How Overeating Rewires Our Brains – Neuroscience of Weight Gain & Loss | Nick Sterling, MD, PhD #4
“We believe we have found a new receiver of information that directly affects brain activity and feeding behavior, and if our findings bear out in other animals, including people, they may advance the search for drugs or other means of controlling appetites,” says Lagerlöf.In examining these signals between nerve cells in the brain, Huganir, along with graduate student Olof Lagerlöf, M.D., and other colleagues, focused on a particular enzyme called OGT that is involved in how the body uses sugar and insulin. When they deleted the enzyme from the brains of mice, it effectively removed the “off switch” to the animals’ appetites, and those mice began to eat bigger meals and gain weight, mostly in the form of body fat.