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Abstract Microbes in the gastrointestinal tract are under selective pressure to manipulate host eating behavior to increase their fitness, sometimes at the expense of host fitness. Microbes may do this through two potential strategies: (i) generating cravings for foods that they specialize on or foods that suppress their competitors, or (ii) inducing dysphoria until we eat foods that enhance their fitness. We review several potential mechanisms for microbial control over eating behavior including microbial influence on reward and satiety pathways, production of toxins that alter mood, changes to receptors including taste receptors, and hijacking of the vagus nerve, the neural...

Researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have made a discovery in neuroscience that could offer a long-lasting solution to eating disorders such as obesity. It was previously thought that the nerve cells in the brain associated with appetite regulation were generated entirely during an embryo's development in the womb and therefore their numbers were fixed for life. But research published today in the Journal of Neuroscience has identified a population of stem cells capable of generating new appetite-regulating neurons in the brains of young and adult rodents. Obesity has reached epidemic proportions globally. More than 1.4 billion adults...

Finding raises hopes for new anti-obesity medications New York, NY (June 7, 2012) — Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) have identified a brain receptor that appears to play a central role in regulating appetite. The findings, published today in the online edition of Cell, could lead to new drugs for preventing or treating obesity. “We’ve identified a receptor that is intimately involved in regulating food intake,” said study leader Domenico Accili, MD, professor of Medicine at CUMC. “What is especially encouraging is that this receptor belongs to a class of receptors that turn out to be good targets...

Find it hard to say no to dessert? Blame it on your brain, for after you've eaten your fill, it's the pleasure centres that tell you when to put down the fork. The discovery comes from an experiment that measured the brain activity of volunteers offered an all-you-can-eat lunch buffet. Rachel Batterham at University College London and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of eight people while they received an intravenous drip either of saline or PYY, a powerful appetite-suppressing hormone that is naturally secreted by the gut after eating. Half-an-hour after being scanned, Batterham...

Stanford Scientists' Discovery of Hormone Offers Hope For Obesity Drug STANFORD, Calif. — When the appetite-enhancing hormone ghrelin was discovered a few years ago, researchers thought they had found the last of the major genes that regulate weight. They were wrong.Introducing: obestatin, a newly discovered hormone that suppresses appetite.The finding, published in the Nov. 11 issue of Science, offers a key to researchers developing treatments for obesity. In a nation that desperately needs to slim down—the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 65 percent of Americans over the age of 20 are either overweight or obese—obestatin is likely...

<p>Thick as a phone book, a new state report on the environment cites a little-recognized danger to global forests: California.</p> <p>By consuming "vast amounts of ... wood products" while increasingly protecting our own forests from logging, Californians are sharpening the pace of cutting elsewhere, including Canada, says a draft of the report "The Changing California, Forest and Range 2003 Assessment," obtained by The Bee.</p>

<p>Scientists have isolated a hormone that makes us feel full when we eat, and they demonstrated its potential as a new weight-loss drug by injecting volunteers with the substance before a big buffet lunch.</p> <p>The participants injected with the so-called "third helping hormone" ate one-third less than usual and resisted snacking for up to 12 hours, scientists reported.</p>