julianne:

I suspect the hormonal changes are a primary cause of the increased hunger…but as that's not an area of my expertise, I can't make any judgments.

Your comment about children is interesting and unsurprising: it's well-established that some people need more stimulation to reach the same levels of dopamine (or whatever metric you're measuring) as others ("daredevils").  The reward systems are extensively studied and documented, just not with food and hunger per se…but the applications to our behaviors around food and hunger are obvious.

However, we must be careful about assuming which direction the causality runs.  We know that "hunger is the best spice", and that satiety is driven primarily by nutritional status (including the ability to access stored nutrients).  Do the children derive more hedonic impact from food because their reward system is harder to activate?  Or do they derive more hedonic impact from food because something about their metabolism (e.g. lack of metabolic flexibility) leaves them hungrier?   

Jan:

I'm glad my explanation was helpful!  

I like it because it's non-judgmental.  It doesn't claim that drugs are intrinsically evil (false), that they're no fun (false), or that using them makes you a bad person (false).  It does explain why so many people use them and enjoy them — and why using them can be dangerous.

Leslie:

I generally refrain from ev-psych speculation, but it is true that a man only has to be "not starving" for a few months in order to father a child.  A woman has to be well-nourished for years in order to become pregnant, carry to term, and nurse a child.

You might be interested to read "The Old Way", linked in my Recommended Reading list.  Among the San, meat and other hunted foods are basically communal: they're brought back to camp and everyone gets some.  However, when the women are out gathering, it's finders keepers: whoever digs it gets to eat it or feed their husband with it. 

Daniel:

I know the studies you're referring to.  It's not so much that we don't have the ability to choose — it's that this ability is somewhat slow, being a function of the forebrain and having to (as mentioned above) go through all the other layers first.  As a result, we're usually not exercising rational choice: we're usually acting by rote or by emotion and rationalizing the decision we already made.

This is why I enjoy writing articles and responding online: I can carefully consider my words before publishing them!

Aaron:

Wasn't that the intellectual basis of the Victorian era?  (Though stated in less clinical terms.)

Chris:

I would hope so — but the tone of the rest of the paper (and its very title, "UV Light Tanning as a Type of Substance-Related Disorder") caused me to take it seriously.  And NSW, a province of Australia, has already banned tanning beds.  

I'm glad you find gnolls.org useful!  I do my best to make it a reliable, information-dense resource for everyone. 

More soon!

JS

EB:

Thanks for the plug!  And when you do your CT, be mindful of the additional DHMO exposure.

Craig:

Though I stay out of that level of detail in my articles, that's an excellent paper on the biochemistry of reward.

I've never read The Compass of Pleasure -- but I cited one of the papers you mentioned ("Weight Gain Is Associated with Reduced Striatal Response to Palatable Food") all the way back in 2010, well before reward became a hot issue in the community.  I'll put TCoP on my to-read list.

"What to do with that observation is another matter entirely, but is likely to be controllable to a large degree."

Exactly.  Most of the reward literature deals with drug addiction -- which is a much cleaner case to study, because the human body has no intrinsic requirement for heroin or cocaine.  Indeed, studying that literature allowed me to understand the reward systems much better!

However, since we do in fact have continual and complex requirements for food, the causality of appetite can run either direction.

It's interesting that our reward centers are doing what one might expect -- lowering the hedonic impact of food in the obese, who presumably don't need as much of it -- but instead of consuming less, some people consume more in order to maintain the same level of hedonic impact in their life!  This suggests many interesting ways to address that particular problem, and it helps explain the correlation between depression and obesity (people who aren't getting pleasure from other parts of their life seeking to replace it with food).

I have a copy of Incognito but haven't read it yet, so I'm glad for your vote of confidence.

Kate:

You're welcome!  

There's a lot of cynicism out there...but I prefer to assume my readers are reasonably smart people who place value on good information.  

It's easy to intimidate with a forest of citations and qualifications and claim, upon inquiry, that any point of dispute is too complex to explain to the layman -- but I usually find that if I can't produce at least a top-level explanation of how something works, my own understanding is probably incomplete.  "He who teaches learns twice," etc.

JS

Daniel:

That's a great book recommendation, and it's going on the list.

I'm not convinced that sleeping later does nothing...it's certainly better than not sleeping!  Perhaps it's a light thing, as I've blacked out my sleeping area pretty well.

Anastasia:

Great to hear from you...and congratulations on the M.D.!

"Hunger, being a physiological response to inadequate nutrient status, should first and foremost be treated as a normal phenomenon."  Exactly!  If we don't understand why people get hungry, we can't possibly understand why they overeat...it's not like people suddenly decided "I hate being slim and healthy.  Frankly, I'd rather be fat" sometime in the 1980s.

Jeffrey, Daniel:

Thus the reason I decided not to open the "free will" argument...it's a whole another topic in itself!

JS

Daniel:

I don't buy the dogma that if a photon gets into your room your sleep is magically disrupted: light-emitting objects called the "moon" and "stars" are part of our evolutionary heritage.

However, sunlight sneaking through mini-blinds or curtains is far brighter than moonlight, so I'm a fan of window treatments (and sleep masks, if you're traveling).

JS