Your brain and food We all know that what you eat can change your physical appearance. I

Your brain and food

We all know that what you eat can change your physical appearance. It also changes how your body functions, making it more or less difficult to pump blood, grow healthy bones or process insulin(胰岛素).

New research presented this week at the Neuroscience 2012 conference suggests that what you eat can even change your brain and vice versa(反之亦然).

Timothy Verstynen and his colleagues used a machine to observe the brain activity in 29 adults. The study participants were shown words on a screen in various colors and asked to identify the color, not the word. Sometimes it was easy—the word red printed in red; other times it was harder, like seeing the word red printed in blue.

The overweight and obese participants’ brains showed more activity during difficult questions, suggesting they were working harder to get the same answers.

　　Verstynen said the results imply that obese people are less efficient at making complex decisions, which could be important for controlling foolish behavior.

His team theorizes that unhealthy eating choices can lead to disrupted(分裂的)brain connections that lead to weakened brain performance, which can lead to making more unhealthy choices.

In other words, it’s a bad cycle.

A second study, presented by Dr. Tony Goldstone, showed the brain’s orbitofrontal cortex(眶额叶皮质)may play a big role in how people make food choices. This area deals with the “value” of a food, Goldstone said—i. e. how rewarding or pleasurable it will be to eat.

Study participants were asked to eat nothing overnight. In the morning they were given a breakfast of about 700 calories and shown photos of food while connected to an MRI machine. They were asked to eat nothing again before another visit; the following morning they were not given breakfast and then shown the same photos.

The starving participants’ orbitofrontal cortices were activated when they were shown photos of high-calorie food. Their reaction was less strong after they had eaten breakfast.

The research suggests fasting or dieting increases the brain’s desire for high-calorie food.

“That’s one of the reasons it’s so difficult to keep weight off, ”Goldstone said.

The good news is that research is on going to find ways to block our brains’ love of unhealthy food. Two studies presented at the conference analyzed the effect of drugs designed to treat alcohol/drug addiction(上瘾)on rats’ eating behaviors.

In one, researchers put the addiction drug into the decision-making area of the brain—to decrease junk food consumption in animals. The drug worked in the study, but more research is needed to see if and how this could apply to humans.

 71. functions　72. finding　73. difficult/hard/challenging　74. Conclusion　75. result　76. make　77. saw   78. increase　79. approaches　80. healthy