Nutrition Wonderland

New Study Connects Leptin to Dopamine

Monday, August 10, 2009

As I've been writing the "Understanding Our Bodies: The Physiology of Nutrition" series, I've tried to explain how the various chemical systems in our bodies relate to how and what we eat. For example, two of the biggest hormones that affect our eating habits - Leptin, the fullness hormone, and Dopamine, the brain's reward hormone - seem to have very different and unrelated effects on our bodies. But every day science is discovering just how interwoven and related our bodies different systems are. Just this week, for example, after explaining everything I could find about how dopamine relates to eating, scientists from the University of Michigan have discovered a new way that leptin regulates dopamine levels.