A new study has investigated oxytocin’s effects on the brain regions that help control eating behavior to explore the possibility of using this hormone as a treatment for obesity.

Researchers get to grips with how oxytocin alters our brain’s response to food.

Oxytocin is a hormone that plays an essential role in social interaction, trust, anxiety, sexual reproduction, childbirth, and mother-infant bonding.

As such, people sometimes refer to it as the “love hormone.”

This hormone increases the contraction of the uterus during labor and stimulates milk production.

Most discussions about oxytocin focus on its role during childbirth, but it also affects other aspects of bodily functioning, including our relationship with food.

This hormone weakens the brain’s reward signals for food, and it affects our eating behavior and metabolism.

According to recent research, which the team presented on Monday at ENDO 2019, the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in New Orleans, LA, oxytocin alters how people with obesity process images of high-calorie foods.

Obesity rates continue to rise

The worldwide prevalence of obesity has nearly tripled since 1975, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). In 2016, almost 2 billion adults were overweight, more than 650 million of whom had obesity.

The WHO use body mass index (BMI) to define being overweight and having obesity in adults. BMI is a calculation that involves dividing the body mass of an individual by the square of their body height.

• Overweight is a BMI higher than or equal to 25.
• Obesity is a BMI higher than or equal to 30.