Obese Children's Brains Are More Responsive To Sugar

Obese children may "think" a bit differently than normal weight counterparts when it comes to taste, according to recent findings published in the International Journal of Obesity.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine found that their brains' reward center processes the taste of sugar differently than others.

"The take-home message is that obese children, compared to healthy weight children, have enhanced responses in their brain to sugar," said study author Kerri Boutelle, PhD, professor in the Department of Psychiatry and founder of the university's Center for Health Eating and Activity Research (CHEAR), in a news release. "That we can detect these brain differences in children as young as eight years old is the most remarkable and clinically significant part of the study."

For the study, researchers examined 23 children between the ages of eight and 12. They scanned the brains of the children while they tasted one-fifth of a teaspoon of water mixed with sugar.

The findings showed that obese children had heightened activity in the insular cortex and amygdala-a retion of the brain that's involved in emotion, awareness, perception, rewards and taste.

However, resarchers discovered that obese children did not show any heightened neuronal activity in the striatum that's also part of the response-reward circuitry, which activity that's linked to obese adults.

Researchers noted that this could be because the striatum doesn't reach maturity until adolescence.'

"Any obesity expert will tell you that losing weight is hard and that the battle has to be won on the prevention side," concluded Boutelle, who is also a clinical psychologist. "The study is a wake-up call that prevention has to start very early because some children may be born with a hypersensitivity to food rewards or they may be able to learn a relationship between food and feeling better faster than other children."

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