A recent study published in Brain Imaging and Behavior revealed that individuals with obesity show heightened brain responses, particularly in the insula region, to monetary rewards when compared to those of average weight. This discovery offers new insights into the neural pathways associated with obesity and reward processing, suggesting that the brains of individuals with higher BMIs may be more sensitive to rewarding stimuli. ...
Science and data are good, actually.
It’s tiring to see, every time a study examining some well-known phenomenon is published, the same obnoxious comment of “hurr durr like we needed a study on this i am very smart”.
Beyond the fact that having rigorous data that actually supports our intuitions is very valuable - since our obvious intuitions are often completely incorrect - understanding the deeper mechanisms behind these things can be extremely useful when examining how you might design interventions. If we known that oversensitivity to rewards processing is a key factor in obesity, that gives us something to target, across a wide array of methods. Drugs might try to mute that reward response, or alternatively boost it for more healthy foods. Perhaps there’s some ingredient with no negative health effects that elicits a strong reward response and can be added to healthy, satiating and low calorie foods, for instance. Perhaps there are psychological interventions or therapies that can tweak that response as well. There’s a world to explore there, and having a specific biological mechanism to target and data to support that is invaluable.
I’d remind you disease being caused by bad humors was a “no shit, Sherlock” thing not all that long ago. How many people to this day think that cold air is the cause of the common cold (after all, it’s literally in the name, duh)? I probably don’t need to say anything about vaccines.
So again, science is good, actually.