- Chronic consumption of Western diet could be altering your body’s chemistry
- Foods high in sugar and fat could trigger receptors in the peripheral organs
- This contradicts research that said signals in the brain caused overeating
- The only safe way to treat it would be ‘using a drug to block these receptors’
Mary Kekatos For Dailymail.com
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The ‘Western diet’ makes overeating feel euphoric, a new study has claimed.
Foods high in sugar and fat, as found in a typical American diet, could be triggering receptors in your body that make you want to gorge – in the same way cannabis gives you the ‘munchies’.
Previous studies have suggested that signals in the brain cause people to overeat.
But this study is the first to suggest that overeating may be due to what is called ‘peripheral endocannabinoid signalling’ – signals generated in other parts of the body rather than the brain.
A ‘Western diet’ could make overeating more enticing, a new study warns. Gorging sweet food has the same effect on the body as when you smoke cannabis: you get the ‘munchies’
The endocannabinoid system is a group of lipid signalling molecules – called endocannabinoids, often thought of as the body’s own ‘natural cannabis’ – and their receptors.
These receptors control many physiological processes including food intake, energy balance, and reward.
Researchers at the University of California Riverside told Daily Mail Online that overeating foods high in sugar and fat enhances the endocannabinoid signals because your ‘reward system’ is being triggered.
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To test the theory, the study had one group of mice put on a ‘Western diet’ and another group fed a low-fat, low-sugar diet.
Over 60 days, the mice on the Western diet rapidly gained body weight and became obese.
These mice also displayed ‘hyperphagia’, meaning they consumed significantly more calories, and consumed significantly larger meals at a much higher rate of intake (calories per minute).
Going hand-in-hand, the obese mice experienced greatly elevated levels of endocannabinoids in the small intestine and general circulation.
The researchers were able to reverse the effect by using a drug to block the actions of the endocannabinoids.
This caused the food intake and meal patterns in the obese mice to normalize to the levels found in the lean-fed mice.
Co-author Dr Nicholas DiPatrizio, an assistant professor of biomedical sciences at the University of California Riverside School of Medicine, told Daily Mail Online: ‘The drug we used, AM6465, not only blocked the the endocannabinoid receptors, but the food intake in the Western diet mice decreased.
‘We’re remotely controlling the brain from the gut.
‘Targeting these receptors in the peripheral organs by using drugs that don’t cross the blood-brain barrier, that don’t have psychiatric side-effects, could be a safe approach to treating overeating.’
Although further studies are needed to see the response in humans, the researchers plan to next look at possible specific dietary ingredients in the western diet that drive overeating
Dr DiPatrizio said: ‘We don’t just have to use drugs to fight obesity.
‘If we can figure out what component of the Western diet – which fats, which sugars – are causing the overeating, then maybe we can implement a form of dietary intervention and get these foods out of our diets.’
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