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Men Control Hunger Better Than Women

A recent study has shown that men control hunger better than women do, which goes a long way toward explaining why women are more likely to eat for emotional reasons, and why men always seem to drop weight more easily when they diet.

"Women have a much stronger reaction to food, such that whether they try to inhibit their desire or not, they have stronger signal [in the part of the brain that controls hunger perception and desire to eat]," study leader Gene-Jack Wang, MD explains.

Dr. Wang and his team at Brookhaven National Laboratory in NY have been using the latest techniques in brain imaging to find the parts of the brain involved in eating behavior.

Previously this group of researchers had shown that obese people are less able than normal weight subjects to sense when they are full.

Dr. Wang wondered if there might be a difference in the brains of men and women, and how they react to food.

It was this question that prompted he and his team to look at what happens in our brains when we can see, smell, taste but not eat foods we love. A test of willpower to be sure.

The study involved testing 13 women and 10 men, all of normal body weight, using three different PET scans - one a control, the other two for testing - given in random order.

The participants fasted for 18 hours before each scan - in one scanning session they were tempted by their favorite foods - everything from chocolate cake and cinnamon buns to barbecue ribs and pizza.

During the scanning they could see and smell the food, and were even given tastes applied to the tongue with a cotton swab. New, hot food was brought in every four minutes during the 30 minute scan. The final barrier to eating was a quiz on their hunger, desire for food and alertness.

A second scanning session had subjects fasting 18 hours once again, and then being presented with favorite foods, just as before.

Only this time subjects were asked to practice ignoring the food... shifting their thoughts away from it and onto other things.

During this scan the subjects were told, "to inhibit their desire for food and suppress their feelings of hunger."

This worked for the men in the study, but wasn't as successful for the women.

Though some of the female subjects were better than some of the men at suppressing food desire, overall the female brains showed just as much hunger activity after they tried to tone down their desire.

"Even though the women said they were less hungry when trying to inhibit their response to the food, their brains were still firing away in the regions that control the drive to eat," Wang explains.

"In contrast, men's brain activity decreased along with their self-reports of hunger during the scan when they were asked to keep their hunger in check."

An expert in the brain circuits responsible for feeding behavior and regulating body weight agrees that we may be uncovering a structural basis for why we eat the way we do.

Rexford S. Ahima, M.D., PhD., associate professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania notes that, "The interesting thing about the Wang study is that when they present food to people and ask them to consciously inhibit the urge to eat, men are better able to do it than women."

What's likely to blame is those pesky female hormones, already linked to promoting weight gain and overeating.

We all know women who crave sweets (or salt) during particular times of their menstrual cycles.

It might have been a plan of evolution that women learned to seek food more avidly than men- especially as females were counted on to have and care for children.

And while men are better able to inhibit the desire for food, does that mean they are also better able to resist emotional eating?

More work will need to be done to test this idea directly. The study appears in the January 15th online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the meantime, to control hunger better, try to surround yourself with healthy, nutritious options - foods that are filling yet low in calories. Raw veggies, whole grain crackers and fresh fruits are all delicious examples. Even if you only replace one junk food snack with something healthier, you're still doing better for yourself and your body.

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