Biopsychologist, Prof. Marion Hetherington, on the Effect of Psychology and Physiology on Appetite

Automatic TRANSCRIPT

Professor. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me like i said. I'm very excited to dive into a lot of these topics. And i think something that might set the stage for people early on is when we think about this psycho biological approach to human appetite. You've written really excellently. In some of your work abou the mistake we might make if we were to consider appetite solely on the basis of physiology or psychology particularly when we think around what drives food intake and that they are inextricably linked wondering. Could you just frame that. For people of what is a the most accurate way we can think of that. Overlap between physiology and psychology when it comes to appetite unless a behavioral scientist. I'm very interested in human behavior. But you just can't get away from the fact that human behavior is driven by really strong physiological needs however food and in our society as everyone is aware is very much shaped by our culture by our cuisine by our environments and to great extent what we eat is powerful identity so when we think about psycho biology appetite. We're thinking about the behaviors that we express and we think about what drives those behaviors and in particular. I'm very interested in genetics. I'm interested in the genetics of obesity. For example and the way. I understand that is to think about the risk factors for obesity being highly heritable. And then ho. That's expressed in terms of behavior and i'm not saying that genes our destiny. I'm simply saying that. The genes are really important and as a psychologist. I need to understand a little bit about the heritage ability of some of these eighteen treats and risk factors for overweight obesity so that i can understand the behaviors

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