Making weight loss easier
One of the things we're careful to tell patients is that bariatric surgery is not a cure-all. While the restrictive and malabsorptive qualities of weight loss surgery certainly aid in weight loss, success still requires strict dedication and commitment from patients to eat more healthily and live more active lives.
A common worry for patients considering weight loss surgery is that they will continue to want to eat the same way after surgery than they did before surgery, or before they were trying to lose weight. This is certainly a concern, especially for patients undergoing LAP-BAND or sleeve gastrectomy procedures, as these procedures merely restrict how much room there is in your stomach and do not help keep your body from absorbing calories the way gastric bypass or duodenal switch do.
However, we have anecdotally heard from many patients that following weight loss surgery of all types, they tend to crave or want different kinds of food than they did before surgery Ñ often healthier foods. Science is now beginning to find out why that may be.
Look to the mice
You could certainly argue that the major shift towards a healthy lifestyle that bariatric surgery provides is what's behind the sudden switch to wanting healthier, more nutritious foods. And that's probably part of it. Our patients are so dedicated to their new, healthy lifestyles, we don't doubt that they train themselves to want better foods. (With the help of our dietitian, of course.)
As with most things in life, though, the full explanation may be more complicated. According to research from the Yale University of Medicine, the key may lie in controlling the dopamine reward system in the brain.
The dopamine reward system in the brain has long been shown to be sensitive to sugar in the GI tract. Essentially, the brain senses sugar in the GI tract (because we've consumed it), the dopamine reward system is activated, making us feel happy, and the brain tells our body we want more sugar because we want to keep feeling happy.
The research at Yale University has shown that by bypassing a part of the GI tract (as is done in most weight loss surgery procedures), that dopamine reward center stops being activated by the consumption of sugar. The mice who underwent the experimental gastric bypass surgery no longer craved sugar and licked incessantly at a sugar-water producing spout even though they were satiated, which they did prior to their surgeries.
A ways to go
This is by no means a definitive answer to why weight loss surgery may help patients make better food choices. However, it's a start, and the more we know about why weight loss surgery succeeds, the more successful patients can be.