Obesity and the hedonic response 1

Published on January 31, 2016   35 min

Other Talks in the Series: Obesity: Science, Medicine and Society

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0:00
Hello, my name is Dr. Tony Goldstone. I'm a Consultant Endocrinologist and Clinician Scientist at the Imperial College London. And I'm gonna talk today about obesity and the hedonic response.
0:14
We all know that we are facing an obesity epidemic. And what I'm trying to discuss in my talk today is how the environment that we live in, which is an obesogenic environment, is interacting with our basic biology through a combination of genetics, although I'm not particularly gonna discuss genetics today, 'cause that's being covered in some of your other talks. But particularly with our psychology and our physiology, to maintain and promote obesity through not only how hungry we are, as far as our appetite is concerned, but also the hedonic and rewarding aspects of food and how these interact to make it difficult for us to lose weight.
0:54
So the topics I'm gonna discuss in my talk today, I'm gonna firstly discuss a little bit about the neurobiology of food reward and food hedonics and then give some examples, particularly using functional braid imaging as our tool to investigate how food reward and hedonics maybe influenced by obesity, also by eating behavior itself, which may be a better thing to investigate than obesity per se, to delve a little bit into some of the neurotransmitter systems that may be involved in this, particularly, the role for the dopaminergic system and the endogenous opioids. Some specific examples of particular eating behaviors that may particularly involve the food reward system such as binge eating disorder, and the concept of food addiction. And then, in the latter half of the talk, some examples where various systems interact with this, particularly the role of nutritional state, gut hormones, and the specific example of the role of bariatric surgery as a way of modifying food reward, and really trying to emphasize that the distinction between the homeostatic mechanisms that control our eating behavior tightly integrated with the hedonic reward and cognitive aspects of eating. So this slide gives a summary of the sort of things