If you made a New Year’s resolution a few weeks ago, you probably decided to get fit or lose weight – two goals that pretty unavoidably involve a pledge to eat less. Perhaps you’ve stuck with it so far, through some combination of brute will, guilt, and the deployment of winning slogans at spots of greatest temptation. But unless you’re one of the rare successful long-term dieters, your assault on adiposity will be short lived. Sooner or later, you’ll find your way back to foods that are sweet, fat, and synthetically tinted.

Why do we eat bad stuff, and too much of it?

Naturally, “because we’re hungry and it tastes good” is an answer, but this just begs the deeper question of what call, exactly, we’re answering when we relent to hunger. Is hunger just the stomach’s empty light, pinging the brain with motivation to refill the tank?  Maybe hunger works more like a balance sheet, telling us how many calories we should seek out, relative to how many we have in the bank. Or perhaps hunger is opportunism, indulged in any case where the expected ‘taste-payoff’ is high enough.

In fact, all of these are known and well-studied facets of the drive experienced as hunger, and they all speak to the idea of appetite as a complex regulatory process.

According to a recent study in PLOS One, however, by Jeffrey Brunstrom and his colleagues, hunger is also a trick of memory.  In effect, these scientists argue that the remembrance of meals past can help fill an empty belly.

What makes this work especially interesting is that it cleanly demarcates a psychologically complex component of hunger. Naturally, we suspect that our thoughts about food must surely play a role in our eating (and overeating) decisions. But nailing these processes down has been trickier than, say, identifying the peptides and hormones that enhance or suppress appetite. By understanding the hunger’s cognitive components better, we might come up with more effective mind hacks to limit overeating.

Early evidence that memory plays a role in eating came from subjects whose memory was impaired. More specifically, both amnesic rats and people with damage to the hippocampus – a key structure in memory formation – tend to eat in short sporadic bouts, rather than in a few concentrated meals. If you put food in front of an amnesic person, they’re almost always game to eat, whether their last large meal was 5 minutes ago, or 5 hours ago. Other evidence for the “memory for eating” idea comes from memory cueing experiments. If people who are about to eat are given reminders of their previous meal (as opposed to reminders of a meal from long ago), they tend to eat smaller portions. In other words, we seem to keep tabs on what we’ve eaten not just by computing signals of physical fullness – which are presumably unperturbed in all of these cases -- but also by keeping a mental tally of what was eaten when. It’s as if you have a vigilant inner parent, reminding you that “you just ate 15 minutes ago – how could you possibly be hungry!”

While interesting, these experiments have their problems. In the amnesic studies, for example, it’s dangerous to infer too much about normal brain function from behaviors that are the product of a damaged brain. Likewise, its unclear what the memory cueing experiments tell us about normal, everyday eating, since we’re not typically given overt reminders of our previous meals. In order to test if the memory of a previous meal comes unbidden, and has effects on subsequent eating, you have to perturb that memory in a normal individual. But how do you do this?

Basically, you trick people, and you do it in a carefully controlled way. In Brunstrom’s experiment, this was done using a device with an infomercial-worthy name: the self-refilling soup bowl apparatus. Experimental subjects would approach the otherwise normal looking soup bowl, and were told to eat what was in it (creamed tomato, for the curious). Half of the subjects were shown a small portion of soup (300 mL, or about one and a quarter cups), and the other half was shown a considerably larger portion (500 mL, a bit more than two cups). 

3 Comments

1. 1. Dr. Joe 10:07 AM 1/23/13

   Good news!
   
   I feel great when current studies support my many years old advice, as I wrote it in http://dr-joseph.blogspot.com/2011/02/my-five-life-coach-areas.html
   regarding 'taking inventory notes'; once you acknowledge it, you own it and therefore you can control or change it.
   
   Thanks,
   
   Dr. Joe

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2. 2. rsabbatini 08:40 PM 1/23/13

   Simply splendid writing, Dr. Castro, you have THE flair for science communication, and an interesting style, too. Please keep up this much-needed work.
   
   Regarding the subject at hand, purely reductionist researchers in obesity will think twice now before explaining alimentary behavior in terms of leptin, ghrelin, gastric sensors and hypothalamic homeostasis! Eye and mind are very important, too. Perhaps taking a photograph of your last meal with your cellphone will help? I will try it,=,

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3. 3. nthmost 06:12 PM 1/24/13

   Interesting stuff. I do wonder whether current trend of food photo-logging does help people with their diets.

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