On a diet? Don't look at the food.....

Spotted this yesterday and thought it worth posting.  If you read around the topic of obesity there are various hormones that get mentioned - leptin, insulin, Peptide YY and others.  Ghrelin is another one that pops up occasionally: a hunger stimulating hormone.

Ghrelin Levels Increase After Pictures Showing Food

With a background of regular meals, these researchers showed various photos to the subjects: food and "neutral" images.  The findings suggest that sight of food elevates ghrelin levels.

Interesting but obvious too?  Seeing food makes you hungry. 

I wonder if all this has something to do with the obesity epidemic too.  Images of food are everywhere.  Appetites through the roof.  People are eating more and getting fatter.

Be careful what you spend your time looking at.

Exercise, depression, eating.....

The debates about the direction of causality in terms of exercise and leanness go back and forth.  This study has some interesting ideas and implications.

In some fat women, exercise past a certain threshold reduced their depression...which seemed to make them better at controlling their eating.

As ever there are so many things going on! 

Relationship of exercise volume with change in depression and its association with self-efficacy to control emotional eating in severely obese women.

Exercises impact on gut hormones

So exercise helps to limit appetite?  (Effects of Exercise On Meal-Related Gut Hormone Signals)

Gut hormones are released before and after a meal to initiate and terminate food intake. The authors measured gut hormone release after a palatable tasty meal before and after rats exercised in running wheels. In rats with a lot of running wheel experience, consuming a tasty meal led to increased blood levels of an inhibitory feeding hormone, amylin. After the meal, the same rats showed a more rapid rebound of a stimulatory feeding hormone, ghrelin. The authors also demonstrated that compared to sedentary control rats, exercise-experienced rats decrease their food intake more robustly after treatment with CCK, a gut hormone that limits meal size.