It’s one of life’s great mysteries: how can we manage to resist eating the entire box of doughnuts all at once? The secret to appetite control, it turns out, could be your sense of taste.
That’s according to scientists at UC San Francisco, who have discovered that brain cells linked to our tastebuds, not our guts, are the first defence against binge eating.
It’s a finding that could be used to develop weight loss treatments that work better than drug Semaglutide (better known as Ozempic or Wegovy).
How your appetite works
It’s true that when it comes to suppressing appetite, your gut plays a role. After experimenting with mice, the scientists suggest that your intestines and stomach can send signals to a group of brain cells, known as CGC cells, which can curb your appetite – but only after tens of minutes.
However, another group of brain cells – known as prolactin-releasing hormone (PRLH) cells – linked to your tastebuds, can act in just seconds.
Stimulated when sensing flavour in your mouth, these cells send two conflicting messages around the brain – one essentially says ‘This is good food, eat more!’, while the other says ‘Slow down or you’re going to be sick!’. It’s ultimately the balance between these messages that determine the strength of your munchies.
It’s now hoped that a deeper understanding of this balance – and the interaction between PRLH and CGC cells – could lead to new weight loss treatments and medicines.
“This discovery gives us a new framework to understand how we control our eating,” said Dr Zachary Knight, who led the research team.
“It was a total surprise that [PRLH] cells were activated by the perception of taste,” added Dr Truong Ly, the study’s lead author. “It shows that there are other components of the appetite-control system that we should be thinking about.”
The new imaging technology developed for this research could also be used to better understand well-known weight suppressors, such as Semaglutide.
“Now we have a way of teasing apart what’s happening in the brain that makes these drugs work,” Knight said.
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