Desert on Your Mind? Your Muscles May Be Getting the Message

According to researchers that reported in the December issue of Cell Metabolism, the thought of sweets may cause your muscles to start absorbing more blood sugar. This article was found on Scicencedaily.com. 

"Our results show that good taste, a pleasant meal, and its expectation stimulate muscle glucose utilization and thereby decrease blood glucose level during feeding," said Yasuhiko Minokoshi of the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Japan. "Thus, blood glucose level after feeding is controlled by hedonic as well as homeostatic regulatory systems."

Minokoshi's team earlier showed that the fat hormone leptin activates glucose uptake and fat burning in muscle. Those effects depend on signals from the hypothalamus, a brain region that is critical for maintaining energy balance.

[...]"The most important finding is that hedonic feeding affects muscle glucose utilization and that orexin is involved in the regulation," Minokoshi said. Orexin has been shown to stimulate feeding, he added, and in fact, they confirmed that mice lacking the orexin gene were less interested than normal mice in sweets. He concludes that orexin may be responsible for controlling and coordinating both feeding behavior and muscle glucose metabolism.

Overall this article is saying that your muscles can affect the things you want to eat. And by injecting orexin into the skeletal muscles, that can make your blood sugar level a lot higher. I think this research that was done on mice can lead to other research projects, such as research projects on diabetes. I never would have thought that your muscles could have made you want to eat sweets.