A "hunger hormone"?

Abstract

Many years ago it was suggested by Luckhardt and Carlson (5) that hunger is governed by a "hormone." This hypothesis developed from the observation that under certain conditions, defibrinated blood transfused from a starved dog augments the stomach contractions (hunger pangs) of the satiated recipient. Conversely, Tschukitscheff (as reported by Bash [1]) observed the inhibition of gastric motility in a starved dog following the transfusion of blood from a surfeited donor. Most recently, the hormone hypothesis has been revived by Morgan (6) and by Morgan and Stellar (7).It is to be noted that in the fashion of the day, Carlson defined hunger in terms of gastric motility. Recognizing the absence of perfect correlation between food ingestion and stomach motility, he has defended his adoption of the latter as a more valid index of hunger (2). In recent psychological discourse, emphasis has shifted to the overt or behavioral manifestations of hunger, i.e., it is operationally defined in terms of the instrumental act of approaching food or the consummatory response of food ingestion (cf. 1, 4, 7). The experiment reported here was designed to examine the hormone hypothesis within the context of such a behavioral definition of hunger. Our methodology paralleled that of Luckhardt and Carlson. We injected animals with blood drawn from surfeited donors and we injected animals with blood drawn from hungry (food-deprived) donors. To anticipate our results, the subsequent food intake of the two recipient groups was found to be strikingly identical in amount. METHOD

Food intake of the rat following the intragastric administration of "hungry" and "satiated" blood.

“…It has been suggested that hunger may be hormonally governed in the sense that: (a) food privation is accompanied by the build-up in the blood stream of an agent capable of exciting hunger ("hunger" hormone), or (6) the ingestion of food releases an agent capable of inhibiting hunger ("satiation" hormone) (3,5,6). An earlier article by Siegel and Taub (9) has presented evidence negative to this hypothesis. It was shown that the immediately subsequent food intake of rats injected intraperitoneally with blood serum drawn from food-deprived donors was equal to that of animals similarly injected with blood serum drawn from satiated donors.…”