WASHINGTON (AP) -- When it comes to favorite foods, women have a hard time saying no -- a much harder time than men, scientists have discovered.
Gene-Jack Wang, who chairs the medical department at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and his colleagues were trying to figure out why some people overeat and gain weight while others don't. They were surprised at the difference between the sexes in brain response to controlling food intake. The discovery may explain the higher obesity rate for women and girls. They report their findings in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the study, 13 women and 10 men were quizzed about their favorite foods, which ranged from pizza to cinnamon buns and burgers to chocolate cake, and then were asked to fast overnight.
The next day they underwent brain scans while being presented with their favorite foods. In addition, they used a technique called cognitive inhibition, which they had been taught, to suppress thoughts of hunger and eating.
While both men and women said the inhibition technique decreased their hunger, the brain scans showed that men's brain activity actually decreased, while the part of women's brains that responds to food remained active.
"Even though the women said they were less hungry when trying to inhibit their response to the food, their brains were still firing away in the regions that control the drive to eat," Wang, the study's lead author, said in a telephone interview.
New research suggests that there's "something going on" in the female brain that makes women less able to control their eating urges. Further research may find the answer to why women have higher obesity rates than men.
The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, performed brain scans on women and men to see how they responded to their favorite foods after fasting overnight.
"There is something going on in the female. The signal is so much different," Gene-Jack Wang of Brookhaven National Laboratory told The Associated Press. "Even though the women said they were less hungry when trying to inhibit their response to the food, their brains were still firing away in the regions that control the drive to eat."
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that 35.3% of American women and 33.3% of men were considered obese in 2006.
Separately, a 10-year study of Europeans has found three new genetic variations that increase the obesity risk for children, Medical News Today reports.
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