Posted on 07/01/2014 8:58:31 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The sweet foods we crave to relieve stress have been shown to cause obesity, heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Short of a ban on sugar refinement, how can we break the habit?
The race against obesity continues apace. Last week, for instance, the bid to save New York's sugar addicts, by banning large bottles of soft drinks, fell flat. Meanwhile a small study published in the journal Neuroscience Letters discovered receptors for stress hormones in taste buds. This could help explain why people end up preferring sweeter foods in times of trouble.
"Stress and sweet are obviously linked. We've known that for a very long time," says Rocky Parker, lead author on the study at the Monell Chemical Senses Centre in Philadelphia. For instance, people with Addison's disease, a rare disorder that causes a deficiency of stress hormones, experience dramatically heightened sensitivity to sweet and salt tastes. But if you give someone with Addison's a shot of these stress hormones, their taste immediately returns to within normal realms of sensitivity.
The stress study
Parker's hunch was that when stress hormones are released in a healthy body, this might make it less sensitive to sweet taste, which could lead to, say, its regular dose of sugar in coffee no longer cutting it. The results of Parker's experiment (on mice) illustrated how this might occur. He found that oral taste cells (housed within taste buds) that detect sweet, savoury and bitter contain an abundance of receptors for the stress hormones, glucocorticoids (GC).
If three tastes are affected, why is sweet singled out and made the headline? First, the GC receptors were more prevalent in cells that pick up just sweet and umami, and second, says Parker, "umami cells make up a smaller percentage of the population of sweet/umami cells. The majority of
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
I just need to quit having too many intimate diners for two.......... with just me showing up.
I’d say something about this, but I just had cake.
No shit, Sherlock.
Oddly enough... apparently my girlfriend’s stress reducing receptors are on my tounge as well.
“We” should stay out of women’s wombs but “we” should invade everyone’s refrigerators.
How they gonna ban home baked sweets? Have the police in every house????
ROFLOL
That’s next.
Just like gun control, it’s one step at a time.
Boy ain’t that the truth! :)
We went from a nation where you could take responsibility and drink a beer behind the wheel to a nation of forced blood draws and anal probes.
I hope all the statists enjoy what's coming
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