The food and ‘fair’ within

Answers to addressing the food crisis may be hiding in our own bodies.

Never do your grocery when you are hungry. A trip down a grocery lane when you are hungry is markedly different from the one you make when you just had your meals. In the May issue of the journal Cell Metabolism, Dr. Alain Dagher and his colleagues at McGill University in Montreal, Canada found the culprit that has been making us shove more foodstuff in our grocery carts than we probably really need. The “culprit” is called ghrelin and it is naturally secreted by our guts when we are hungry and when this hormone reaches our brains, it makes the look of food so much more vivid, barbecuing ordinary food images in our working memories to “golden brown,” making us remember the details of food image so much more.

This of course makes sense in terms of what our bodies needed to tell us in order to survive. When we are hungry, then it truly helps our case if we have it within our bodies a mechanism to help us recognize food more. Nature’s answer seems to be this hormone called ghrelin. The researchers found this out by conducting an experiment whereby they had two groups — one they injected with this hormone and the other who were simply told they were given the hormone but were actually not. The results showed that those who received ghrelin remembered the details of food that were shown to them and as they were given increased doses of the hormone, they actually remembered even more details.

Food and sex are the two main storylines in the story of all biological life that the spell of food is not really a secret to anyone but now, we are uncovering some answers as to how our bodies flesh out this story. Now, we know that a hormone seems to have this dedicated job of making our brains recognize and remember food better — like a hormonal ad agency within. The research also showed how this hormone also pays a visit to our brain’s pleasure parts which makes us desire those very vivid images of food even more. That is why the researchers think that controlling this hormone within our bodies play a big role in fighting obesity and they are at work on that. But they also warn that our intricate story with food is not merely about enhanced memories of food but also a love affair with it such that pleasure centers are having a heyday when we think or eat food. That is they think that controlling ghrelin could not be done without affecting the moods of a person which could spell bouts with depression.

But imagine if we can control people’s desire for food by unleashing some control over their natural urges. Obviously, it would not make sense to control this hormone in people who need nourishment but to control it in people who have an uncontrollable desire for food which could also harm them. But as in all other complex issues that have to do with humans, I do not think a hormonal solution will be the only answer because food is not merely a main course in physiology but also a distribution issue. Will a diminished perception of one’s desire for food necessarily translate to giving them away for others who need it more?

Another recent study published by researchers from the University of Illinois and the California Institute of Technology in the May 8 issue of the journal Science found that indeed, when people are making decisions which reflect “fairness” (rather than “efficiency”), they are relying more on their emotions. In the experiment, the scenario involved a hypothetical situation where the subjects were asked to choose from two options of meal plans to give as gifts to a number of children in an orphanage. One involved more meals for more children but leaving out some children (“efficient”) while the other plan involved lesser meals for all children but not leaving out any (“fair”). The study found that an overwhelming number of subjects chose to be “fair” rather than “efficient.” They peered into the action happening inside the subjects’ brains through functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and found that that activity was increased in the insular cortex when the subjects were being “fair” and that there was decreased activity in it when they were leaning toward being more “efficient.” The insular cortex is the brain part associated with emotions.

The researchers think that because the insular cortex is literally located deep inside our brains, it reveals how emotional decisions played a role in our survival as humans. Brain parts deeply located in our brains are “older” in terms of our own evolution as a species. The researchers also think that this counters long-held views about economic theories as being purely rational. The issue of “fairness” sits right at the heart of economic decisions. This tells us that “fairness” is something that we could naturally expect from human beings in making economic decisions.

Knowing that we are naturally hardwired to be fair can be quite confusing. On one hand, it makes us affirm hope in humans — that somehow, literally deep inside the brain of an economic decision-maker, is a natural tendency to be fair. On the other hand, overwhelming experience and even just a survey of history brings us to see serious equity problems at any level — personal, societal and global. If you were simple-minded, you would think that hope for “unfair” individuals including politicians would naturally be brain surgery. Maybe “fairness” takes on different forms for different people with different interests at stake. Maybe when we make decisions about gifts we should give, there is a different kind of “fairness” involved. Maybe if it involves large-scale communities, emotion-based decisions could be too overwhelming for a human brain? Maybe we could have more research with varied sets of equity/efficiency scenarios and see how they play out in our brains. Then maybe we will better understand how we as a species messed up something as basic as our need to eat.

Bon Appétit.

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