Always want to eat spicy food when you lose weight?

"What to eat in the morning", "What to eat at noon", and "What to eat at night" are eternal topics
.

When you are hungry and can’t wait to open the list of popular restaurants, or when you look at the takeaway list and hesitate, what makes you finally choose to eat porridge or noodles, hot pot or barbecue, roast duck or eat Where's the fried chicken? Interestingly, this question may be answered from the fly
.

Like humans, the nerve activity of the fly’s brain is regulated by neuropeptides and dopamine
.

Through such adjustment and feedback, the brain responds differently to different foods
.

Just like when you are very hungry, the neurotransmitters secreted by your brain will make you want to eat hot pot barbecue or fried chicken, which is greasy and high in calories
.

Therefore, when we think that we are consciously making choices about things, they are actually controlled by the neural activity in the brain
.

Just like we humans have taste requirements for food, flies also have a choice of their own "menu"
.

Scientists at Yale University in the United States studied the activities that occur in the brain when flies make food choices
.

The first study came from Michael N.
Nitabach and his team, Professor of Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Genetics, and Neuroscience at Yale University School of Medicine
.

They provide hungry fruit flies with high-calorie food that combines bitterness (bitterness is usually related to the toxicity of food) and sweetness, and low-calorie food that is neither too sweet nor bitter, and then observes the difference between these two foods.
Food choices made
.

At the same time, they made neuroimaging tracking of the brain nerve activity of the two groups of fruit flies to understand the differences in their neural activity during eating choices
.

After the experiment, the conclusion is that "the degree of hunger of fruit flies will determine their food choices, the more hungry they are, the more likely they are to choose high-calorie food, even though it has a bitter taste
.

" More than this research provides The information is a study published in the journal Nature Communications on July 5, 2021, entitled "A neuronal ensemble encoding adaptive choice during sensory conflict in Drosophila"
.

This research also comes from Michael N.
Nitabach, and he, together with Preeti F.
Sareen and Li Yan McCurdy, conducted further research on the causes of how fruit flies make food choices
.

This time, they used optogenetics and found that the activation and inhibition of FB16 neurons in the fan-shaped area of ​​the brain are closely related to the food selection of fruit flies
.

Through optogenetic technology, the activities related to neuropeptides and neurotransmitters are activated or inhibited to observe whether fruit flies have significant differences in food choices
.

CsChrimson (Chr) is used for activation and GtACR1 (Gt) is used for inhibition
.

The color-coded ones are analyzed as significant differences
.

Source: Nature.
com Optogenetics experimental results show that for neuropeptide neurons (Lk, AstA, NPF, DH44), dopaminergic neuron subgroups (PPL1-γ2α'1, PPL1-α3, PAM-α1) And the activation and inhibition of the expression of the sixth layer neurons (FBl6) in the fan-shaped area significantly changed the food choices of fruit flies
.

These neurons can well evaluate the external sensory environment and some important characteristics of the internal state
.

For example, the activity of AstA neurons affects carbohydrate and protein preferences, and DH44 neurons can sense the levels of sugar and amino acids in the body
.

The evaluation and feedback of these neurons for food will be assembled at FB16 and form a comprehensive report to the brain so that the brain makes the final food choice
.

In this way, for a while, I don't know whether we are "controlling" our brain or the brain is "controlling" us
.

In the experiment, the control of these neuronal activities is to simulate the information transmitted to the fan-shaped area of ​​the brain by the different sense organs produced by the fruit fly when facing different foods
.

This information gathers in FBl6 in the fan-shaped area and triggers the final choice of food for fruit flies
.

In other words, the method in the experiment "controls" the brain
.

In addition, when the neuronal activity involved in metabolism is inhibited, hungry flies will go uncharacteristically and choose foods with lower calories
.

The information transmitted by the upstream neurons DH44, AstA, Lk, and NPF are integrated at the FB16 neurons in the sector of the brain to make decisions about food choices
.

Source: Nature.
com Generally speaking, the sensory stimulation of food on fruit flies, as well as some important physiological conditions in the body (such as energy levels, or emotional changes), will prompt related neurons to release different information, and these information The interaction will determine the brain's choice of food
.

"This is the connection between fruit flies and humans' food choices.
Changes in this neural network may change the brain's response to different types of food," Nitabach said.
This study allows us to better understand factors such as hunger and our own emotional state.
How the resulting difference in neural activity affects our behavior
.

In this way, perhaps the brain can provide better assessment and decision-making for the energy we need
.

Whether we feel hungry or when our mood fluctuates drastically, our brains are telling us what food we need most at the moment
.

The more you want to lose weight, the more you want to eat and drink spicy food.
This may really not be our fault.
It is our smart brains
.