Why there is always room for desserts

London -  Researchers have now found scientific backing to the universally acknowledged truth that however full you are, there’s always room for pudding.

Dr Nora Volkow said that the junk food culture of today means the chemical signals produced by the stomach to indicate that we are full can no longer override the brain’s pleasure centres.

Throughout evolution, these two systems have co-existed to control fullness. But now the delicate balance has been disturbed.

“That is what dessert is all about,” the Daily Mail quoted Dr Volkow as saying.

“They are bringing you a food that can overcome the satiety signals, so even though you are full, you eat it because of the pleasure it generates,” Dr Volkow said.

Describing the stomach-based system, Dr Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Maryland, said that people feel full when the stomach is stretched beyond a certain limit. 

“The feeling of satiety, which is a central component of this system, is triggered when the stomach is stretched beyond a certain threshold,” she said.

“At this point, chemical and neural signals are sent to the brain that instructs it to stop eating.

“This mechanism has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, and it has served us well in an environment that wasn’t particularly plentiful in terms of food, let  alone foodstuffs with high-caloric content,” she explained.

The second, highly-complex system, is in the brain and controls our urge to eat and the pleasure food gives us.

The two systems constantly communicate to each other and long co-existed in harmony, keeping calorie intake, and so weight, in check.

But today, when we are always surrounded by desserts and junk food, the balance can easily be disturbed, leaving the signals from the full stomach unable to over-ride the powerful wanting produced by the brain.

“If you know they are going to be bringing out these wonderful cakes, say to yourself I am not going to eat them and you are much more likely to not eat them than if someone just put them in  front of you,” she said.

The researcher, whose great-grandfather was Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, added that food could be addictive, acting on same brain pleasure centres as hard drugs, cigarettes and  alcohol.