Women are less successful at keeping their hunger pangs at bay than men, researchers say.
A study has found that women find it much harder to suppress their cravings for food when presented with a plate of goodies than men, and are more likely to give in to temptation.
Scientists who carried out the study using brain scans of hungry volunteers, say it could help explain why women are at greater risk of developing eating disorders and why men find it easier to shed excess pounds. Women find it harder to suppress food cravings than men. According to the Department of Health, three out of five adults in Britain are now overweight, while 25 per cent are clinically obese – so fat it threatens their health.
Women are more likely to be 'morbidly obese'– defined as having a body mass index (BMI) over 40. A normal BMI is between 20 and 25.
The study compared the brain activity of men and women to see if biological differences between the sexes could influence our ability to resist hunger. Researchers asked 23 healthy and slim volunteers to fast for 17 hours, then presented them with a plate of their favourite foods, which included bacon and egg sandwiches, hamburgers, ice cream and chocolate cakes.
They were then told to try to suppress their hunger by thinking of non-food related things.
Dr Gene-Jack Wang, who carried out the study at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, then monitored the volunteer’s brains using positron emission tomography (PET) scans.
He found that when men tried to suppress their hunger, the parts of their brains dealing with the desire to eat were far less active than before.
But for the women, there was no significant change in brain patterns, reports the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr Wang said: ‘The decreased inhibitory control in women could underlie their lower success in losing weight while dieting when compared with men.
‘Lower cognitive control of brain responses to food stimulation in women compared to men may contribute to gender differences in the prevalence rates of obesity and other eating disorders.’
The study does not explain why women find it harder to quell their hunger pangs, or whether men’s ability to suppress appetite is hard-wired into their brains or a result of differences in upbringing and lifestyle.
Women typically find it harder to lose weight than men, because they tend to carry more fat than men. Men are also heavier, so a stone of excess weight is a smaller proportion of the total – and so is easier to lose.
(China Daily January 21, 2009)