The Regulation of Food Intake in XXXX

@entity1 @entity28
Knowledge of the regulation of food intake is crucial to an understanding of body weight and @entity28 . Strictly speaking, we should refer to the control of food intake whose expression is modulated in the interests of the regulation of body weight. Food intake is controlled, body weight is regulated. However, this semantic distinction only serves to emphasize the importance of food intake. Traditionally food intake has been researched within the homeostatic approach to physiological systems pioneered by Claude Bernard, Walter Cannon and others; and because feeding is a form of behaviour, it forms part of what Curt Richter referred to as the behavioural regulation of body weight (or behavioural homeostasis). This approach views food intake as the vehicle for energy supply whose expression is modulated by a metabolic drive generated in response to a requirement for energy. The idea was that eating behaviour is stimulated and inhibited by internal signalling systems (for the drive and suppression of eating respectively) in order to regulate the internal environment (energy stores, tissue needs). Although there has always been a field of research dedicated to the study of food intake stimulated by the external environment, the rise of @entity28 in the last 20 years has accelerated thinking about this issue. The term    obesigenic environment    has entered into scientific discourse and implies that the potency of the external environment is in large part responsible for the increases in food intake that is one of the causal agencies underlying the epidemic of @entity28 . This approach has revitalized interest in the sensory and external stimulation of food intake and has drawn attention to the hedonic dimension of appetite. There is now a very strong current of thought that a major cause of an increase in food intake associated with the rise of @entity28 resides in the hedonic rather than the homeostatic system. This does not mean that the so-called    energy homeostasis system    is no longer important. Since the middle 1990s there have been impressive advances in the molecular infrastructure of the brain   s homeostatic networks which have given some precision to knowledge of how regulatory processes operate. At the same time the use of neural pathway studies in animals, and neurobiological procedures     including fMRI scanning     in @entity1 , have refined understanding of the brain   s hedonic networks. Interestingly there is evidence of cross-talk between the neurochemical substrates of the two systems. This is an exciting concept which offers the possibility of some re-unification of the dualism underlying homeostatic and hedonic processing of information. It is against this scientific landscape that the control (regulation) of food intake in @entity1 can now be addressed.
