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Many homes have a large kitchen area devoted to preparation of meals and food, and may have a dining room, dining hall, or another designated area for eating. Most societies also have restaurants, food courts, and food vendors so that people may eat when away from home, when lacking time to prepare food, or as a social occasion. People usually have two or three meals a day. Snacks of smaller amounts may be consumed between meals.
In jurisdictions under Sharia law, it may be proscribed for Muslim adults during the daylight hours of Ramadan. This section does not cite any sources. Newborn babies do not eat adult foods. They survive solely on breast milk or formula. Small amounts of pureed food are sometimes fed to young infants as young as two or three months old, but most infants do not eat adult food until they are between six and eight months old.
Eating positions vary according to the different regions of the world, as culture influences the way people eat their meals. For example, most of the Middle Eastern countries, eating while sitting on the floor is most common, and it is believed to be healthier than eating while sitting to a table. Eating in a reclining position was favored by the Ancient Greeks at a celebration they called a symposium, and this custom was adopted by the Ancient Romans. Compulsive overeating, or emotional eating, is “the tendency to eat in response to negative emotions”. Empirical studies have indicated that anxiety leads to decreased food consumption in people with normal weight and increased food consumption in the obese.
Many laboratory studies showed that overweight individuals are more emotionally reactive and are more likely to overeat when distressed than people of normal weight. Furthermore, it was consistently found that obese individuals experience negative emotions more frequently and more intensively than do normal weight persons. The naturalistic study by Lowe and Fisher compared the emotional reactivity and emotional eating of normal and overweight female college students. The study confirmed the tendency of obese individuals to overeat, but these findings applied only to snacks, not to meals.
There are many physiological mechanisms that control starting and stopping a meal. The control of food intake is a physiologically complex, motivated behavioral system. There are numerous signals given off that initiate hunger. There are environmental signals, signals from the gastrointestinal system, and metabolic signals that trigger hunger.
The environmental signals come from the body’s senses. Environmental signals and ghrelin are not the only signals that initiate hunger, there are other metabolic signals as well. As time passes between meals, the body starts to take nutrients from long-term reservoirs. There are short-term signals of satiety that arise from the head, the stomach, the intestines, and the liver.
The long-term signals of satiety come from adipose tissue. The taste and odor of food can contribute to short-term satiety, allowing the body to learn when to stop eating. The brain stem can control food intake, because it contains neural circuits that detect hunger and satiety signals from other parts of the body. The brain stem’s involvement of food intake has been researched using rats. MCH plays a bigger role in producing hunger. In mice, MCH stimulates feeding and a mutation causing the overproduction of MCH led to overeating and obesity.
Satiety in the hypothalamus is stimulated by leptin. Leptin targets the receptors on the arcuate nucleus and suppresses the secretion of MCH and orexin. The arcuate nucleus also contains two more peptides that suppress hunger. Physiologically, eating is generally triggered by hunger, but there are numerous physical and psychological conditions that can affect appetite and disrupt normal eating patterns.