Metabolic-cognitive control of food choices and long-term dietary success in aging

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Long-term weight loss maintenance is the main challenge of obesity treatment and critically depends on the control of hedonic eating. Based on the successful identification of the role of central insulin for hedonic food valuation under normal and pathological conditions in our previous project, we will now focus on the metabolic-cognitive mechanisms and long-term consequences of functional and dysfunctional food choices in humans. Here, we will extend our previously established intranasal insulin fMRI approach to an individualized food choice task that manipulates self-control by focusing participants’ attention on short- (i.e. taste) and long- (i.e. healthiness) term stimulus features. This allows for disentangling metabolic and cognitive reward regulation within a single run and thus the extraction of independent, common and interactive (e.g. compensatory) processes. In the first part, the impact of expected prefrontal-mesolimbic regulation on food value signals and dietary choices will be characterized in a sample of normal weight young adults. In the second part, we will investigate these effects in a large sample of older pre-diabetic dieters and lean controls from whom we have baseline neurobehavioral and insulin data from our 3.5 years ago previous project. On the one hand, this allows for the evaluation of potential age and weight effects on prefrontal-mesolimbic food choice regulation. Moreover, this longitudinal approach enables us to identify metabolic-cognitive predictors and consequences of successful weight management after 3.5 years in a high risk group for type 2 diabetes. This approach will help us to identify modifiers of hedonic food intake and to transfer acquired knowledge into studies of risk populations.