SensaSlim Success as Yale University Study Links Obesity to Lack of Brain Control

New York (PRWEB) September 29, 2011

The Swiss pharmaceutical company that develops the slimming spray SENSASLIM is excited by a Yale University study published this week in the Journal of Clinical Investigation describing it as a major breakthrough in supporting their products science that obesity is affected by how well a control system in your brain is working.

US researchers have found the brains of normal-weight and obese people react differently to pictures of energy-rich foods, with obese people having less activation in a brain area that can inhibit cravings.

SENSASLIM Research Director Dr Sommerville said this may prove to be an important clue to understanding obesity and supports their research that the more effective ways to curb weight gain is by beginning not on the plate but in the brain.

The study – carried out by Dr Kathleen Page and Dr Dongju Seo from Yale University along with researchers from the University of Southern California – investigates which areas of people’s brains are most active when blood glucose levels are either normal or slightly low.

As party of the study, 14 people (nine non-obese and five obese) ate a meal. Two hours later, they lay in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine that scanned their brains as they looked at pictures of either food- or non-food-related objects.

While they were undergoing the experiment their blood sugar levels were altered from normal to slightly low levels. Although the participants knew their blood sugar might be altered, they did not know when or in what direction.

A further seven volunteers underwent the same experiment, but with constant normal glucose levels to act as a control. When the blood glucose was lowered, and the participants looked at pictures of foods, they showed more activity in the limbic and striatal regions deep in the primitive part of the brain – regions important in reward and motivation.

When the volunteers’ glucose levels were normal, though, two regions of brain cortex became active – but only in the non-obese subjects. These two areas – the anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex – act as the executive control centre of the brain, and they have a role in inhibiting desires.

“What happens in lean people, when their blood sugar is not dropping, is that their executive function lights up the area involved in making decisions,” explains Robert Sherwin, professor medicine at Yale and senior author of the paper, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

“This executive function controls the reward system, which is much less activated. But in obese people, that executive control is not activated when their blood sugar isn’t falling. So they have continued activation of their reward system and that system dominates even if they’re not hungry.”

The implication, he says is that there is a biological driver that pushes obese people to continue to eat, even when they’re full. They may not “see” food the same way as lean people do, because their reward and desire signals are consistently signaling that they want to eat, and that they want to eat high-calorie foods in particular.

“We don’t know why, and we don’t know if it’s reversible, but these results imply that there may be a biological difference that when people become obese, their motivation for eating when they see an ad or picture may not be under the same control systems as those of lean people,” says Sherwin.

Dr Sommerville says it is as if normal weight people are saying to themselves “Hmmm, I’ve had enough I think” – but obese people do not have that inhibition.

The discovery that obese people are not getting the inhibition from their executive control centres is exciting, he said.

The SensaSlim slimming spray is administered three times a day, by two sprays onto the tongue, ten minutes before meals. The effect of the formulation is felt immediately and suppression of appetite is swift.

SensaSlim removes the call of action to eat, by fooling the brain into believing that you are full. In simple terms, if you dont think of food, you dont crave food, you dont eat food. The weight just drops off, Dr Sommerville said.

The potent active ingredients enter the blood stream and naturally suppress the appetite. Simultaneously, the taste buds are pleasantly desensitised by a natural herb. This sends a message to the brain that suppresses the appetite, without affecting the central nervous system, he said.

At the surface of the tongue, each taste receptor cell has a chemically sensitive tip that responds to taste stimuli in the mouth. These cells may “talk” back and forth, before passing their environmentally derived message on to cells at the bottom of the taste bud, which may also talk back and forth with the receptor cells. Once the final message has been ironed out, cells convey it to sensory nerve endings that carry the signal, which eventually is interpreted by the brain.

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