英语四级六级阅读练习（13）：饥饿能让大脑偏向于垃圾食品

本篇阅读材料“饥饿能让大脑偏向于垃圾食品”选自《卫报》（原文标题：Hunger primes the brain for junk food 2011.11.16）。如果大家觉得比较简单，就当作泛读材料了解了解，认识几个新单词或新表达方式也不错。如果大家觉得这些材料理解上有难度，不妨当做挑战自己的拔高训练，希望大家都有进步^^

The first law of home economics states that the amount of food in a supermarket trolley rises in direct proportion to the shopper's hunger level.

supermarket trolley  超市购物手推车

be in direct proportion to  与……成正比

But while the danger is well known to shoppers who venture out on an empty stomach, how the problem arises in the brain has remained a mystery.

venture out  探险；冒险出去

In a new study of hunger's effects on the mind, neuroscientists pieced together what happens in the brain that makes us buy more food when we are famished.

effect on  对……的作用

piece together  拼凑；七拼八凑

The findings point to ways of overcoming the temptations of the food aisles and throw fresh light on the rise of obesity over the past 30 years.

throw light on  使……显得清楚；阐明

From a series of brain scans on volunteers, the researchers showed that a hunger hormone triggered activity in the brain that made people pay more for junk food than usual. Equipped with this knowledge, shoppers should be able to override the urge and stick to more healthy shopping, the scientists said.

"You should never make decisions about food when you are starving. When you go to the supermarket hungry, the food you are drawn to is high-calorie junk food," said Dr Alain Dagher, a neurologist at the Montreal Neurological Institute. "You assign way too much value to calories and so way too little to health and other things."

Dagher and his colleague Deb Tang recruited 29 volunteers for the study and, asked them to rate how much they liked various items of food, from chocolate cookies and potato crisps to apples and carrots.

recruit  v. 招募

The scientists next put the volunteers in a brain scanner and had them bid up to five dollars a time for food and other objects, such as baseball caps and T-shirts, that flashed up on a screen.

After each volunteer had bid for 300 items, one bid was taken and compared with a counterbid generated at random by a computer. If the volunteer bid the most, they got to eat the food or keep the item at stake.

at random  随机的；任意的

at stake  在紧要关头

Each person took the test twice over two days and beforehand received either an injection of ghrelin, a hunger hormone that is released by the stomach, or a shot of saline as a control. The ghrelin jab made volunteers ravenous for one to two hours.

Unsurprisingly, the hungry volunteers bid consistently more for food and less for inedible items than the volunteers who had the saline jab. The hungry people were willing to spend an average of $2.09 for food and $1.32 for other objects, but on saline bid only $1.82 for food and $1.58 for the inedible items.

The scientists traced the behaviour to increased activity in a brain region called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in motivation and reward.

"Ghrelin seems to increase the amount you are willing to pay for food through this area of the brain. We think this is why you assign greater value to the food when you are hungry," Dagher said. The research was presented at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington DC.

But the study found that people did not simply pay more for foods they liked. Instead, the higher bids were for the high-calorie junk foods.

"When you are hungry you assign way too much value to calories and so way too little to health and other things," Dagher said.

Dagher believes that simply being aware of the way the brain works could help people overcome the urge to buy junk food when they are hungry. "We have this intrinsic value system but we can override it with our minds," he said.

The findings support evidence that shows skipping meals to lose weight can be counterproductive. "If you miss meals, you tend to gain weight because you get hungrier and eat calorically dense foods," Dagher said.

skip meals  不吃饭

counterproductive  adj. 起反作用的；使达不到预期目标的

calorically dense food 高热量食物

"The main reason for the increase in obesity over the past 30 years is the cost of food. When you look at an item of high-calorie food, its cost is low, so you're more likely to buy it. And once you have bought it, you are more likely to consume it.

"The problem is the decision-making before you even sit down to your meal. That's where you have lost the battle," Dagher said.

Question time:

1. What's the meaning of "famished" in Para. 3?

2. Why can't you buy food when you're starving according to the research?

3. Is it helpful to lose weight by dieting?