Binge eating and the brain
The Editor of JAMA Psychiatry suggested recently that before entering clinical practice, health professionals should learn much more about the brain (1). This is as important as it is interesting not least in the field of eating disorders because the neuroscience of eating is a very active field. Witness the interesting animal model of binge eating published this week in eNeuro, the open access journal of the Society for Neuroscience (2). But be careful! Eating a lot of food when offered the chance is a normal behavior that has evolved as a consequence of the challenge of starvation, the main evolutionary threat to all animals, including humans (3). The binge eating rats in this weeks´ eNeuro may therefore just reveal a way in which the brain permits a normal response rather than a neural cause of an eating disorder.
