A recent study has shown that men control hunger better than women, which goes a long way to explaining why women are more likely to eat for emotional reasons and why men always seem to lose weight more easily when dieting.
“Women have a much stronger reaction to food, whether they try to inhibit their desire or not, they have a stronger signal [in the part of the brain that controls hunger perception and desire to eat]explains study leader Gene-Jack Wang, MD.
Dr. Wang and his team at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York have been using the latest brain imaging techniques to find the parts of the brain involved in eating behavior.
Previously, this group of researchers had shown that obese people are less able than normal-weight people to sense when they are full.
Dr. Wang wondered if there might be a difference in the brains of men and women, and how they react to food.
It was this question that led him and his team to look at what happens in our brains when we can see, smell, taste but not eat the foods we love. A test of willpower to be sure.
The study involved evaluating 13 women and 10 men, all of normal body weight, using three different PET scans, one for control and the other two for testing, administered in random order.
Participants fasted for 18 hours before each scan; in one scanning session, they were tempted by their favorite foods, from chocolate cake and cinnamon buns to barbecue ribs and pizza.
During the scan, they were able to see and smell the food, and were even given flavors applied to their tongues with a cotton swab. New, hot foods were brought in every four minutes during the 30-minute scan. The final barrier to eating was a test on hunger, desire to eat, and alertness.
In a second scanning session, the subjects fasted for 18 hours once more and were then presented with their favorite foods, just as before.
Only this time the subjects were asked to practice ignoring the food… turning their thoughts away from it and onto other things.
During this scan, the subjects were told to “inhibit their desire to eat and suppress their feelings of hunger.”
This worked for the men in the study, but it wasn’t as successful for the women.
Although some of the female subjects were better than some of the men at suppressing the desire to eat, overall, the female brains showed just as much hunger activity after they tried to dampen their desire.
“Even though the women said they were less hungry when they tried to inhibit their response to food, their brains were still firing in the regions that control the impulse to eat,” Wang explains.
“In contrast, the men’s brain activity decreased along with their self-reports of hunger during the scan when they were asked to monitor their hunger.”
An expert in the brain circuits responsible for eating behavior and body weight regulation agrees that we may be uncovering a structural basis for why we eat the way we do.
Rexford S. Ahima, MD, PhD., associate professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, notes that “what is interesting about Wang’s study is that when they present people with food and ask them to consciously inhibit the urge to eat, the men They are more capable of doing it than women.
Those pesky female hormones, which are already linked to promoting weight gain and overeating, are likely to blame.
We all know women who crave sweets (or salt) during particular times of their menstrual cycles.
It might have been an evolutionary plan that women learned to forage more avidly than men, especially since women were relied on to bear and care for children.
And while men are better able to inhibit the desire to eat, does that mean they are also better able to resist emotional eating?
More work will be needed to test this idea directly. The study appears online Jan. 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the meantime, to better control hunger, try to surround yourself with healthy, nutritious options—foods that are filling but low in calories. Raw vegetables, whole grain crackers, and fresh fruit are delicious examples. Even if you just replace a junk food snack with something healthier, you’re still doing better for you and your body.