Your Brain's Reaction to Food

The Brain-to-Plate Connection:  Diabetes Part 2 --

Your brain's reaction to food directly affects how you eat. High-quality foods (proteins, healthy fats, and foods high in fiber)make you feel fuller because they fulfill your body’s nutritional needs. This fulfillment then appropriately adjust your body’s production of satiety hormones like ghrelin and leptin. As a results, your stomach is full and your brain knows it. You put down your knife and fork.

Sugary foods and beverages, however, trigger the release of the feel-good chemical dopamine. While this explains why sweet foods taste great, it also signals a steep downside. The more sugar we eat, the less dopamine produced by our brains. Our constant intake of sugar wears down the brain's ability to produce dopamine. We develop a resistance.

At first, this may seem like a positive effect because the feel-good effects would no longer be associated with nutrient-lacking sugary foods. In reality, though, we continue searching for that great dopamine feeling. As a result, we just shovel in more sweet stuff.

"We suggest that insulin resistance and its association with less dopamine release in a central brain reward region might promote overeating to compensate for this deficit," Wang said. This overeating typically does not insinuate the consumption of "health foods."

Sugar negatively affects your brain as well as your body. It disrupts the body's everyday processes and even interferes with the production of vital chemicals in our brains. As a result, damaging conditions like insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes are enabled to develop.