Ice cream and other fatty foods may target your brain before your hips

If you are feeling hungrier on Monday after a weekend of binging on ice cream, burgers and cheese fondues, you may want to blame your brain for sabotaging your efforts to get back on the right diet track, according to new research from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. As a result of animal studies, the researchers theorize that fat from certain foods we eat makes its way to the brain, affecting brain messages. The fat molecules cause the brain to send messages to the body’s cells, warning them to ignore the appetite-suppressing signals from leptin and insulin, hormones involved in weight regulation, the researchers say. The study said one particular type of fat, palmitic acid, which is found in butter, milk, cheese and beef, was particularly effective at jumpstarting this mechanism. The researchers said palmitic acid reduced the ability of leptin and insulin to activate their intracellular signaling cascades, so that the animals became insulin-resistant. Oleic acid, a common unsaturated fatty acid, did not show this effect. The researchers suggest that, even though these results are in animals, we limit our intake of saturated fats because it's possible that they are make us feel hungrier and eat more.