A study that showed men and women's brains light up differently when they're starving and tempted with food has experts debating the reason behind a gap in obesity rates between the sexes.
(Getty Images)A study that showed men and women's brains work differently when they're tempted with food has experts debating the reasons behind the gender gap in obesity rates.
Doctors asked 23 men and women of healthy weight to go on a three-day fast and then tempted them with morsels of their favorite foods and trips to buffets where study subjects were told they could not partake.
Brain scans of the test subjects showed men's brains looked calmer and worked less when they consciously faced temptation, but women's brains lit up in emotion and hunger desire areas, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers behind this study suggest that the gender difference in the PET brain scans may explain the two percentage point lead women have over men in rising obesity rates.
However, other diet experts think environment and culture, not biology, explain the roots of obesity.
"When people move from the U.S. to other countries, they lose weight. When people move here to the U.S. from other countries, they gain weight," said Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University.
"Is it that we can't control what we are eating that makes us obese, or is it that we are eating the wrong things and not moving around?" Brownell asked.
Dr. Gene-Jack Wang, lead author of the study, did his best to mimic a person's struggle with food in his lab to address the question.
Wang first asked each study subject to rate their favorite foods from a long list, and then start fasting for three days.
When the test subjects returned, he used their favorite foods to tempt them.
"We're going to show it to you, and you're going to put a small piece in your mouth for taste. And then we're going to talk about it with you," said Wang, who admitted he had to eat before each case to stop his own temptation.
"It's the actual food, and you're in the bed and you cannot escape," he said. After each temptation, which included a trip to a buffet at the end of the day, Wang and his colleagues did a PET (positron emission tomography) scan of each subject to see which parts of the brain are active during temptation.
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