Weight Maven

From UCSF (home of Robert Lustig) comes this presentation by Kent Berridge (UMich) at the Sugar Highs and Lows COAST/UCOP Symposium this past March. His presentation looks at “how food pleasure is generated in the brain, the neural bases of wanting and liking, and how fear and stress relate to desire.”

The content is pretty heady stuff. But even if you don’t speak neurobiology (or speak it poorly like I do), I cannot imagine watching this and not starting to think that there’s something more to obesity than calories in vs out.

I hung in til the end of the video, and the interchange that starts at 52:00 suggests (to me anyways) how important it is to explore how diet can be used as treatment.

Q: So what’s your opinion given the similarities with drug addiction and what we know about treatment for drug addiction and pharmacology … do you think there’s any hope that there’ll be medications that help?

A: I think we’re a long way from effective medications that can tap into this system, at least for drug addiction that could reverse sensitization changes but not have all kind of unwanted side effects. We’re a long way. I think the best therapies are still cognitive behavior sorts of therapies and learning to accept the cravings and things. But in principle — in principle — it could happen that a medication could, it’s just not in our career lifetime probably.

Berridge is certainly correct about the timeline and hazards (ref: fen-phen). So as I mentioned, I think that there’s a great opportunity to explore the usefulness of a diet that supports the brain, chiefly by providing sufficient nutrients and avoiding/minimizing trigger foods.

UCSF has posted a couple of other videos from the event, including one from Yale’s Ashley Gearhardt, who makes a telling remark (around the 21:00 mark) about our obesogenic environment:

The role of cues is especially important … think about the amount of floods of advertisements and food cues that you saw today. Just imagine, shifting in your head, thinking if those were all alcohol cues and you were someone who was struggling to control your alcohol use. That’s going to be a really difficult challenge. The role of cues, potentially dealing with the cues in our environment, is an especially important area to look at in the future.

Um, yeah!