Alcohol Switches the Brain Into Starvation Mode In Mice, Increasing Hunger and Appetite, Study Finds (bbc.com) 130
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: In tests on mice, alcohol activated the brain signals that tell the body to eat more food. The UK researchers, who report their findings in the journal Nature Communications, believe the same is probably true in humans. The mice were given generous doses of alcohol for three days -- a dose being equivalent to around 18 units or a bottle-and-a-half of wine for a person. The alcohol caused increased activity in neurons called AGRP. These are the neurons that are fired when the body experiences starvation. The mice ate more than normal too. When the researchers repeated the experiment but blocked the neurons with a drug, the mice did not eat as much which, the researchers say, suggests that AGRP neurons are responsible for the alcohol-induced eating. The study authors, Denis Burdakov and colleagues, say understanding how alcohol changes the body and our behavior could help with managing obesity. Around two-thirds of adults in the UK are overweight or obese.
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Explains why you see a line of cars at taco bell, white castles, McDonald's around 1-3am most nights, especially Friday/Saturday.
If high school was any indication, I believe you have your drugs mixed up. That line in front of Taco Bell at 2AM would be the weed talking, not the alcohol. Weed also explains half the crazy shit they come up with to put on a menu.
That said, it's no surprise that alcohol also induces food consumption, and often overindulgence, as if that's been some unsolved mystery through the ages. Those "mice" we affectionately label drunk humans validated that theory hundreds of years ago. We needed a fucking stud
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HOWEVER, the next day, if hungover, my food choices become dismal I will admit.
If I'm hungover, I often don't feel like getting up and cooking a healthy meal with lots of veggies, etc. THOSE are the times I reach for the phone for a pizza....or if I can manage to get up and out just for a quick run...fast food like Taco Bell.
But that's more alcohol withdr
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I thought a hangover was not so much an alcohol withdrawal symptom as the body healing from alcohol damage and dehydration. I stopped drinking because of the hangovers, man I really hated the hangovers.
As I recall from a movie I saw a long time ago (probably sensationalist, incorrect, and overdramatized), alcohol withdrawal is more characterized by DTs (Delirium Tremens).
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This study doesn't add anything to our knowledge of diet.
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I think it is fascinating that alcohol stimulates chemical receptors linked with the starvation response. Nobody knew this before the study....
You mean other than the tens of thousands of alcohol proprietors across hundreds of years of history who have found that pairing drunk people with food results in a quite a profitable business? (FYI, capitalism is also the reason that there will not be some form of AGRP-blocking chemical added to alcohol in order to try and make drinking "healthier", regardless of the study.)
People who have a drinking problem are also likely to be obese due to over-consumption of food. Alcohol is also a poison to the huma
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Apparently we do - since YOU clearly have no idea wtf you're talking about.
Maybe you're just doing that stupid thing where people that don't understand shit project their weird ideas onto the scene and make a stupid joke about weed - but clearly the 2am taco bell line is both drunks and stoners.
Then you weirdly contradict yourself to be correct in paragraph 2.
My statement was not meant to be a contradiction, it was meant to clarify other influences lining up humans at 2AM, along with the influences creating the weird shit we like to label "food" today. Alcohol isn't exclusive in this influence, and my point regarding wasting time studying mice stands, especially when humans have been capitalizing on the known behavior of drunks for literally hundreds of years.
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Hm. I would have guessed that, if someone's up unusually late on a weekend, they'd just be hungry due to elapsed time. If you have supper around 6, then by 3 a.m. it's been 9 hours since you've eaten. That would make it time for another meal, right?
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Drunks don't waste their money on food,
This is why the meal voucher program for the homeless failed so miserably in my city. Hand a beggar a coupon for food and they just scream at you.
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We offered a homeless lady a slice of freshly made, hot pepperoni pizza, she was very happy to have it. Didn't scream at me (or my kids) at all.
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Exactly. Colleges and universities, and especially frat houses, are full of morbidly obese fat kids. This is explained by their exceptionally high consumption of alcohol.
Or by the fact that most colleges have meal plans that are essentially all you can eat which leads to overeating since the food is "free" for the student (free as in not out of pocket since loans,parents, scholarships or whatever are paying for the meal plan as part of tuition/room/board)
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Boy, the quality of the food must have increased markedly since I was in school in the 90s. The only edible thing was the Lucky Charms.
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Boy, the quality of the food must have increased markedly since I was in school in the 90s. The only edible thing was the Lucky Charms.
I went to school out in the country. The biscuits and gravy seemed to be popular (I found the gravy somewhat bland though), as was the pizza and stir fry. Really good chicken and dumplings and fried chicken, too.
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I went to school in Philadelphia, and even the cheesesteaks were nasty in the cafeteria. That's sacrilegious in those parts.
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mmmm gravy
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This must be very school dependent. I graduated in 1994 and the food was fantastic.
Breakfast: The usual cereals from dispensers, a line if you wanted a fresh made omelette (from real eggs) with whatever ingredients you wanted: bacon, sausage, assorted veggies, cheeses...
Lunch: Burgers, sandwiches, could have grabbed a to-go PBJ at breakfast.
Dinner: Typical dinner fare, it all seemed fresh made.
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Maybe it's city school vs country school or something? I went to a city school and so there were dozens of lunch options, including lunch trucks, fast food, bars, and the like. As a result, not a single faculty member used the cafeteria. For that matter, no one not required to buy the meal plan ate there. I suspect in a self-enclosed campus with fewer options, the faculty and students would demand better food.
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Maybe so. Or maybe the school already knew the competition was fierce, what with being in the middle of Westwood. That said, I doubt anyone was going to go from the dorms out to town just for breakfast, it was hard enough to roll out in time to make breakfast hours downstairs. Even the student athletes ate in the caf (basketball players are easy to spot). I knew a couple of people who didn't live in the dorms but bought the meal plans. Yeah! Good times!
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As freshmen, we had the somewhat torturous ritual of walking past a number of restaurants and food trucks on our way to the university-required foodplan cafeteria :) We hated it, but it was already paid for! I definitely did not step foot in there ever again after freshman year...
I wonder if the other center city Philly schools were as terrible. Aramark food service was native to Philly, and I think that was part of the problem. They switched to Marriott a little later and apparently that improved things, b
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Pizza and hamburgers made to order. A mix of fast food, short-order, and cafeteria, all in one dining hall.
But, if one wanted, one could stick to the vegetables and eat quite well, while healthfully. I dropped weight an
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Lesson: go to a massive agricultural school with an active food science department :)
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*whoosh*
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Exactly. Colleges and universities, and especially frat houses, are full of morbidly obese fat kids. This is explained by their exceptionally high consumption of alcohol.
Mhmm. Your certainty is completely misplaced. You don't know if it's drink, or if it's food, or a sedentary lifestyle, or all of the above. I know you think you know, because most people on slashdot think they know everything, but you actually don't.
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Yeah, the ability to perceive sarcasm/humor has really plummeted lately. I blame tRump!
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Look at most heavy drinkers. They're usually overweight, more so than can be accounted for by the extra calories in alcohol alone.
On the other hand, these rodent heavy drinkers went at it for only 3 days...
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more so than can be accounted for by the extra calories in alcohol alone.
Damn, they wasted all their time doing this study when they really should have just asked you.
Re:You need a study for this? (Score:5, Informative)
Uhhh... Yes.
If you actually read, you'll see that the study isn't about the fact that alcohol triggers you to eat more, it's about how it does it, which parts of your brain are affected, and why. That's important information if you say.... wanted to make drugs that suppressed your starvation response to help you lose weight.
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Or the same for the reverse: increase apatite in those who may require it.
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"This study is flawed an false."
I rather like the way that you went to such great effort to spell "Empirically" properly, that you put it in all-caps.
After that though- Fail.
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
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for an organism new to alcohol, that is a lot imo
I think a bottle and a half of wine is a hell of a lot to drink for a mouse regardless.
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Look at most heavy drinkers. They're usually overweight
You're a genius, a true scientist. Someone fetch this man a nobel prize.
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Check out the typical local "Skid Row". A bunch of skinny old dudes with full heads of hair. (Heavy Alcohol consumption suppresses the production of Testosterone.) Alkies don't much like eating. Some of those skinny old dudes are under forty. Skinny old young dudes with bloated faces and full heads of hair...
Fat Alcoholics tend to have other addictions. It's all about Feeding, stuffing the face. Skinny Alcoholics are quite the opposite; they embrace starvation. If they were impressionable teenaged Girls, th
Kebab shops (Score:2)
when the researchers repeated the experiment but blocked the neurons with a drug, the mice did not eat as much ...
You reaise that this drug could put a lot of late night kebab shops out of business
Problem solves itself (Score:2)
Who Knew? (Score:1)
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I'm not sure that it does.
Anecdotally I think it suppresses hunger in me. If I'm drunk and become really hungry (i.e. "get the munchies") it's probably because I haven't eaten enough.
That may just be me though, but the same was true when I was young and in college.
Oh, it's 2 AM and you're suddenly hungry? You've been drinking for 6 or 7 hours without eating anything, of course you're hungry!
And while composing this I did come over all peckish and I have been drinking, but I haven't actually eaten anything
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It does for me. I always have to stop by a kebab joint or a Burger King or whatever on my way home.
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It does for me. I always have to stop by a kebab joint or a Burger King or whatever on my way home.
I would humbly suggest that you are just moderately drunk, and therefore sensibly hungry, as you probably haven't eaten since lunchtime.
If you go out and get seriously drunk, you are unlikely to disrupt the flow by breaking for food, in my experience.
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You're probably right.
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It's gotta be more complicated than that.
When we get home from work, I'm kind of hungry, but it's beer time so we start drinking beers. And then I notice I'm not so hungry anymore. Beer really does have food value.
OTOH, it just delays dinner, and I don't think we eat less of it when we eventually get around to it. So what happened to the food value? Did my body "forget" that I've already "eaten" some?
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The calories in it are primarily/exclusively in the form of alcohol sugars so they digest very easily. By easily, I mean that your liver has to work like a beast to metabolize the poison that alcohol is so you won't die from excessive sugar in the blood. But it performs the job heroically and so you live, but the calories have already been dealt with and put into deep storage, both in the liver and in your visceral fat (thus the beer/alcohol belly) so you get hungry again.
Similar to the effect of eating c
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I see you don't speak clickbaitese.
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All the best research is done in Europe (Score:5, Insightful)
All the best research on addiction, consumption and rehabilitation of all drugs is done in Europe.
Here in the States, it's treated as a character flaw and research pales in comparison. And rehab is mostly ineffectual 12-Programs that were created 80 years-ago by a drunken religious kook. But when one fails a 12-step program, it's all on them and not the fact that 12-programs are quackery and thinly disguised religion.
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That is you stating your personal opinion while ignoring science, ironically enough. Your accusations of withheld information don't really make sense, because there isn't like "The Association of 12 step programs" keeping all their records secret. It's a group of unaffiliated organizations using a similar approach.
Scientific studies and meta-studies, on the other hand, say 12 step programs have a "robust medium-size effect." Per a scientific study [nih.gov].
How large is the relationship between AA exposure and abs
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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In the UK, I routinely witnessed overweight people mocked and verbally abused
It's true, British people are by and large awful. But the OP is right about Europe, excluding the UK. Most EU nations are much more progressive and willing to tackle the issue. And even the UK does fund research into it, because the intellectuals who direct the money are less politically motivated than their counterparts in the states.
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Which is not to say that there are no assholes in the US either.
I took an anatomy class a long time ago, I am of the opinion that your statement is very true. In fact the ratio of assholes to people is exactly 1, with of course a standard deviation of 0.0000000001.
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Your anecdote notwithstanding, the science is firmly on the side that exercise has not a whit to do with overweight, it is all about the foods consumed. People who eat a high carb diet become fat/obese, people who eat a high fat diet become slim/healthy. Not so much about the calories consumed either, it is about the hormonal effect that the macro-nutrients have on the body.
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Friend squiggleslash, please notice that I specifically pointed out that it is the hormonal effects of food on the body that impact weight loss or gain. While a caloric deficit does matter for fine tuning weight loss, first and foremost the macros have to be correct. It turns out that if you eat a high fat diet, in the absence of most carbs, you will lose weight. This happens because the body's satiety mechanisms are well satisfied by the eating of fats. It is also a well understood principle in animal
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Almost all US government funded research into nutrition is done through the department of Agriculture and up until about a decade ago was completely focused on pushing American's to a diet that prioritized foods grown in America. This resulted in diets pushed to consume grains, something America produced in great excess. It's this push that caused the shift in American eating habits that prioritized cold breakfasts composed of cold cereals instead of the prior tradition of high protein/fat breakfasts using
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The UK is generally urban, which means people get plenty of exercise, and spend 20 minutes getting to and from work leaving more time in their day for healthy food preparation.
You must have lived in n expensive flat near to your high powered job in the City of London if you believe that.
In London, most normal people take an hour to get to work on over-crowded public transport, and pile out of their office at 5 to go down the pub then have a burger on the bus home.
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They're still sitting in their SUVs munching down a Big Mac or whatever "nutritional" monstrosity Taco Bell has cooked up, but since their windows are rolled up and it's dark we don't even have to see that.
FTFY
Alternate study version (Score:2)
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Yeah, a bottle-and-a-half of wine is definitely into "serious drinking problem" territory. Marginally increased appetite is the least of your worries in that situation.
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Alcohol is poison with a relatively high LD50, and a rather pleasant buzz at moderate doses.
Laboratory mouse life (Score:5, Funny)
The mice were given generous doses of alcohol for three days ... equivalent to around ... a bottle-and-a-half of wine for a person. ... The mice ate more than normal too.
See, being a lab mouse is not all bad. All that free booze and food!
Re:Laboratory mouse life (Score:5, Funny)
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Hey you don't know what a good WiFi signal is like until you've been a mouse in the "does WiFi have a negative affect on tissue" experiment.
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LOL
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Yeah, perks are great, but that certain death at the end of experiment is a bit of a downer. Hmm, what was that wooshing sound?
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Only if you're the mouse that's the Booze mouse, you could lose the coin flip and get to be the mouse that gets stuck with a needle (that's the equivalent to a 2inches in diameter for you) four times a day for your entire life.
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And lots of sex? :D
Dehydration (Score:5, Insightful)
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You gotta drink 8,437 glasses of water a day!
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You gotta drink 8,437 glasses of water a day!
If each glass was one gram and u weighed 600 pounds
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That's probably correct if you are european and used the comma in place of the period.
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I am actually European, but I used American notation to make a joke :-)
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It was a good one but you made the mistake of using 8 for your first digit which is the most widely accepted as correct number of glasses of water to drink in a day. Even Dr Batmanghelidj went with 8. I should have made a better joke about the extreme accuracy of your recommendation *sigh*.
Re: Obesity causes (Score:3, Insightful)
Or as other researchers have already proven sugar is alcohol in disguise, same metabolithic pathway, just no receptors to feel the buzz. YouTube sugar: the bitter truth
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Obesity causes are linked mostly to sugar consumption and junk food. Alcohol accounts for a very small percentage of that.
That depends on what you're drinking.
The latest trend in beer making leans towards putting 300+ calories in a 10% beer, along with an ingredient list that would make a Starbucks hipster jealous. This is all done to make beer taste good for the I-hate-beer crowd (not unlike what Starbucks has done to coffee).
I'd say there's more than enough in that bottle to warrant a growing waistline.
Mmmm (Score:2)
A bottle and a half of wine has over 1000 kilocalories. I wouldn't exactly call that 'starvation mode'.
Not the alcoholics I know (Score:2)
Which then leads to a follow-up question (Score:2)
So, if alcohol hacks your brain into thinking it is hungry, if you do NOT then eat--you purposefully resist the urge--does those same "starvation mode" signals then trigger different metabolic responses from the body as well and lead to weight LOSS?
Of the functioning alcoholics that I know, a not-insignificant number of them are rail skinny; while, yes, others are obese (mostly beer-gut "fat"). But I have empirically noticed that the skinny ones tend not to eat; they "drink" their dinners. In a few instance
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"starvation mode" signals then trigger different metabolic responses from the body as well and lead to weight LOSS
Starvation usually triggers a reduction in metabolism with the goal of reducing energy consumption from fat stores.
a not-insignificant number of them are rail skinny
Heavy drinking screws up metabolism of carbohydrates. They may still eat a lot, but extract less from what they eat. A by-product of this is that the products of this less efficient process place a heavy load on the liver, eventually damaging it.
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Hmm, I thought starvation mode triggers consumption of fat stores while reducing caloric needs through various mechanisms mainly aimed at increasing effficiency of calories used. As the saying goes "a half-starved man is at his best".
Yeah! (Score:2)
I wanna party with these rats!
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And I wanna go with them to Denny's at 2am and order eggs, sausage, bacon, hash browns and pour gravy over the entire thing.
in other news .. (Score:2)
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I have never, ever, ever experienced the munchies from drinking alcohol, usually only an overwhelming thirst for more alcohol, lots more alcohol. Usually it ends in tears, hangovers, and dehydration: muy malo.
Were you stoned enough to think they were talking about being stoned (on weed) and getting the munchies? That would be a fair excuse for the confusion. Munchies from alcohol is not one of those "oh, everybody knows that!" kind of memes.
Do all GABAergic compounds do this? (Score:1)