Your Brain on Fatty Food

Remember those commercials decades ago that showed someone cracking an egg into a frying pan? As you watched it sizzling in the pan, the voiceover said, “This is your brain on drugs.” Well, new research published in the journal Cell made me think of this commercial, except the statement would be, “This is your brain on fatty food.”

The researchers discovered that when they fed rats fatty foods, it increased the amount of one type of lipid (produced in the small intestine) that entered the bloodstream and traveled straight to the brain. The lipid—nicknamed NAPE, short for N-acylphosphatidylethanolamine—appears to collect in the hypothalamus, the region in the brain that controls food intake. NAPE seems to then reduce food intake while also raising energy expenditure.

When the researchers injected the rats with a reasonable dose of NAPE for five days, they saw a continuous reduction in food intake and a decline in body weight. But when they fed the rats a high-fat diet for 35 days (the lifespan of a rat is approximately two years), they lost the normal, compensatory increase in NAPE.

What does this mean, at least potentially, for humans? Although more research definitely needs to be done, it suggests that our body is perhaps also designed to compensate for a rich, high-fat meal with an increase in NAPE, which then tries to decrease the amount of food we eat afterward while simultaneously helping to increase the number of calories burned. What I find most interesting is when high-fat meals are consistently eaten over a longer stretch of time (hello, the typical American diet). The research suggests that our bodies might lose this ability to try to self-correct, possibly contributing to obesity in the long run.

Source: Gillum MP, Zhang D, Zhang XM, et al. N-acylphosphatidylethanolamine, a gut-derived circulating factor induced by fat ingestion, inhibits food intake. Cell. November 26, 2008;135(5):813-824.

By Elaine Magee, MPH, RD
The Recipe Doctor Blog