The Many Causes of Hunger, and the Opposite of Hunger

What makes us hungry? If you answered “lack of food,” you’d be right some of the time, but as this article in Science News reports, that is just one of several things that tells the body to find some more food. Body weight, lack of sleep, and the hormone ghrelin, named after a Hindu god of growth, also play major roles the amount of hunger we feel. This comprehensive piece focuses on ghrelin and on a few other biological factors that were recently shown to greatly influence our sense of hunger.

Still more hunger news comes to us from the L.A. Times, which reports on the newfound and cultish popularity of a strange African plant called Hoodia gordonii. According to the Times, researchers say the bitter-tasting succulent tells neurons in the brain to start firing full-stomach signals, thereby curbing appetite, and users say that several bites of the raw plant can quell hunger for up to a day. We want to know how it will be before Hoodia gordonii is the most often searched term on Google.