Brainstem recording shows that our tastebuds are the first line of defense against eating too fast.
Brainstem recording shows that our tastebuds are the first line of defense against eating too fast. Understanding how may lead to new avenues for weight loss.
When you eagerly dig into a long-awaited dinner, signals from your stomach to your brain keep you from eating so much you’ll regret it — or so it’s been thought. That theory had never really been directly tested until a team of scientists at UC San Francisco recently took up the question.
The picture, it turns out, is a little different.
The team, led by Zachary Knight, PhD, a UCSF professor of physiology in the Kavli Institute for Fundamental Neuroscience, discovered that it’s our sense of taste that pulls us back from the brink of food inhalation on a hungry day. Stimulated by the perception of flavor, a set of neurons — a type of brain cell — leaps to attention almost immediately to curtail our food intake.
Read more at University of California - San Francisco
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