Abhay Singh
Many people find joy and comfort in food, prompting the phenomenon of stress eating as a means to alleviate negative emotions.
This connection between food and happiness is further supported by a recent study involving fruit flies, which revealed a correlation between the act of swallowing food and the subsequent release of neurotransmitters in the brain that are responsible for feelings of pleasure and contentment.
“We wanted to gain a detailed understanding of how the digestive system communicates with the brain”
The researchers that studied fruit flies claim that choosing what to eat is “arguably the single-most salient decision that an animal has to make” as it’s essential to an animal’s ability to survive in the wild.
It seems that the brain codes that decision based on a reward system, or, to put it another way, the release of happy hormones upon the passage of delicious food through the gut.
Neuroscientist Michael Pankratz, one of the researchers in the study, said “We wanted to gain a detailed understanding of how the digestive system communicates with the brain when consuming food, In order to do this, we had to understand which neurons are involved in this flow of information and how they are triggered,”
The University of Bonn researchers examined the larvea of fruit fly
Researchers from the University of Bonn studied the drosophila larvea to learn more about how the brain is affected by swallowing. For this, the researchers dissected the larvae into hundreds of tiny fragments and studied them under a microscope before creating three-dimensional (3D) reconstructions of them.
A Stretch receptor was found in the larva’s esophagus, and it has been connected to specific neurons in the fruit fly brain. They discovered that some of these neurons are involved in determining the quality of food, and that when food is good, the happy hormone “serotonin” is released.
Neuroscientist Andreas Schoofs said “[The neurons] can detect whether it is food or not and also evaluate its quality. They only produce serotonin if good quality food is detected, which in turn ensures that the larva continues to eat,”
This subsequently increases the urge to consume.
According to the findings, people might also be capable of this kind of mechanism. If that theory turns out to be true, it may provide new insights into the reasons behind our eating habits. Because of their straightforward neural system and ease of research of fundamental biological processes, fruit flies may be an excellent indicator.
Think about the fact that humans have 100 billion neurons, but these insects only have 200,000. They might therefore resemble a minuscule form of the human body.
The goal of the research is to determine if other animals also engage in these same happy-hormone-releasing mechanisms. A common metaphor is the gut as the second brain.
Although our stomachs are impacted by our emotions, our moods and emotions are also affected by a number of digestive system disorders. Scientists will eventually make sense of it all.
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