Control System for Hunger and its Implications in Animals and Man

The current multifactor approach to the explanation of hunger includes a role for influences of bodily metabolism. The most widely favored idea appears ,fobe that metabolism of glucose in a specialized part of the central or peripheral nervous system produces short-term inhibitory effects, and some representation of adipose triglyceride stores produces adjustments in food intake which promote the long-term precision of energy regulation. These metabolic hunger signals are unlikely to be identified without techniques to separate normal metabolic influences on feeding from confounding nonmetabolic effects. The remarkable fact is that, in the 20 years of the glucostatic and lipostatic theories, there has been no proof that metabolism of ingested food affects hunger at all, let alone an experimental paradigm in which metabolic factors could be studied in isolation.