Study explains how Marijuana gives People the Munchies

Posted by Sagar Satapathy on February 18, 2015.

For years, the marijuana users have been asking one question to themselves after waking up. "Why I am so hungry"? A lot of theories were going around. But, finally, we have an answer, as per the recent study titled, "Hypothalamic POMC neurons promote cannabinoid-induced feeding" published on Nature.com journal.

This cluster, called the POMC neurons, is in the hypothalamus, a specific area of the brain that is associated with base instincts like sexual arousal, alertness and feeding. The active ingredients in pot make appetite-curbing regions of the brain reverse functions. When that happens, neurons give the brain the munchies instead of giving it instructions to stop eating. The neurobiologists claim that marijuana hijacks the brain and controls the functions, which even the pot users fail to understand.

In the past, we had seen comedies that smoking marijuana makes users crave for salty, crunchy or sweet snacks, including potato chips and brownies. However, the scientists have now confirmed it as a brain function. These are nothing, but pot-fuelled snack attacks, they revealed it in other words. The pot compels to eat further even if the body does not need food, the study claims.

Author of the study, Tamas Horvath, a neurobiologist at Yale University School of Medicine, termed the finding as completely "nonsensical". He revealed that his group's research was supposed to confirm the nerve circuits that tamp down hunger. Instead, the results were "upside down", he said, as quoted by the USA Today.

Apart from Tamas L. Horvath, other researchers, who were part of the study group, included Marco Koch, Luis Varela, Jae Geun Kim, Jung Dae Kim, Francisco Hernández-Nuño, Stephanie E. Simonds, Carlos M. Castorena, Claudia R. Vianna, Joel K. Elmquist, Yury M. Morozov, Pasko Rakic, Ingo Bechmann, Michael A. Cowley, Klara Szigeti-Buck, Marcelo O. Dietrich, Xiao-Bing Gao and Sabrina Diano.

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