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Late-Afternoon Munchies? Blame Your Brain
Heavy thinking burns calories — go ahead, give your brain that bag of chips
It’s 4:45 p.m. at the office and you’re feeling mentally drained. You can barely get yourself to open — let alone answer — one more email. You open your file drawer which contains zero files, but does contain multiple snacks. Ah, yes: Chips!
There’s a scientific explanation for this late-afternoon work-snack phenomenon. Research shows that the brain burns calories with heavy thinking. Demanding mental work, even done sitting stationary at a desk, requires physical energy, and eventually the brain wants you to replenish it. It all comes down to glucose, a form of simple sugar, and how the brain uses it.
“The brain uses fuel to do work,” says Ewan C. McNay, Ph.D, Associate Professor and Area Head, Behavioral Neuroscience University at Albany. “That fuel in humans is in the form almost exclusively of sugar, which contains calories.”
“We used to think that there was just a pool of glucose that your brain uses,” adds Benjamin Ampel, a researcher at the University at Albany. “Actually, glucose is compartmentalized in your brain, with each region having its own localized pool. It’s all connected, but that means that when you use a certain part of your brain intensively, we see…
