People with obesity receive less satisfaction from eating
Last reviewed: 11.04.2020
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Regular overeating in obese people is associated with less satisfaction from eating. That is, people get less pleasure in consuming food - as a consequence, they begin to consume it in larger quantities.
Extra kilograms negatively affect not only the metabolic processes, but also the human food behavior. Specialists representing the University of Bangor conducted such an experiment. They offered several dozen people (among them were, as people with excess weight, and with a normal physique) to install in your smartphone a certain application. Every day it was required to put a mark when they were visited by the idea of eating, how strong this desire was - regardless of whether they used food or not. If, after the thought of eating, a meal followed, the participant should have noted whether he was satisfied with the meal. It was also necessary to note how many times a day there were meals, and how long each process of absorption took. Then the participants filled out a special questionnaire, indicating whether they were suffering from increased cravings for food without the presence of a sense of hunger.
In the course of the experiment, it was found that volunteers with excess weight, and without it, differed little in their behavior from each other: their meals were about the same in time, and thoughts about the need for "something to chew" came about at regular intervals. The intensity of the feeling of hunger was also approximately the same. Differences were only in the feeling that was experienced during and after eating. So, participants, who are overweight, used food not always - that is, they did not receive from it the proper pleasure. This factor in the future also influenced the fact that they wanted to eat more and more - but not to get rid of the feeling of hunger, but in order to get at least a small fraction of the pleasure that they did not have. By the way, such an experiment scientists put earlier, but in the laboratory.
Today's research has indicated the natural behavioral characteristics of people living under normal conditions, not limited to the laboratory. However, now scientists have another question: satisfaction with food disappears with the appearance of excess weight, or vice versa - violation of satisfaction leads to the development of obesity ?
In any case, the lack of nutritional satisfaction and excess weight are mutually reinforced. Will scientists continue to work on the creation of a drug that returns people the positive emotions associated with eating? Maybe this could be one of the ways to solve the problem of overeating and overweight.
Details of the experiment are described on the pages of Eating Behaviors (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1471015317304609).
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