It’s all in our heads

Now this is interesting. A recent study may shed some light on yet another reason why women are vastly different from men:

Faced with their favourite foods, women are less able than men to suppress their hunger, a discovery that may help explain the higher obesity rate for females, a new U.S. study suggests.

Researchers trying to understand the brain's mechanisms for controlling food intake were surprised at the difference between the sexes in brain response.

Gene-Jack Wang of Brookhaven National Laboratory of Upton, N.Y., and colleagues were trying to figure out why some people overeat and gain weight while others don't.

They performed brain scans on 13 women and 10 men, who had fasted overnight, to determine how their brains responded to the sight of their favourite foods. They report their findings in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"There is something going on in the female," Wang said in a telephone interview. "The signal is so much different."

Keep Reading: Something going on in the female,' appetite study suggests