New research suggests the old saying that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach actually applies to women too.
A team of researchers determined women's brains respond more strongly to romantic cues after they've had a good meal, UC San Diego Health Sciences reported on their blog.
To make their findings, the researchers looked at brain circuitry using MRI technology for both hungry and satiated women who were either past-dieters or who had never dieted before.
"We found that young women both with and without a history of dieting had greater brain activation in response to romantic pictures in reward-related neural regions after having eaten than when hungry," said first author Alice Ely, who is now a postdoctoral research fellow at the Eating Disorders Center for Treatment and Research, part of the UC San Diego School of Medicine.
The findings contradict past findings that people generally respond more strongly to rewarding stimuli such as food, money, and drugs when hungry.
"In this case, they were more responsive when fed," Ely said. "This data suggests that eating may prime or sensitize young women to rewards beyond food. It also supports a shared neurocircuitry for food and sex."
The findings showed women who has a history of dieting responded more intensely to food cues compared to participants who had never dieted or were currently dieting. All of the participants were college-age women who were of a healthy weight.
"In the fed state, historical dieters had a greater reaction in the reward regions than the other two groups to highly palatable food cues versus neutral or moderately palatable cues," Ely said.
Highly palatable food cues included temptations such as chocolate cake while an example of a neutral cue was carrots. The data suggests historical dieters may be more at risk for weight gain because they are predisposed by their brain reward circuitry to crave more food.
"Based on this study, we hypothesized that historical dieters are differentially sensitive after eating to rewards in general so we tested this perception by comparing the same groups' brain activation when viewing romantic pictures compared to neutral stimuli in a fasted and fed state," Ely said.
In conclusion, the reward centers of both groups responded more strongly to romantic cues when fed.
"The pattern of response was similar to historical dieter's activation when viewing highly palatable food cues, and is consistent with research showing overlapping brain-based responses to sex, drugs and food," Ely concluded.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Appetite.
