It sounds like a horror movie: you move carefully through a dark kitchen until you reach your goal. The light from the freezer blinds you for a moment! The last thing you see is the ice cream carton, grown ten times its original size, opening a gaping, sharp-toothed mouth to take a bite out of you.
Ice cream can’t REALLY eat your brain. But researchers from the UT Southwest Medical Center in Dallas, Texas found a particular fat in ice cream (and other foods) can get into your head and mess with your appetite.
Palmitic acid — a fat found in beef, butter, cheese, and milk — might go directly to your brain when eaten. Once there, it tells the brain and body to ignore appetite-suppressing signals from hormones like leptin and insulin. And the message sticks around… for up to three days.
That’s up to three days of eating when you’re NOT hungry. Talk about a dietbuster!
Keep in mind — the research was done on mice and rats, not humans. The animals were given different types of fat in different ways (through injection, infusion, and feeding). Each one got the same amount of nutrition, calories, and fat. When the animals received palmitic acid for their daily fat, they were less inclined to stop eating once they were full. Animals who ate other types of fat (monounsaturated fatty acid, unsaturated oleic acid) stopped when they were full.
Researchers in the study pointed out how quickly the brain’s chemistry can change — just one bad snack can flip the “keep on eating” switch. Normally, the body lets us know when we’ve had enough. When that self-regulation isn’t there, a person can go a little overboard with eating.
Palmitic acid is most often seen in snacks that are high in saturated fats. If you can avoid those, you may be able to avoid the “ice cream is eating my brain” problem.