/24-7PressRelease/ - MONTREAL, CANADA, May 10, 2008 - If food seems to always look appetizing to you, then you might want to take a look at what hormones are running around your system. A natural chemical named ghrelin was been found to enhance mental reactions and memories in connection to food.
It also plays a role in making food appear more appetizing to the palate, by the way.
It has long been known that going to a supermarket or restaurant hungry is guaranteed to make a person buy more food. This has always been the case and has been a practice diet experts have advised everyone from doing. Alain Dagher, a neurologist from Montreal's McGill University and part of the research team that found ghrelin, stated that "we've found it is ghrelin that acts on the brain and makes food more appealing."
Prior to this revelation, scientists were already aware of a few things about ghrelin. First, they knew that it had to be linked to hunger somehow, since the levels of it in the bloodstream experienced fluctuations before and after a meal. It has been suspected of having some effect on when the body feels hunger and encourages eating in high amounts. Widespread effects on the brain have also been suspected.
There were some interesting results in the test. To see what kind of things the hormone could do to people, a group was injected with it and another was merely told they were injected, but were not. Both groups were asked to look at a number of pictures of food. The research team found that they were literally seeing the pictures better if they had been injected with ghrelin than if they were not. They also exhibited a higher chance of remembering what the pictures were with the chemical than without.
Scientists speculated that this was critical during times of famine. It is theorized that it could have saved people from staring to death by making food look appetizing when they would not have seen it as such otherwise. However, during times of plenty, scientists suspect that it might ultimately be tied to obesity and overeating.
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