Pleasure-Centered Eating – Why It Feels So Good!

We don’t only receive pleasure from eating sweet foods, though. In addition to the taste of sweet, we can also discern salty, acidy, savory, spicy and “fatty” flavors. These tastes, in combination with the olfactory bulb which gives us our sense of smell, engage our limbic system in the brain and set off a chain reaction of neurotransmitters that stimulate the release of chemicals, that in turn signals the body to react to the message. 

The limbic system is made up of many important organs, including something called the amygdala as well as the nucleus accumbens, also known as “The Pleasure Center”.

This same complex limbic system stimulates memory and rapid reaction emotions, such as the fear “fight, flight or freeze’‘ response. It is also responsible for aggressive and violent reflexivity. But it is equally responsible for empathy and compassion. 

Daniel Goleman, an American psychologist and science journalist, is the author of the best-selling book Emotional Intelligence. In it, he calls this rapid response an amygdala hijack. “Emotions make us pay attention right now – this is urgent – and give us an immediate action plan without having to think twice. The emotional component evolved very early: Do I eat it, or does it eat me?” 

The amygdala’s primary job is our survival, and it evaluates our experiences to decide if they threaten our survival, or promote it.  If something threatens our survival, the amygdala gets us as far away from it as possible; but if it promotes it, we receive the signal to continue towards it. When we experience pleasure, our amygdala says, “This is good, do it again.”

It follows then that the amygdala would create an appetite for anything that gives us pleasure and is therefore interpreted as being survival-promoting. 

We can see that Penina’s assertion on the pleasure factor is definitely backed by science.

The discovery of the pleasure center, some technical info

The “pleasure center” of the brain was co-discovered in 1954 by James Olds, an American psychologist, and Peter Milner who was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University. Olds and Milner stumbled on the pleasure center after they implanted electrodes into the septal area of the rat and found that rats became addicted to pushing a lever that was stimulating the nucleus accumbens (NAcc).

Electrical stimulation triggers the release of dopamine in the NAcc, much in the same way that addictive drugs and natural reinforcers, such as sex, drugs, alcohol, food, extreme sports—or anything pleasurable—also trigger the release of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens.

The rats in Olds and Milner’s experiment would continue to press this lever incessantly even at the expense of eating and drinking for sustenance. This suggests that the area is the “pleasure center” of the brain and is involved in the reward-driven reinforcement of learning and addiction.  (Christopher Bergland, The Athlete’s Way) 

The same results have been seen in human subjects, in brain imaging studies called Optogenetics, using light-responsive proteins to “light up” the areas of the brain during stimulation.  

So what happens in the pleasure center (nucleus accumbens – NAcc) when we eat refined sugar and high fat, and why are they so addicting?

Using Penina’s example, chocolate contains over five hundred chemicals. Some of these chemicals are endorphins – the feel-good (and addictive) properties. They include:

Phenylethylamine (PEA) – (similar to dopamine and adrenaline)

• Caffeine – energy stimulus
• Tryptophan – soothing, relaxing effect, sleep enhancer
• Anandamide – a fatty acid neurotransmitter. It was the first endocannabinoid to be discovered: it participates in the body’s cannabinoid system by binding to cannabinoid receptors, the same receptors that the psychoactive compound THC in cannabis acts on. The name ‘anandamide’ is taken from the