The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
By putting sugars into foods and hiding the sugary taste of those foods, those foods, even if they contain artificial sweeteners, can activate the sorts of neurons that we talked about at the beginning of the episode, like the neuropod cells that will then signal to the brain to release more dopamine and make you crave more of that food
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This is a taste system in the gut that is not available to your conscious awareness... the other reason is that these neuropod cells are driving a chemical craving below your conscious detection, so they're really two systems. Your gut is sensing, at a subconscious level, what's in it and sending signals to your brain that work in concert, in parallel with the signals coming from your mouth and your experience of the taste of the food.
anytime you eat something sweet, that substance is actually causing your gut, your stomach and your intestine, or to be more precise, I should say, that substance, food substance, is causing the neuropod cells in your stomach and intestines to send a parallel set of signals up to your brain saying, eat more of that, or simply eat more, eat more, eat more, and preferably eat more sweet foods.
These neuropod cells also trigger activation of dopamine pathways within the mesolimbic reward pathway.
So when you ingest something sweet, you perceive that sweet taste and a cascade ensues within your brain that makes you want more of the sweet thing. That's the conscious pathway for sugar perception, for sweet perception.
So this car analogy that I used before, where it's some weird car that has two accelerators, it actually has three accelerators. And so with three accelerators, all pushing the system hard, we can say, wow, there must be something really special about this pathway.
is dependent on these neuropod cells and related pathways.
Now you ingest it and now it activates a selective group of cells in your intestines that now send a signal to the brain via the vagal ganglia that says, I got what I need. The tongue doesn't know that you got what you need. It only knows that you tasted it. This knows that it got to the point that it's going to be used, which is the gut. And now it sends the signal to now reinforce the consumption of this thing, because this is the one that I needed. Sugar, source of energy.
these cells have to make sense not only of the molecule that had been ingested meaning the chemistry of the molecule let's say it's glucose it has to make sense a little bit of The Taste is it sweet right is it bitter then it has to take into account how much of the molecule is absorbed inside of the cell right so that's the second layer of integration then once the cell has eaten that molecule so to speak then that molecule will be digested inside of the cell to release ATP or some other uh compound
We all have neurons within our gut. These neurons have a name. They are called neuropod cells. Neuropod cells were famously discovered by professor Dr. Diego Bahorquez at Duke University. And these cells respond to, among other things, to the presence of sugar within the gut. These neuropod cells send electrical signals through a particular highway within the vagus to the so-called noo's ganglen. This is a cluster. A ganglen is just a cluster of neurons. And then the nose ganglion sends on information to the nucleus of the solitary tract. The nucleus of the solitary tract is very important for understanding sugar preference.
all sweet things or things that we perceive as sweet, but also sweet things that are ingested and registered by those neuropod cells in our gut trigger the release of dopamine and trigger these neural circuits to make us want to eat more of these foods.