What causes increased appetite. Where does appetite come from What does a person's appetite depend on

How much and how we eat depends on our appetite. He can be weak or brutal, the main thing is that he is. If the appetite is strong, it cannot be extinguished by a simple effort of the will. It is necessary to investigate the causes of increased appetite. Maybe it's hormonal storms in the body or the lack of some hormones and the predominance of others? Maybe it's food with a high content of substances that cause appetite?

If a person does not eat enough, then his level of endorphin hormones in the body - the so-called joy hormones - decreases. And then a person does not want to work, arrange a personal life, achieve something. He becomes irritable and aggressive.

Consequences of prolonged fasting

If fasting lasts more than 1 day, the man or woman (or child) may feel dizzy, muscle weakness occurs, and he cannot perform regular daily tasks. The activity of the brain is disturbed, simple tasks become inaccessible, a person may faint in the most inappropriate place and at the most inopportune time (for example, during the presentation of the "Person of the Year" award).

A person begins to lose weight dramatically and look bad, his skin is no longer soft and smooth, but rough and in wounds. His nails break, his hair splits and falls out. Teeth will also not be healthy for a long time: they crumble and fall out.

All this ends with the rebirth of the individual. A person is no longer interested in what he does, all his thoughts are occupied by food and control over kilograms, it is not even interesting to communicate with him. Memory deteriorates, attention is scattered, a person becomes a crybaby and a bore. In general, you can say goodbye to the aesthetic moral character. That's what intermittent malnutrition is.

endogenous nutrition

Endogenous nutrition means internal. A person switches to it as soon as the body does not receive food from the outside or receives too little of it. And then we get the process of exhaustion: the reserves of subcutaneous fat are consumed, then the muscle mass leaves. A person looks flabby, not well-groomed, and this adds years to him.

When the body "eats" its own muscles and fats, it can live on. But internal food supplies are limited. Therefore, soon the processes of destruction begin to actively take place in the tissues of the body. And that's it, write wasted, death is on the horizon. Because the body cannot always feed on its own muscles and fat. To live, you need food. And if this food appears, the person remains in the world of the living.

Mechanism of Appetite

There are at least three chains that serve to satiate: appetite, eating delicious (or tasteless) foods, and the work of the digestive tract. As soon as you have a desire to refresh yourself, they begin to work more actively salivary glands. Therefore, people came up with the expression "drooling." This means that the stomach and intestines are ready to receive food and digest it. Also recycling.

But if we actively overeat, the body will also tell us about it with the help of a feeling of satiety, belching, it is impossible to even look at food - these are reflex reactions of the body to overeating. This is the body signaling to us: “Leave those buns alone - I can’t even look at them, let alone chew them.”

You should always pay attention to what you especially want to eat. Sour or salty or, conversely, sweet. This ingredient, therefore, is not enough in your body - it needs to be replenished, this will protect you from diseases. And you don’t need to force yourself to eat the food that makes you feel bad - this means that the body has an overabundance of certain substances that are contained in this product. The body is the best clue and helper in choosing a menu.

If a person began to want to eat after a long period of flu or a cold, this is reliable evidence that he is recovering. Because the function of a good appetite is also to provide a man or woman with a sufficient quality of life. Appetite comforts a person in grief, increases pleasure in joy and provides reliable protection against diseases at any age.

The role of appetite

It has not yet been fully explored by science. But it is known for certain that appetite can regulate the work of all systems of the human body, improve its emotional, physical and psychological condition and also promote social contacts. This means that you need to obey your appetite: if you are healthy, then eat what you want and refuse obligatory meals if it does not suit your soul.

But appetite must be controlled. That is why you should immediately contact an endocrinologist if the appetite is too small or very large, and constantly. Strong changes in appetite - from an acute desire to eat a lot to complete unwillingness to look at food - should also alert and force you to consult a doctor for advice.

Biological basis of appetite

There are biological bases of appetite according to the degree of attractiveness of certain types of food products. People get pleasure from specific nutritional properties of foods by their qualities, such as sweetness and fat content or sour or bitter taste. In the process of human evolution, the preference for foods with these properties can lead people to consume foods that have a special energy, for example, everyone knows the nutritional value carbohydrates, the energy value fats.

Therefore, the importance of these qualities for survival has almost certainly survived to the present day. Scientists recognize that most cultures have highly valued eating habits based on foods that are either sweet and fatty or sour and bitter. And sometimes a combination of both - when the appetite can be especially intense.

How do these genetic traits, based on the pleasant qualities of foods, manifest themselves in brain processes? The attractiveness of food is indirect signals to “reward yourself for something” on the way to the brain. These are the way forward various kinds pleasures can be artificially stimulated by drugs and food.

Research on the mechanisms of appetite

Through drug research it has been found that neurochemical transmitters are involved in the reward process, these transmitters include the substances dopamine, opioids, cannabinoids - these are molecules with their specific receptors. Research has also empirically shown that areas of the brain that serve the most intense pleasure can be stimulated with food.

This means that nutritional deficiencies, as evidenced by low body weight, can spur so-called reward systems to increase food enjoyment. In practice, this will mean that people who have lost a significant amount of body weight will show an increased interest in some foods that are pleasant to them, ignoring others. This will mean that their appetite will increase at the sight of some favorite foods, and decrease at the sight of unloved ones.

This can be seen as a useful biological mechanism where appetite can be increased or decreased through the long-known phenomenon in which appetite perceives an external stimulus as pleasant or not, depending on internal stimuli. This concept is based on biological concept pleasure.

High degree of appetite

However, another mechanism also works. This mechanism is based on the recognition that some rapidly gaining and obese individuals have traits that lead them to enjoy food to a high degree. Therefore, products with strong sensory properties are attractive targets for such people. And then the increase in pleasantness from what you eat can lead to overconsumption and increased weight.

There is clear evidence that obese women rely on sweet and fatty foods is very high, so they consume a significant amount of it.

Other studies have shown that obese people prefer only fatty foods and respond to the taste of fat with pleasure. After eating, obese people eat the food that is more pleasant to them than that. Which they classify as tasteless. Therefore, the cake, which is considered tasty, is eaten again and again, and healthy, not tasteless carrots are ignored. Because of these biological properties of appetite, obesity tightly grips people in its paws, it is difficult for them to get out. Especially considering the abundance of products with pleasure-stimulating properties.

Appetite and the problem of choice

Appetite activity depends on the properties of the products. Science has found foods that can increase appetite and extinguish it. Given these features, a person can control his appetite.

For many people, food is cheap form enjoyment available every day. Satiety involves reducing people's willingness to consume food. The question arises as to whether it is possible for the food industry to increase the palatability of foods without impairing satiety and vice versa. The balance between taste and satiety must be maintained, this is the essence of the interaction between hunger and satiety in the process of eating. That is, appetite control.

WHAT DEPENDS ON APPETITE?

A sick child refuses to eat... This state of affairs, although psychologically sad for relatives, is generally understandable. Any adult is aware that this is temporary, that the disease is to blame. Memories from my own “painful” experience are very helpful in calming down: “When I am sick, I don’t want to eat either.”

Completely different thoughts visit loving parents in a situation where there are no signs

no illness, but no appetite either. This is frightening with uncertainty, because the most logical explanation is that there is still a disease, we just cannot see it. In fact, a decrease in appetite very often has a completely physiological, i.e., normal, natural basis.

In order to understand this, one must know and consider factors that can influence the severity of appetite. Let's consider these factors in more detail.

1. Individual characteristics metabolism, characteristic of both children and adults. Everyone can confirm this, based on numerous everyday examples. Petya and Sasha eat the same way, Petya is thin and Sasha is fat. Thin Masha eats a lot, and fat Lena eats little.

By and large, what matters is not how much food the child has eaten, but how much of what has been eaten will be digested and how long this “assimilated” will last. Here, a not very correct, but understandable technical analogy may be quite appropriate: one car “eats” 20 liters of gasoline per 100 kilometers, and the other, under the same conditions, only 5 liters.

2. Intensity of hormone production. The growth process is uneven. In the first year of life, adolescence, growth hormone, hormones

thyroid and parathyroid glands, sex hormones are produced in greater quantities, the child is actively growing, appetite increases. The intensity of growth also depends on genetic characteristics. If Vasya's parents are under two meters tall, then Vasya will most likely eat more than Seryozha, whose dad is sixty meters, and even then in a cap.

There are also seasonal patterns: growth slows down in winter (less hormones), in summer it becomes more active (more hormones). It is clear that the appetite in the summer is better.

3. The level of energy consumption. Nutrition, in fact, has two global goals: firstly, to provide the body with the substances necessary for growth and normal functioning. internal organs; secondly, to cover the current energy costs, primarily due to motor activity. Everything is quite obvious here - the more the child spends energy, the better the appetite.

Why do some people need a very small amount of food to get enough, while others do not know how to keep food, becoming slaves of their stomach? For many years, physiologists have been searching for answers to these questions. Moreover, these studies are not only of theoretical interest, but also have a tempting prospect of using the results obtained in biology, medicine, and agriculture.

The feeling of fullness is associated, as you know, with the satisfaction of the body's need for food. But everyone knows from their own experience that the feeling of satiety is something more than just heaviness in the stomach from what you eat. Studies show that humans and animals finish their meals long before absorption from the digestive tract makes up for the energy deficit that caused hunger. So what does happen in the body when we sit down at the table and start eating?

For a long time it was believed that commands signaling food satiety are transmitted from the gastrointestinal tract to the brain via nerve fibers. In the late 1950s, the well-known Soviet physiologist, now academician A. M. Ugolev, established that satiety is also caused by certain substances released from the intestines into the blood during meals. The existence of some specific regulators in the blood, "responsible" for the appearance of a feeling of satiety, was confirmed by further research. So, American scientists found that if you take blood from well-fed animals and inject it into hungry ones, then their food intake was almost halved. It remained to find substances that regulate the complex processes of nutritional saturation.

The most likely candidates for this role were considered to be peptides produced by the body, primarily cholecystokinin, which is synthesized in the intestine and enters the blood during meals. The fact that this peptide has the ability to dramatically reduce the need for food in animals was discovered only in the early 70s. Prior to this, the function of cholecystokinin in the body was associated mainly with the contraction of the gallbladder and stimulation of pancreatic secretion (hence, by the way, the name came from: "chole" - bile, "kistis" - bladder, "kinema" - movement).

Almost everyone dreams of a perfect figure. A thin person will never understand how much effort people who are inclined to be overweight spend on looking good. AT modern world there are many medical preparations, diets and many other things that one way or another can help those who seek to improve their figure. There are really a lot of means for losing weight, but the enemy of those who are losing weight is still the same as it was before. It's about increased appetite. Because of it, it is very difficult to achieve the goals set in the fight against excess weight. It is also worth noting that increased appetite, the causes of which we are considering here, is by no means always the norm, which means that it must be fought. In some cases, it may even be a symptom of some disease or mental disorder.

Increased appetite: causes

Some people experience hunger all their lives that cannot be appeased, while others eat little, but from time to time something switches in their bodies, and they begin to eat for two, or even for three. As a rule, an increase in appetite is not always observed, but only at certain hours. For example, late at night. Surely, many now remembered how they got up more than once after midnight and went to the refrigerator, wanting to eat everything that was there. In the morning, of course, everything that happened at night caused only confusion.

In general, it is worth noting that the center of saturation, like the center of hunger, is located in the hypothalamus. They receive signals from the stomach that indicate whether a person needs food. As a result of any disorders with these signals, various kinds of problems can arise. Excessive appetite is one of these problems. The reasons for all this, as it has already become clear from the above, are various, but the main ones include the following:

1) Many women have increased appetite before menstruation. This can be explained by the lack of a hormone called estrogen in the body during PMS. This hormone makes people cheerful, is responsible for a good mood. It can also act as a pain reliever. It is also worth noting that before menstruation, as well as during it, the level of hemoglobin drops, and the woman begins to feel weak from this and tries to regain her strength with the help of food. There is nothing wrong with increasing appetite during menstruation.

2) A person may constantly want to eat if he constantly experiences large physical exercise(sport, hard work). All this is quite natural, as it is trying to gain strength. In such cases, it is recommended to eat food that contains a lot of protein.

3) Increased appetite may appear as a result of stress, mental disorder or serious emotional shock. The fact is that the process of eating, as a rule, is very pleasant. This means that a person always moves away from reality a little while eating. The brain tells us that it is worth eating not because the body needs nutrients, but because we just want to get away from the problems that have piled on us or forget about something very bad. In this case, it is recommended to seek the help of a professional psychologist, as it is quite possible that the problem will not disappear on its own.

4) The main causes of increased appetite include problems with carbohydrate metabolism. With such a violation, people are subconsciously drawn to the absorption of those foods that contain a lot of carbohydrates. In this case, it is recommended to consult a doctor.

5) The cause of increased appetite may be a brain tumor.

6) Increased appetite in children is usually associated with their growth. Many adults start to worry when their child starts eating everything, but in fact there is nothing to worry about.

Finally, I would like to say that people who cannot lose weight due to the fact that they are constantly tormented by hunger are advised to use the most simple ways reduce it is:

Drink a glass of carrot juice;

Eat oatmeal;

Eat grapefruit.

Increased appetite, the causes of which we have considered, of course, can be a big problem. It cannot be ignored.