Credit: Maliz Ong/public domain

The current epidemic of obesity in developed countries should be a warning for health officials in the developing world with newly opened markets. Food manufacturers, restaurant franchising companies, food supply chains and advertisers collaborate to create environments in which extremely palatable, energy-dense foods and their related cues are readily available; however, people still have adaptive neural architecture best suited for an environment of food scarcity. In other words, the brain’s programming may make it difficult to handle the modern food ecosystem in a metabolically healthy way.

Humans, like all animals, have ancient genetic programming adapted specifically to ensure food intake and food-seeking survival behaviors. Environmental cues strongly influence these behaviors by altering neural architecture, and corporations have refined the science of leveraging human pleasure response and perhaps inadvertently reprogramming people’s brains to seek surplus calories. In an environment that is rich in highly palatable, energy-dense foods, the pervasiveness of food-related cues can lead to food seeking and overeating regardless of satiety, a likely driver of obesity.

– Christopher Packham

Source: How junk food primes the brain’s food-seeking behavior