MDPRC in the News
Can you change what you crave?
“Imagine this scenario. You’re at a house party, sitting on a sofa. In front of you is a bowl of peanuts. Humble, roasted, salted peanuts. Not a super exciting snack. And you’re not that hungry. But in a moment of fidgetiness, you take a peanut. A few moments pass. You take another. And then another. Do you even like peanuts? You know more food — tastier food — is coming when dinner is served. You don’t really want to eat these, but now, half the peanut bowl is gone. Still, there’s something inside you — wordless, noiseless, unceasing — compelling you to reach for more.
That’s want.”
“Desire — for food, companionship, fun, sex, whatever — can bring excitement, joy, and even purpose to life. It’s the Good Stuff! But too much craving is the seed of addiction, of unhealthy eating habits, of the shameful feeling of being torn between what’s good for us and what we crave.
We cannot live without wants, yet we cannot be overcome with them.”
Read the full article here.
In conversation with new Canada excellence research chair Dana small
In Canada, obesity is the leading cause of diabetes and heart disease, and a strong risk factor for depression, certain cancers, Alzheimer’s disease, and all-cause mortality. Prof. Small, who completed graduate degrees in Neuroscience and Clinical Psychology at McGill and was most recently a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University, leads pioneering work that combines human neuroimaging and metabolic measures with animal models to reveal new insights into the mechanisms linking obesity and brain disorders.
As CERC, Prof. Small plans to develop a paradigm-shifting approach to combat the obesity and diabetes pandemics. As the founder and director of the Modern Diet and Physiology Research Center, an international consortium that supports science in gut-brain health, the Chair will also bring new capacity to research at McGill and the RI-MUHC, synergizing with their world-class neuroscience and metabolism research and training programs.
Read the full interview here.
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The making of a junk food junkie
“So-called Western diets that are high in fat, ultra-processed foods and sugar are in large part responsible for the rising tide of obesity worldwide.
Beyond the many empty calories they provide, they promote weight gain through a cycle of overeating and modifying the brain’s motivation and reward center, called the dopaminergic system. However, not much is known about how obesity actually changes this system. It’s not clear if these brain changes are caused directly by repeated consumption of unhealthy foods; secondary to obesity or overweight; or whether they are genetic, predisposing a person to weight gain.
We are now closer to an answer. The findings of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research in Germany and Yale University suggest that a high-fat/high-sugar diet may actually teach the brain to prefer these foods.”
Read the full article here.
How sugary or fatty snacks change your brain activity to make you like them more
‘“Let’s say a new bakery opens up next to your work and you start stopping in and having a scone every morning. That alone can rewire your basic fundamental dopamine learning circuits,” said Dana Small, the study’s senior author and director of Yale University School of Medicine’s Modern Diet and Physiology Research Center.
“It just tells us how sensitive we are to the food environment, and how the food environment can actually change our behavior,” she said.’
Read the full article here.
Humans don't just eat for calories, but have 'nutritional wisdom' to seek micronutrients, study shows
“Ordering a perfectly seared steak and fries or spooning creamy dal over rice could be a sign of something other than an enjoyable meal. Revolutionary new research suggests humans have ‘nutritional wisdom,’ which helps us navigate the ‘hidden complexity’ in food choices.
Food composition — not just a need for calories — plays into our preferences, according to a paper published in the journal Appetite. As has been shown in other animals, humans ‘seem to possess a discerning intelligence’: the ability to select foods based on their micronutrients (vitamins and minerals).”
Read the full article here.
Toronto author Mark Schatzker says the secret to healthy eating is pleasure
“Toronto author Mark Schatzker’s new book is the rare title on diet and nutrition that delivers good news – and a welcome prescription. In The End of Craving: Recovering the Lost Wisdom of Eating Well, the award-winning writer argues that we can trust our bodies to make wise nutritional choices, and that instead of obsessively counting calories we should simply focus on eating delicious, unprocessed foods. Here he talks to The Globe about how he arrived at that conclusion.”
Read the full interview here.
‘The End of Craving’ Review: Why You Can’t Eat Just One
The pandemic may be seizing our attention at the moment, but another health crisis, with a longer arc, is nearly as worrisome. Why has the incidence of obesity—contributing to disease and early death—been creeping dangerously upward in virtually all the world’s countries for the past several decades? More specifically, why does the United States have an adult obesity rate, 42%, that is the highest in the world outside a few small nations?
In “The End of Craving,” Mark Schatzker, author of “The Dorito Effect” (2015), shrewdly looks into the matter, presenting, among much else, laboratory studies that show how today’s foods and beverages manipulate the brain and wreak havoc on the body.
Read the full article here.
QED with dr. b: The Science of Taste
“I think the most interesting implication of these findings is actually for prevention and understanding the modern food environment. When you think about processed foods, you have all kinds of weird combinations of sensations that are no longer related to the nutritive properties, and the system really gets messed up. And some of the work in my lab has shown that when you consume even small amounts of food that are like this - sort of mismatched - you can develop very rapidly insulin resistance, and your brain response changes. And so, this whole principle that it’s really the metabolic signals that’s driving reward and, thinking about the modern food environment, I believe one of the fundamental reasons why we have an obesity and diabetes pandemic on our hands.”
Dr. Dana Small joins Dr. Frederick Bertley on QED with Dr. B to discuss the evolutionary significance of our sense of taste, the biological nuances between taste and flavor, and how the modern diet circumvents these evolutionary safeguards.
Watch the full video here.
A Brief history of peanut butter
“The ubiquity of this aromatic spread has even figured in the nation’s response to Covid-19. As evidence emerged last spring that many Covid patients were losing their sense of smell and taste, Yale University’s Dana Small, a psychologist and neuroscientist, devised a smell test to identify asymptomatic carriers. In a small, three-month study of health care workers in New Haven, everyone who reported a severe loss of smell using the peanut butter test later tested positive. “What food do most people in the U.S. have in their cupboards that provides a strong, familiar odor?” Small asks. ‘That’s what led us to peanut butter.’”
Read the full article here.
Low calorie, but high risk?
Are artificial sweeteners benign or a threat to your long-term health? A recent study adds a new element to the debate.
“Artificial sweeteners seem to offer a tantalizing free pass to dessert. These low- or no-calorie additives taste like sugar, but your body can't absorb them the same way it does natural sugars. You get the taste without the calories, which should mean that you can eat them guilt-free. Right?
Over the years, experts have increasingly questioned whether artificial sweeteners are too good to be true. Are they really your ticket to a -low-calorie treat — or will you wind up getting your just desserts for trying to outsmart Mother Nature?”
Read the full article here.
Heroes of the pandemic: Canadian professor has a peanut butter sniff test to combat COVID-19
“Dana Small, a Victoria, B.C. native now at Yale, with a dual professorship in psychology and psychiatry, was engaged in ground-breaking research on the ‘gut,’ and how the modern food environment plays tricks on our system before the pandemic hit. She opted for red wine, as did Theresa White, another foodie/sensory psychology expert at Le Moyne College in upstate New York, while Rachel Herz, the other Canadian, and an adjunct professor at Brown University in Providence, R.I., chose white.
Around the time of the party, reports were starting to surface about a percentage of COVID-19 patients who experienced a profound loss of smell, an aspect of the rapidly advancing global virus the three professors took as a sign, perhaps, that their expertise in all-things olfactory might come in handy.
‘I said, “We need to come up with a test,” Small says. ‘So we started brainstorming.’”
Read the full article here.
Fat–Carb Combo Is a Potent One–Two Punch
“Potato chips! Does the mere mention of the salty snack send you searching for a vending machine? Well, you can blame the one-two punch of fat and carbohydrates, because a new study finds that foods high in both carbs and fats tickle the brain’s reward circuits more so than snacks that showcase just one or the other. The findings are served up in the journal Cell Metabolism.
“The energetic properties of foods play an important role in determining their value.”
Dana Small, professor of psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine.
The big players, calorically speaking, are fats and sugars. And the reason we desire them is because they activate our neural reward system, flooding those brain regions with the neurotransmitter dopamine. But studies show that fats and sugars trigger those rewarding bursts of dopamine in different ways.”
Listen to the full podcast here.
Why amateur wine scores are every bit as good as professionals’
“Many professional critics, not surprisingly, have scoffed at the idea that mere amateurs understand, let alone have the ability to rate, wine. In a 2012 column for the website Wine Spectator, critic Matt Kramer described the wisdom of the crowd as a ‘pernicious delusion.’ ‘One hundred people who don't know much about, say, Auxey-Duresses,’ he wrote, ‘adds up to 100 muddied, baffled and often duplicative conclusions.’ Critic Steve Body concurred in a 2014 post titled ‘Crowd-Sourced Ratings and Why They Suck’ on his website ThePourFool: ‘The readers and users of these sites are almost always slaves to their personal preferences and current trends.’
That’s the standard knock against amateur critics. Compared with the paid professionals — who very often evaluate wines blind — they are untrained, are subject to bias, and lack expertise.
But is that true?”
Read the full article here.
Study: diet soda can really mess with your metabolism
“Artificial sweeteners have been controversial for almost as long as they’ve been around. As early as 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt was compelled to defend the world’s first no-calorie sweetener. “Anybody who says saccharin is injurious to health,” he said, "is an idiot!”
The debate rages on today. Some dietitians and nutritional scientists go to bat for artificial sweeteners like sucralose and stevia as a safe way to enjoy sweet drinks and foods while avoiding the calories. Other scientists believe they play a role in the obesity and metabolic disease epidemics because they confuse the brain and the body about the caloric value of sweet foods. A lot of consumers — especially those trying to lose weight — end up confused.
Enter Dana Small, a neuroscientist at Yale University, whose research, published Thursday in Current Biology, promises to change not only our understanding of sweeteners, but of sweetness itself.”
Read the full article here.
The Taste Of Wine Isn't All In Your Head, But Your Brain Sure Helps
“What do listening to music, hitting a baseball and solving a complex math problem have in common? They all activate less gray matter than drinking wine.
According to Yale neuroscientist Gordon Shepherd, the flavor of wine "engages more of our brain than any other human behavior." The apparently simple act of sipping Merlot involves a complex interplay of air and liquid controlled by coordinated movements of the the tongue, jaw, diaphragm and throat. Inside the mouth, molecules in wine stimulate thousands of taste and odor receptors, sending a flavor signal to the brain that triggers massive cognitive computation involving pattern recognition, memory, value judgment, emotion and of course, pleasure.
Whereas most wine writers tend to focus on the various elements that go into the wine itself — the grape, the oak, terroir, the winemaker — Shepherd's subject is the drinker. He explores biomechanics, physiology and neuroscience to describe a journey that begins as wine passes the lips and ends with a lingering "finish" that can last for minutes.”
Read the full article here.