brain Signaling

A high-fat diet has another worrying problem---it leads to overeating.

Scientists discover that due to "defective signaling in the brain", there can be overeating of high fat foods in mice, that automatically leads to obesity, according to scienceworldreport.

It has been noticed that obesity has shot up all over the world, and has in fact more than doubled since 1980. Globally, two billion people are overweight, and 600 million of them are obese.

The causes of the obesity epidemic could be economic stress, alterations in the built environment and transformation in food trends.

However, there are also biological causes. Due to drawbacks in the central nervous system, the body is not able to live up to its energy intake of food or match it with the expenditure. In this new study, the researchers found a novel mechanism behind overeating high fat foods for pleasure.

"We have always been struck by how much animals-and even people-will over-consume tasty high-fat foods, even though they might be technically feeling full," said Aurelio Galli, one of the authors of the new study, in a news release. "A high fat diet causes people to eat more, which ultimately impairs the ability of obese people to successfully control their caloric intake, lose weight and maintain weight loss. We have conducted several studies trying to understand why a high fat diet has this effect."

Scientists found that there is a precise "signaling pathway in brain cells that control motivation, movement and attention" that leads towards the consumption high fat foods.

Any defect in the signalling could result in overeating of high fat diets.

"West distilled the neurobiological mechanisms involved specifically in overeating for fat," said Kevin Niswender, one of the authors of the study. "We defined the why, where, and how of 'hedonic' obesity and found that disrupting a specific signaling pathway in the brain can lead to overeating specifically food high in fat."

The study would benefit those who are fighting obesity, but more research is needed.

It has been published in the journal Heliyon.