FRIDAY, April 23, 2004 (HealthDayNews) -- The same area of the brain linked to drug addiction is also activated by the desire for food and could be a contributing factor to the obesity epidemic in the United States.
That claim comes in a study by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory.
They found that a person's hunger and desire for food significantly increases metabolism in the right orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region that controls drive and pleasure.
"These results could explain the deleterious effects of constant exposure to food stimuli, such as advertising, candy machines, food channels, and food displays in stores," study author Gene-Jack Wang, a Brookhaven physician, said in a prepared statement.
"The high sensitivity of this brain region to food stimuli, coupled with the huge number and variety of these stimuli in the environment, likely contributes to the epidemic of obesity in this country," Wang said.
The study appears in the April issue of NeuroImage.
The Brookhaven researchers used positron emission tomography (PET) brain scans to measure brain metabolism in 12 normal-weight, food-deprived volunteers who were allowed to smell, view, and taste small portions of their favorite foods.
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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers these healthy eating tips.
