MAE - Hunger Motivation Lesson

 

Hunger Motivation

Some of my favorite foods include french fries, pancakes, milkshakes, pecan pie, oreos, and pizza. Yum! While my body certainly needs food to survive, it probably would be a lot healthier without any of these foods. Like me, you are biologically motivated to eat to survive, but also by psychological, social, and cultural factors, which makes hunger motivation an interesting study.

One factor in hunger motivation is certainly biology. When your stomach is empty, it alerts you to a need for food. But psychological research shows that your empty stomach isn't the only factor that leads to hunger. When participants' stomachs were filled with inflated balloons, they did feel hunger eventually, although their stomachs continued to experience fullness because of the balloons.

Hunger, then, does not come from the stomach, but from the brain. One specific structure in the brain, the hypothalamus, regulates feelings of hunger and fullness. The lateral hypothalamus creates feelings of hunger and the ventromedial hypothalamus creates feelings of fullness. When functioning correctly, the hypothalamus senses appetite hormones in the blood stream and creates a balance, keeping the body at a comfortable weight, or set point. If body weight increases, the hypothalamus decreases hunger and increases metabolic rate to get back to the "normal weight" that the body has been at for a period of time. If body weight decreases, the hypothalamus increases hunger and decreases metabolic rate to get back to the normal weight. This explains why it's so difficult for people to diet and lose weight; if the body has been at a high weight for a period of time, the body starts to think that's the "normal" weight and seeks to remain at that weight. 

This biological explanation does not fully explain hunger motivation though. While some people are motivated by internal cues (hunger hormones or a growling stomach), others are motivated by external cues such as stress or the smell or sight of something that appeals to them. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation apply not only to hunger motivation, but to our motivation in other areas of life as well.

Culture also affects our motivation to eat specific foods. The first time I tasted caviar, I was horrified, but my cousin grew up eating it and loves it. Chicken feet, escargot, tuna, eyeballs, stomach lining, spam, fried spider, and turtle soup are each craved by people from different cultures. The foods that we grow up eating become familiar and desirable to us, and new foods are often viewed with disgust.

 

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