Always Hungry? Blame It On Food Porn
There is no doubt that living in a society in which we are constantly surrounded by highly palatable foods makes not overeating a challenge for most of us. Now, an interesting paper by Charles Spence and colleagues from Oxford University, published in Brain and Cognition, makes a strong case for how exposure to images of desirable foods (which they label ‘food porn’, or ‘gastroporn’) via digital interfaces might be inadvertently exacerbating our desire for food (what they call ‘visual hunger’). In their paper, the authors review the growing body of cognitive neuroscience research demonstrating the profound effect that viewing such images can have on neural activity, physiological and psychological responses, and visual attention, especially in the ‘hungry’ brain. Beginning with a brief discussion of evolutionary aspects of vision and food, the authors remind us that, “Foraging – the search for nutritious foods – is one of the brain’s most important functions. In humans, this activity relies primarily on vision, especially when it comes to finding those foods that we are already familiar with. In fact, it has been suggested that trichromatic colour vision may originally have developed in primates as an adaptation that facilitated the selection of more energy-rich (and likely red) fruits from in-amongst the dark green forest canopy.” “The brain is the body’s most energy-consuming organ, accounting for somewhere in the region of 25% of blood flow, or rather, 25% of the available consumed energy. Note that this figure is even higher in the newborn human, where the brain absorbs up to two thirds of the energy that is consumed by the developing organism. As Brown notes: “In embryos, the first part of the neocortex to develop is the part which will represent the mouth and tongue…” As the brain grew in size over the course of human evolution, the demands on the visual system to efficiently locate nutrients in the environment would likely also have increased.” This notion is not trivial given our current environmental exposure to a multitude of food images: “Our brains learnt to enjoy seeing food, since it would likely precede consumption. The automatic reward associated with the sight of food likely meant another day of sufficient nutrients for survival, and at the same time, the physiological responses would prepare our bodies to receive that food. Our suggestion here is that the regular exposure to virtual foods nowadays, and the array of neural, physiological,… Read More »
Is the Metabolically Healthy Obesity Phenotype Irrelevant for Public Health?
Anyone who has closely followed my writings on this topic will know by now that health for a given individual cannot be measured by simply stepping on a scale (or for that matter using a measuring tape). There are indeed individuals who appear rather healthy even at BMI levels considered to be well into the obesity range (just how many depends on your definition of “healthy”). In an article and commentary that appears in the American Journal of Epidemiology, Juan Pablo Rey-López and colleagues from the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol,UK, argue that the notion of “metabolically healthy obesity” (MHO), if anything is distracting and even counterproductive to public health efforts to prevent obesity. They argue that, “the MHO phenotype is not benign and as such has very limited relevance as a public health target.” Throughout the article, the authors indeed make the oft-heard arguments for a population wide approach based on the notion that even a small left-shift in the weight distribution curve (as popularized by Geoffrey Rose) can have a potentially large influence on the population burden of excess weight. This is not something anyone would argue with – at least at a population level and when the issue is prevention. Unfortunately, Rey-López and colleagues then fall into the trap of pooh-poohing the research efforts around better trying to understand exactly why there is such a variation in how excess weight may (or may not) affect an individual’s health. “More efforts must be allocated to reducing the distal and actual causal agents that lead to weight gain, instead of the current disproportionate scientific interest in the biological processes that explain the heterogeneity of obesity.” Furthermore, they argue against further investments into obesity treatments: “Nevertheless, it should be openly recognized that further investments in this predominantly individual approach will not reverse the obesity epidemic, because 1) medical therapies or dramatic lifestyle changes do not modify the distal causes of obesity (i.e., modern processed food and the built environment) and 2) individualized lifestyle modifications are commonly unsuccessful and inaccessible.“ The two facts that are largely ignored in this discussion are 1) that efforts at prevention (no matter how effective) are not helping the millions of people already living with this problem and 2) trying to find better treatments by learning more about the biology of this condition is exactly how we have found treatments for a host of… Read More »
Are We More Susceptible to Obesity Than Before?
Regular readers will be familiar with my wariness of epidemiological data on diet and activity – especially, when these are self-reported. Nevertheless, for what it is worth, a publication by Ruth Brown and colleagues from York University, Toronto, published in Obesity Research and Clinical Practice, suggests that people today may be more susceptible to obesity than just a few decades ago. The study looks at self-reported dietary from 36,377 U.S. adults from the National Health and Nutrition Survey (NHANES) between 1971 and 2008 and physical activity frequency data from 14,419 adults between 1988 and 2006 (no activity data was available from earlier years). Between 1971 and 2008, BMI, total caloric intake and carbohydrate intake increased 10-14%, and fat and protein intake decreased 5-9%. Between 1988 and 2006, frequency of leisure time physical activity increased 47-120%. However, for a given amount of caloric intake, macronutrient intake or leisure time physical activity, the predicted BMI was up to 2.3kg/m2 higher in 2006 that in 1988. So unless there was some major systematic shift in what people were reporting (which seems somewhat unlikely) it is clear that factors other than diet and physical activity may be contributing to the increase in BMI over time – or in other words, it appears that people today, for the same caloric intake and physical activity, are more likely to have a higher BMI than people living a few decades ago. There are of course several plausible biological explanations for these findings including epigenetics, obesogenic environmental toxins, alterations in gut microbiota to name a few. If nothing else, these data support the notion that there is more to the obesity epidemic than just eating too much and not moving enough. @DrSharma Edmonton, AB
2014 CDC Obesity Maps
For readers, who like showing images that demonstrate just how increasingly prevalent obesity is across the US, here are the 2014 obesity maps released by the US Centre for Disease Control this week. Not that much new (unless you want to quibble about a couple of percent points here or there) – the situation is bad, with no sign of getting any better (no surprise here). Here are the basic facts: No state had a prevalence of obesity less than 20%. 5 states and the District of Columbia had a prevalence of obesity between 20% and <25%. 23 states, Guam and Puerto Rico had a prevalence of obesity between 25% and <30%. 19 states had a prevalence of obesity between 30% and <35%. 3 states (Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia) had a prevalence of obesity of 35% or greater. The Midwest had the highest prevalence of obesity (30.7%), followed by the South (30.6%), the Northeast (27.3%), and the West (25.7%). What else can one say? @DrSharma Kelwona, BC
The Cost-Saving Argument For Obesity Prevention Is No Better
Yesterday, I suggested that using a cost-saving argument to justify treatments for obesity reeks of discrimination. I argued that even if obesity treatment costs the system money, it needs to be delivered in the same way that we deliver treatments for other conditions – not because they save money, but because that’s what people living with those conditions deserve. But the “cost-saving” argument is not just used to justify treatment for obesity – it is also regularly and widely used to justify spending money on obesity prevention. The usual line of argumentation is that x dollars spent on obesity prevention will save y times x dollars in healthcare spending, which is why we need to prevent obesity. This is nonsense. We should be preventing obesity whether or not it saves money for the healthcare system, simply because obesity (defined here as excess weight that actually causes health problems) negatively impacts health and well-being. If this costs money, so be it. Obviously, no one is asking anyone to simply pay for everything (prevention or treatment) just because it is the right thing to do, no matter the cost. In real life cost does matter and there is a fiscal responsibility to spend money on things that are effective and deliver real benefits – but let us not wander into weighing one disease against another in making that decision. And most certainly the question of “fault and responsibility” leads to a very slippery slope, given that so much of what affects our health (from infections to cancer, from accidents to chronic diseases) is often avoidable. The question really boils down to whether or not there are effective ways to prevent obesity – if there are, they need to be funded, whether they save money or not. @DrSharma Edmonton, AB
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