Cerebral energy homeostasis and incentive salience of food (B04)
| Principal Investigator: | Prof. Dr. Kerstin M. Oltmanns |
| Project staff: | Dr. med. Georg Gohla |
| Dr. rer. nat. Uwe H. Melchert |
Human eating behavior is topic of the GRF-Transregional Collaborative Research Centre TR-SFB 134 "Ingestive Behaviour: Homeostasis and Reward" of the universities of Lübeck, Cologne and Hamburg.
Brain energy metabolism and neuropsychological aspects of food intake control with respective behavioural correlates have been suggested to be closely interlinked. This project aims at testing the hypothesis that food intake behaviour, and particularly the preference for palatable high caloric (“comfort”) food by its incentive salience, is synchronized by the human brain in dependence of its current energy status. We assume that low cerebral energy content promotes the intake of foods with high caloric density by increasing their incentive salience and vice versa.
