Relation of Reward from Food Intake and Anticipated Food Intake to Obesity: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

By Eric Stice, Sonja T. P. Spoor, Cara Bohon, Marga G Veldhuizen, Dana M. Small. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2008

745 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We tested the hypothesis that obese individuals experience greater reward from food consumption (consummatory food reward) and anticipated consumption (anticipatory food reward) than lean individuals using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with 33 adolescent girls (M age = 15.7 SD = 0.9). Obese relative to lean adolescent girls showed greater activation bilaterally in the gustatory cortex (anterior and mid insula, frontal operculum) and in somatosensory regions (parietal operculum and Rolandic operculum) in response to anticipated intake of chocolate milkshake (versus a tasteless solution) and to actual consumption of milkshake (versus a tasteless solution); these brain regions encode the sensory and hedonic aspects of food. However, obese relative to lean adolescent girls also showed decreased activation in the caudate nucleus in response to consumption of milkshake versus a tasteless solution, potentially because they have reduced dopamine receptor availability. Results suggest that individuals who show greater activation in the gustatory cortex and somatosensory regions in response to anticipation and consumption of food, but who show weaker activation in the striatum during food intake, may be at risk for overeating and consequent weight gain.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Endocrine and Autonomic Systems, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/67b2f590ec5d680794b58eb2694e9784d166d415

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Citations in the corpus

Pro v Con Reviews: Is Food Addictive? (2012, background): “In spite of some inconsistencies among studies, brain imaging data also support the notion that structural and functional changes in brain regions implicated in executive function (including inhibitory control) may be associated with high BMI in otherwise healthy individuals.”
Reward, dopamine and the control of food intake: implications for obesity (2010, neutral): “Surprisingly, obese individuals, when compared with lean individuals, experienced less activation of reward circuits from the actual food consumption (consummatory food reward), whereas they showed greater activation of somatosensory cortical regions that process palatability when they anticipated c”
fMRI Reactivity to High-Calorie Food Pictures Predicts Short- and Long-Term Outcome in a Weight-Loss Program (2012, result): “…neuroimaging studies examining brain responses to pictures of food that signal impending food intake, or responses to food intake itself (e.g., Stice et al., 2008a, 2008b, 2009, 2011), to our knowledge, there have been only two published fMRI studies investigating whether activation of reward…”
Reward Mechanisms in Obesity: New Insights and Future Directions (2011, background): “…toweight gain in humans (Barnard et al., 2009; Stice et al., 2008a; Wang et al., 2001), and that deficient striatal D2R signaling may blunt striatal responses to hedonic food in human subjects, thereby predisposing the individual to future weight gain (Stice et al., 2008a; Wang et al., 2001).”