London, October 17 (ANI): Skipping breakfast - the most important meal of the day, not only means that you tuck in more lunch, but also primes your brain to seek out unhealthier and higher-calorie foods, researchers have warned.
Dieters who skip meals often end up gaining weight over the long term, but why this happens is not well understood.
Tony Goldstone from the MRC Clinical Science Centre at Imperial College London scanned the brains of people who skipped meals and found mechanisms at work that could help explain the conundrum.
Prolonged fasting of any kind seemed to prime certain brain regions to gravitate towards higher-calorie foods when the person did eventually find a meal.
"That makes evolutionary sense if you're in a negative energy-balance situation," the Guardian quoted Goldstone as saying.
"You're not going to waste your time going for lettuce," he said.
In the experiment, Goldstone scanned the brains of 21 men and women, all around the age of 25, on two separate days while they were shown pictures of food and asked to rate how appealing they found everything from chocolate and pizzas to vegetables and fish.
On one of the days, the volunteers skipped breakfast before their scans; on the other, they were given a 750-calorie breakfast of cereals, bread and jam an hour beforehand.
After the scans on both days, the volunteers were given lunch, where they could eat as much as they liked.
"Not surprisingly, when they are fasted they are hungry and they rate the high-calorie foods as more appealing than when they are fed," Goldstone said.
"For low-calorie foods, the effect is not as marked. When they come out of the scanner, they are given lunch and they eat more when they haven't had breakfast," he said.
When the volunteers had skipped breakfast, they ate around 20 percent more at lunch, compared with days when they had eaten a normal breakfast.
Their brain scans also showed that activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, which is just above the eyes, was especially responsive to high-calorie foods.
"We believe that bit encodes the value of rewards - how rewarding, how pleasant, how tasty something is. Not just food but other rewards seem to be signalled there in the brain," Goldstone said.
The more you like the food you're eating, the more active the orbitofrontal cortex becomes, and when people are asked to suppress their desire for tasty foods, its activity drops.
The changing activity in this brain region could also explain why different methods of weight-control surgery work to differing degrees.
The findings of the study will be presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans. (ANI)
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