Regulation of energy intake and the body weight: the glucostatic theory and the lipostatic hypothesis.

TLDR: With the collaboration of Anliker, an experimental psychologist versed in the “Skinner box” techniques, the study of the probability of response to exposure to food and on the frequency of work for food of normal mice, as well as of littermates with the hereditary obese hyperglycemic syndrome, goldthioglucose obesity, and hypothalamic obesity is undertaken.

Abstract: The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines hunger as (1) a craving for food, and (2) any strong craving. Appetite is defined as the natural desire for satisfying some want or need, as of food. Other definitions have introduced emphasis on this or that component. Carlson,’ for example, has defined hunger as “a more or less uncomfortable feeling of pressure and pain referred to the region of the stomach”; Grossman and Stein: in an excellent article on hunger feelings following insulin and their persistence after vagotomy, have distinguished between the sensation of being “hungry all over” and epigastric pangs. Other authors have emphasized differences in psychic associations, as well as in intensity, between appetite and hunger. All these considerations should make it clear that hunger and appetite are generally understood to be sensations or feelings that, as such, are not properly amenable to regulation. The sensory meaning has been so generally accepted that, desirable though it may be to reject it, as suggested by Doctor Hollander, it seems a little late in the day to do so. It is even diflicult to record the appearance of these sensations and, a fortiori, their intensity, except through a behavioristic approach. As all of us have known empirically since childhood and as can be clearly evidenced in the laboratory, a multiplicity of factors, emotions, urges, environmental temperature, necessity for exercise, will interfere to modify the tendency to partake of food. Often, the course of action in time of these factors is complex: acute exposure to cold will inhibit tendency to eat in a first phase, yet increase it later. When dealing with a problem which can be attacked only behavioristically and which depends on a multiplicity of variables, the only systematic approach that I know of is the statistical method of Skinner, who studied the frequency or probability of responses to this or that stimulus. With the collaboration of Anliker, an experimental psychologist versed in the “Skinner box” techniques (as well as in electronics and recording techniques), we have recently embarked on the study of the probability of response to exposure to food and on the frequency of work for food of normal mice, as well as of littermates with the hereditary obese hyperglycemic syndrome, goldthioglucose obesity, and hypothalamic obesity. This study will enable us, we hope, to obtain analysis of correlations of response to various physiologic stimuli, as well as an exploration of how much conditioning can be introduced in these responses. Results, however, are too preliminary to warrant a report a t this date. Even then, of course, they will not deal with a regulation, but only with a pattern of feeding.