I have been swamped for the last week or so with the day job and have just started my workshop intensive for my nutrition therapy class … so a few more days of light blogging.
But oh happy day … Stephan Guyenet has begun his series of posts on the implications of a “body fat setpoint”, starting with Food Reward: a Dominant Factor in Obesity, Part I (emphasis mine):
The human brain evolved to deal with a certain range of rewarding experiences. It didn’t evolve to constructively manage strong drugs of abuse such as heroin and crack cocaine, which overstimulate reward pathways, leading to the pathological drug seeking behaviors we call addiction. These drugs are “superstimuli” that exceed our reward system’s normal operating parameters. Over the next few posts, I’ll try to convince you that in a similar manner, industrially processed food, which has been professionally crafted to maximize its rewarding properties, is a superstimulus that exceeds the brain’s normal operating parameters, leading to an increase in the body fat setpoint and other negative consequences.
This is going to be an important piece of the puzzle that folks like Taubes and the Drs Eades and others who look primarily at macronutrient ratios and insulin are missing IMO. It’s not just about fat storage hormones, but about appetite-regulating ones. And there are many more at play than just insulin or leptin.
This is gonna be good!
So I just saw a blurb about this study from this month’s American Journal of Clinical Nutrition:
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our modern culture -- especially diet. Beth writes about ancestral health, health policy, & mindfulness. And cats! 
