Grant: Foundation Grant

The rising rate of obesity poses the biggest challenge to our health care system, such that obesity is complicated with many other comorbidities. Prevention of obesity and its comorbities is likely the best strategy to reduce health care costs and improve health. This is difficult in a society where easily accessible, inexpensive, highly palatable and caloric foods are abundant; we are forced to temper our 'heightened motivation' and engage our 'willpower' to prevent us from eating beyond satiety. The ventral tegmental area, and its inputs and outputs, engages individuals in motivated behaviour whereas the orbitofrontal cortex functions to assess the current value of rewards and updates our actions based on these values and underlies 'willpower'. We propose that once obesity sets in, the neural circuits that underlie 'heightened motivation' and 'willpower' are altered by obesity so that is harder to resist overeating palatable food. We will test how peripheral signals modulate these circuits in a lean and obese state. Thus a research strategy of understanding how these circuits are impacted with obesity provides a unique opportunity to really understand why we overeat. I have the unique expertise to address this problem as we employ techniques that can address changes at the synaptic, circuitry and behavioral level in lean and obese animals.