Breakfast is considered an important meal for daily appetite control. We examined the effect of high-protein breakfasts on within-day appetite sensations and subsequent ad libitum intake, in men and women. Twenty subjects attended on 4 occasions, to consume in a randomised order high-protein (30% energy) breakfast meals, as, 1) maintenance (MTD) fed to energy requirements (2.67 MJ), 2) a weight...

The brain has an essential role in maintaining a balance between energy intake and expenditure of the body. Deciphering the processes underlying the decision-making for timely feeding of appropriate amounts may improve our understanding of physiological and psychological disorders related to feeding control. Here, we identify a group of appetite-enhancing neurons in a behavioural screen for fli...

The needs of the body can direct behavioral and neural processing toward motivationally relevant sensory cues. For example, human imaging studies have consistently found specific cortical areas with biased responses to food-associated visual cues in hungry subjects, but not in sated subjects. To obtain a cellular-level understanding of these hunger-dependent cortical response biases, we perform...

Effective strategies to combat recent rises in obesity levels are limited. The accumulation of excess body fat results when energy intake exceeds that expended. Energy balance is controlled by hypothalamic responses, but these can be overridden by hedonic/reward brain systems. This override, combined with unprecedented availability of cheap, energy-dense, palatable foods, may partly explain the...

For many animals, hunger promotes changes in the olfactory system in a manner that facilitates the search for appropriate food sources. In this video article, we describe an automated assay to measure the effect of hunger or satiety on olfactory dependent food search behavior in the adult fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. In a light-tight box illuminated by red light that is invisible to fruit...

Malnutrition in cirrhotic patients is extremely common and has a multifactorial aetiology, whose constitutive elements have not been completely elucidated yet. Protein depletion particularly important an imbalance of hormones regulating hunger satiety may be additive factor. The diagnosis treatment malnutrition are since associated with higher complication rates mortality. Our observational stu...

Explicit cues associated with food consumption when hunger prevails will enhance eating when they are subsequently presented under conditions of satiety. Here we examined whether contextual conditioned stimuli (CSs) paired with consumption of food pellets while rats were food-deprived would enhance consumption of this food in rats that were not food-deprived. The conditioning context enhanced r...