In our modern world with manufactured, highly palatable foods, nutrition researchers seek to understand how these foods impact our food-seeking and eating behaviors. Particularly, how are neural circuits driving the motivation to to eat impacting our bodies ability to maintain a homeostatic equilibrium when high value foods are present in our diet. Here my collaborators and I discovered a specific brain target contributing to eating behavior and a potential method for future neural based interventions for nutrition related disorders. This work was funded by the MnDrive Neuromodulation Research Fellowship.
Understanding the effect of highly palatable foods on eating behavior.
problem
What is the human problem motivating nutrition researchers?
Dysregulated food-seeking and eating habits can lead to nutritional related disorders or diseases that cause chronic illness in humans. Nutrition researchers have great interest in discovering the specific neural circuitry contributing to these habits in order to develop more specific and effective therapies to restore nutritional homeostasis.
What are the barriers nutrition researchers are facing ?
Researchers have yet to discover a holistic understanding of the neural circuitry driving food-seeking and food consumption.
Non-invasive neuromodulation needs more validation and specificity to be translatable to human research.
goals
Use neuromodulation to discover a neural contributor to food-seeking and/or food consumption.
Utilize a highly specific method of neuromodulation to contribute potential strategies for translatable methods for human research.
Use varied high and low value rewards to see how food-seeking and food consumption measures change with different valued foods.
approach
Use behavioral preference testing and highly specific neuromodulation methods to determine the contribution of the brain target of interest on food-seeking and consumption of food .
qualitative analysis of behavioral changes during neuromodulation.
quantitative analysis of changes in consumption and food-seeking for rewards of different value during neuromodulation.
rigorous experimental design to validate neuromodulation method.
results
Highly specific neuromodulation of specific brain target altered behavioral measures of food consumption.
When brain target was activated, a subset of subjects (male) consumed more food, however, did not alter their food-seeking behavior.
Food consumption changes seen with neuromodulation were indiscriminate of the value of reward.
Subjects consumed more of both lower and higher value foods when brain target was activated.
Subjects showed no change in their preference for high value rewards when brain target was activated or inactivated.
benefits
Specific brain target proven to contribute to food consumption and offers future research avenues for nutrition researchers.
Publicly available results and methods: https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/254136
Our highly specific neuromodulation method proved effective at altering behavior and offers a more neurologically specific and less invasive method of modulating food consumption.
Publicly available code and data: https://github.com/ally-scott/FoodandRewardConsumption