Despite popular belief, humans have more in common with flies than you might think. These insects do not randomly choose the foods they eat, in fact, they can spend a lot of time choosing them. Does it sound familiar to you? 

A group of scientists came up with a method for them to eat healthier meals, and the method could work in humans.

Flies “spend much of their time looking for sweet and nutritious calories and avoiding bitter and potentially toxic foods.” However, scientists did not understand how the process of choosing these foods worked.

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To better understand this process, a group of researchers at Yale University decided to find out the exact mechanism in their brain through deception. For this, they used a group of Drosophila melanogaster, known as fruit flies. 

The researchers gave a group of these hungry insects a choice between sweet, nutritious foods mixed with bitter quinine and less sweet, but not bitter, foods that contain fewer calories.

With the help of neuroimaging, the scientists tracked neural activity in their brains while making this decision.

The results showed that the choice depends on how hungry they are. “The hungrier they are, the more likely they are to tolerate the bitter taste for more calories,” said Michael Nitabach, professor of cellular and molecular physiology, genetics and neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine and one of the study’s authors.

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In addition, the scientists found that flies transmit sensory information to a part of their brain called the fan-shaped body, where the signals that send a neuropeptidergic and dopaminergic network that transmits the internal state and another are integrated. relevant information for decision making.

They also found that they could change a fly’s choice by manipulating neurons in areas of the brain that feed on the body in a fan shape. Thus, by causing a decrease in the activity of neurons involved in metabolism, they caused hungry flies to choose food with fewer calories.

This study, published in Nature Communications, could help understand food choices in humans.

Neuronal activity in both humans and flies is regulated by the same neuropeptidergic and dopaminergic networks. 

Dopamine in humans helps regulate feelings of reward, so changes in this network can alter the way the brain responds to different types of food.

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“The study provides a template for understanding how things like hunger and internal emotional states influence our behavior,” Nitabach said.