Hunger

In order to function properly, as an organism, we need to maintain an inner balance. This process is constantly realized as a reflex of our bodies and it is called homeostasis. A body function triggered by the homeostasis point is hunger. When there is a lack of nutritional elements, our brain makes us feel hungry. When we feel thirsty, we can easily choose to drink water in order to satisfy this need, but things are a little bit different regarding hunger. We can choose to eat from an enormous variety of food.

Our brains were created with different ways of choosing the kinds of food we need. Some of them imply fundamental taste preferences which we were born with and other ways imply preferring learning mechanisms for certain foods.

Firstly, we can talk about flavor. This specific element contains both taste and smell components. People come in this world "programmed" with native inclinations and aversions for certain tastes. This is proven by the fact that babies react to the sweet taste by licking their lips and to the bitter taste by turning away their heads and show a disgusted face. Food producers speculated around our native predisposition towards sweet and so they created foods which incite us to excessive consume. In order to explain this predisposition, researchers think that sweet taste represents a label for foods which are an excellent source of calories. Analogous, the bitter taste represents a label for the bitter compounds which are usually found in the toxic plants.

Secondly, there is another way of developing preferences for certain tastes: the individual or social learning mechanism. One of these mechanisms is active when the preference is based on the consequences of eating something with a certain taste. When we experiment positive and nourishing consequences, we develop a form of pleasure for the certain taste through a process called classical conditional learning.

No matter what kind of food we eat it is clearly that we must eat in order to maintain the energetic equilibrium of the body. The cells inside our body burn fuel in order to produce the necessary amount of energy which is needed for the proper function of the organism. Physical exercises determine the muscular cells to burn more fuel in order to respond to the metabolic requests made. When you read these lines, the neurons inside your brain also consume energy in order to respond to the metabolic needs created when the electrical impulses were generated and when neurotransmitters were produced.

The main source of fuel for the nervous cells is glucose. This element can be found in fruits and many other foods. Glucose can also be manufactured by the liver from other sugars or carbohydrates.

Another important thing about hunger is the psychological indicators. In a way, hunger is what we feel when we don't have the feeling of satiety. As long as we have food in the stomach and intestines or as long as our storage of calories has a high level inside our bodies, we feel relatively satiated. When all these start to decline, hunger appears. In order for the satiety feeling to appear, a specific process needs to take place. In the first place, after we eat something, the chemical substances inside our stomach send a message to the brain, throughout the vague nerve. Then, another signal is send when the food reaches the duodenum. Here, the CCK hormone is released in the blood and when it gets to the brain is detected by the specialized receptors.This fact has been proven through an experiment in which hungry animals were injected with the CCK hormone. In a few seconds these animals stopped eating, even though they only had a few bites because they felt satiated.

In conclusion, hunger is a feeling which triggered when the homeostasis point is in disequilibrium. This means that the body lost its inner balance because the calories needed for the proper functioning of the cells are too reduced. At this point we can choose from a large variety of foods something efficient enough to increase the quantity of glucose and so to contribute to the balance of fuel of the nervous cells.