Skipping lunch may be the reason why you’re so hungry.
Researchers at the University of Southern California said brain cells they’ve identified that create memories of meals could explain why forgetting about a meal can trigger excessive hunger and why people with dementia and other memory issues often overeat.
“The brain fails to properly catalog the meal experience,” Lea Decarie-Spain, postdoctoral scholar at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, explained in a statement, “leading to weak or incomplete meal engrams.”
Decarie-Spain was the first author of the study that was published Tuesday in the journal in Nature Communications.
Engrams refer to physical or chemical changes in the brain that occur when a person learns and acquires a memory.
Meal engrams are specialized traces a memory leaves behind in the brain that store information about the experience of food consumption. While eating, neurons in the brain’s hippocampus – the part of the brain responsible for memory and learning – become active, forming these traces in the moments between bites. The researchers have identified these engrams, that help to store “multiple types of information such as where you were eating, as well as the time that you ate.”
To reach these conclusions and see how meal memories form, they used advanced neuroscience techniques, watching the brain activity of lab rats as they ate.
When the meal memory cells were destroyed, the rats showed impaired memory for food locations. They retained spatial memory for other tasks.
The authors found that the neurons – one of two main types of brain cells – communicate with the region of the brain known to control hunger and eating behavior. But, when the connection between that region, known as the lateral hypothalamus, and the hippocampus was blocked, the rodents overate and could not remember where meals were consumed.
They also found that mindless snacking may also impair meal memories and contribute to overeating. The encoding moments between bites are compromised when attention is focused elsewhere.
Scott Kanoski, professor of biological sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Kanoski said it can be assumed a human’s brain would undergo a similar phenomenon.
This could, eventually, help to inform new clinical approaches to treating obesity and managing one’s weight.
“We’re finally beginning to understand that remembering what and when you ate is just as crucial for healthy eating as the food choices themselves,” the corresponding author of the study said.
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