Metabolism out of Order

From a historical perspective, we live in paradise – even if things sometimes go better and sometimes worse, for most people hunger and hardship are very far away. A quick ice cream before we load the weekly shopping into the trunk: no problem! But the paradise of endless supermarket shelves has a downside, because our metabolism is not designed for the blessings of postmodernism – it is still controlled by evolutionary history and hoards calories for bad times. Calories that it often never gets a chance to burn off. The result is diseases such as diabetes and obesity – diseases of civilization. Both are closely related, and today there are more overweight people on Earth than underweight people. 

Metabolism is a very complex process that is controlled in the hypothalamus of the brain. There, hormonal signals from the body activate certain neurons that control the cycle of hunger and satiety. Or should control, because neural activity changes, sometimes dramatically, as a result of morbid obesity. Then we are not only no longer satisfied, we also no longer experience any reward from eating. 

In collaboration with the Schering Foundation, we show here how this axis between the brain and digestion works and what goes wrong in the mind and body in cases of diabetes and obesity.