Why does hunger disappear if you ignore it for a long time?

Why, if you, for example, read an interesting book, you can easily forget that you missed lunch? You ignore the hunger until you turn the last page, and then you are surprised to find that you could eat an elephant - you are so hungry.

This question seems to be quite simple and not important, but nutritionists say that this is actually an interesting topic for discussion.

Why do we feel hunger?

When the human stomach is empty, a chain of attitudes to the brain comes to the message that the body needs to get energy from food. These settings are also called triggers, and one of them is ghrelin - a hormone, about which scientists say that this is the "only substance responsible for appetite". This conclusion was made by the researchers in their review of 2006, published in the journal Physiology and Behavior. The article also says that ghrelin affects certain areas of the brain and causes a feeling of hunger.

Almost all of the ghrelin is produced by the stomach and the first section of the small intestine and never disappears from the body completely. The level of the substance decreases when we are saturated, and rises as we want to eat, stimulating the signals to the brain.

But here's the thing: as shown by another study, the feeling of hunger depends not only on ghrelin.

The connection of ghrelin and hunger

In 2016, a new study was published in the journal Clinical Nutrition. It lasted eight weeks and included 59 adult subjects suffering from obesity. According to the rules of the experiment, men and women ate one day in the usual way, the other - in economical, limiting themselves to food. Every day the researchers measured the ghrelin levels of the participants, but found that its concentration was not directly related to the hunger felt by the subjects.

Simply put, on days when they ate less, the ghrelin was higher, but the people themselves did not feel the difference between the feeling of hunger in ordinary days.

The bariatric program manager, Colin Tewkbury, who did not participate in the experiments, summed up: "This is an important conclusion that the subjective perception of hunger and its clinical dimension do not coincide, which means there is no direct relationship between hunger and ghrelin."

Scientific explanation

We return to our question: why can people not pay attention to hunger?

"It sounds completely unscientific, but it's very logical - intensive activities are too distracting for people and they have priority," says Leah Groropo, clinical nutritionist at the Stanford Medical Institute in Palo Alto, California.

"We all felt it, so it's hard to argue with that," says Groppo, "hunger diminishes if all our thoughts are occupied with something else."

It is interesting that if external factors do not allow you to forget about hunger, you can not ignore it. Tried to read a book in the kitchen? Suddenly, aromatic hot meat becomes much more interesting than literal history.