Participate in a project about the effects of food on the brain reward system!

Are you curious about the effects of food on the brain? Are you interested in psychology and neuroscience? Do you want to know how a biomedical experiment works? If you have answered “yes” to one of these questions, you might like to participate in a study about the effects of food on the brain, being conducting at the Department of Psychology at the Faculty of Health Sciences at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.

This study is part of a translational project (funded by Helse Nord) aimed to investigate the effects of junk food on the reward system of the brain. This reward system is a collection of structures in the brain and connections between them that regulate how we respond to different stimuli. This reward system works by linking beneficial situations or actions to a feeling of pleasure. Food, drinking, socializing and sex are hardwired in the brains of many animal species, including humans, to be pleasurable. We want to find out if eating junk food for a longer period could change how the reward system works.  

This translational project has two related research lines. In the first one, we test the effects of “cafeteria diet” in rats [you can read more about it in a review published by our research group: link to the review]. The “cafeteria diet” consists of the same unhealthy but tasty and ultra-processed products that humans eat. Looking at the rats’ behavior and the activity of specific parts of the brain at the same time, we are able to measure if and how junk food can change the reward system and behavior.

For the second line, we want to study the effects of food in human volunteers, by using a type of brain scan (functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI). 

Are you interested to participate? Do you want to know more about this project? 

Please fill up the form and we will contact you very soon: http://tinyurl.com/uitfoodreward  

The outcome of this project will contribute to explaining the underlying mechanisms of the vulnerability of the reward system by junk food consumption. This will help with more research, and hopefully therapies, for diseases that where the reward system has become unbalanced, such as obesity and addiction.

(picture (CC) by Marco Verch https://flickr.com/photos/30478819@N08/48814061166)