New research shows how communication in the brain changes during a diet. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research and Harvard Medical School carried out this research on mice which showed that the nerve cells that mediate the feeling of hunger receive stronger signals so that the mice eat significantly more after the diet and gain weight more quickly. In the long term, these findings could help develop drugs to prevent this amplification and help to maintain reduced body weight after dieting.

"People have looked mainly at the short-term effects of dieting. We wanted to see what changes in the brain in the long term," explains Henning Fenselau, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research, who led the study.