Health care professionals assume that tube feeding is an unpleasant, distressing experience for patients, which is only partially substantiated by experience. Thirty patients were interviewed via a tube feeding and hospital experience checklist (a 47-item interview schedule). Common experiences were operationally defined as those felt by at least 50%; subjectively distressful experiences were t...

Dietary restraint theoretically increases risk for binge eating, but prospective and experimental studies have produced contradictory findings, apparently because dietary restraint scales do not identify individuals who are reducing caloric intake. Yet, experimentally manipulated caloric deprivation increases responsivity of brain regions implicated in attention and reward to food images, which...

The mRNA expressions of UCP2 and UCP3, two newly described genes with high sequence homology to the uncoupling protein UCP1 in brown adipose tissue (BAT), were examined in two skeletal muscles (gastrocnemius and soleus) as well as in interscapular BAT (IBAT) of the rat in response to food deprivation and controlled refeeding. In IBAT (a tissue highly dependent on lipids for thermogenesis), the ...

Leptin administration has been shown to prevent the disruptive effects of acute food deprivation on reproductive function in cycling females and lactating females. We examined the ability of intracerebroventricular leptin administration to ameliorate the effects of food restriction for the first 2 wk postpartum on length of lactational infertility. Leptin administration did not reduce the effec...

Introduction: Ghrelin increases growth hormone secretion and food intake. Growth hormone (GH), steroid hormones and opioids are involved in the regulation of food intake. So, they may have a role in the regulation of ghrelin secretion. We determined the effect of intravenous injections of progesterone, GH and morphine or co-administration of these hormones on ghrelin concentration and body w...

Although acute food deprivation and chronic food restriction both result in body weight loss, they produce different metabolic states. To evaluate how these two treatments affect hypothalamic peptide systems involved in energy homeostasis, we compared patterns of hypothalamic neuropeptide Y (NPY), agouti-related protein (AgRP), proopiomelanocotin (POMC), and leptin receptor gene expression in a...

It has previously been suggested that deprived neighbourhoods within modern cities have poor access to general amenities, for example, fewer food retail outlets. Here we examine the distribution of food retailers by deprivation in the City of Glasgow, UK.We obtained a list of 934 food retailers in Glasgow, UK, in 2007, and mapped these at address level. We categorised small areas (data zones) i...

  Humans suffer transient or persistent starvation due to a lack of food intake, either because of fasting, voluntary dieting, or due to the scarcity of available food. At the cellular level it is possible to possess pathological starvation during ischemia and solid tumors. Blood provides many nutrients to our cells, and researchers provide these nutrients to cells in culture in the form of en...

Neuropeptide Y (NPY) plays a key role in both food intake and GnRH secretion. Food deprivation elevates hypothalamic NPY activity and suppresses LH and gonadal steroid secretion. Similarly, lactation up-regulates NPY expression as food consumption increases and estrous cycles cease. These observations suggest that NPY coordinates reproductive suppression in response to energy deficiency; if so,...