Anyone who has smoked pot before, will know that doing so gives you extreme munchies.
As shown in the picture above from the movie Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, those burgers, fries and milkshakes suddenly smell better and taste better after you’ve had some pot in your system. You’ll then also desire some cookies, candies, ice-cream and cereal for dessert.
This extreme hunger is due to marijuana’s active ingredient- tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, which stimulates our appetite. In studies found in mice, this THC fits into the receptors in their brain’s olfactory bulb, which significantly increases their ability to smell food, leading them to eat more of it.
Recently a new study has come out in Nature, explaining marijuana’s neurological effects, helping us to understand why this drug makes us so hungry.
It explains that our hunger is controlled by a group of brain cells known as pro-opiomelanocortin, or POMC neurons, which are located in the hypothalamus region of our brain. This region is responsible for giving us our desire to eat, our feelings of alertness, and also our sexual arousal.
Normally, our POMC neurons help suppress our desire to eat, because without them we would continue eating, and become extremely fat.
However, in this study, in which mice were given chemical compounds called cannabinoids, which are found in marijuana, the THC turned out to flip a switch in the mouse’s hypothalamus part of their brains, so even if they were full, neurons started telling their hypothalamus that they were hungry.
Tamas Horvath, from the Yale University School of Medicine said about the study: “We were surprised to find that the neurons we thought were responsible for shutting down eating, were suddenly being activated and promoting hunger, even when you are full. It fools the brain’s central feeding system.”
Horvath continued to say that “it’s like pressing a car’s brakes and accelerating instead.”
While we will need further studies done on humans to verify this evidence found in mice, this information certainly helps us to understand why we feel that extreme urge of hunger come over us after smoking marijuana.
An interesting bit of information to add is that in 2006, Sanofi-Adventis rolled out an anti-munchie drug called Rimonabant in Europe, but they had to pull the drug off the market within a few years after people were reporting side effects like anxiety, depression, and overall bad vibes.
Kenneth Mackie, a biologist from Indiana University (who was not part of this study published in Nature) said: “If POMC shows there’s another way to change neuron activity, it may give them another way to manipulate receptors for weight loss.”
We certainly hope that in future there’s a way to reverse weed giving us an extreme desire to eat. Until then, we hope you enjoyed this article, and please be sure to share it with your friends, and leave your comments below.
[Featured Image Credit: Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle]
The Science Behind Why Marijuana Gives Us The Munchies is a post from: LifeDaily