Drinking microstructure in humans: A proof of concept study of a novel drinkometer in healthy adults

Altered Activity of Lateral Orbitofrontal Cortex Neurons in Mice following Chronic Intermittent Ethanol Exposure

“…We also examined the microstructure of drinking episodes and found that CIE exposure increased the number of drinking bouts per session, consistent with some previous findings (Robinson & McCool, 2015). Interestingly, a human laboratory drinking study found that an increase in the number of drinking bouts was highly correlated with reported levels of liking a drink (Gero et al, 2019). However, Barkley-Levinson and Crabbe (2015) found that two different strains of mice, selected for high alcohol consumption, consumed high levels of alcohol through either larger bouts or a higher frequency of bouts.…”

Challenges in the interpretation and therapeutic manipulation of human ingestive microstructure

“…However, interventions aiming to keep burst volume in a "healthy" range, which remains to be defined in large scale observational studies, may have a meaningful contribution in the treatment of obesity. To fill this data gap, our group recently performed a pilot study to analyze the ingestive behavior following Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) in humans using a custom-built and validated drinkometer (28). Preliminary data suggest that the postbariatric reduction in overall food intake in humans is due to smaller burst sizes and not to decreased number of bursts (29) which is in accordance with previous animal data (48).…”

“…To our knowledge, no published research has directly tested the interpretative significance of burst-related characteristics in human adults. In an exploratory study involving healthy lean participants, our research group identified an association of male sex with higher burst volume of liquid stimuli, while total number of bursts did not differ between males and females (28).…”

“…However, this could be due to a direct effect on the pattern generator rather than a specific satiation effect. Human studies also found a stable chewing/licking frequency across different conditions, including sex, bite size, different food, deprivation state or body weight (range= 1.1 -1.4/s) (28,65). Remarkably, psychosocial stress under laboratory conditions was able to increase chewing frequency in a study where participants were offered various solid foods and chewing behavior was recorded with a sound sensor system (33).…”

“…Over the last decades, high definition recording of nutrient intake within one single meal of solid or liquid food, or during breast-feeding, has been deployed in human research (12,28,45). More recently, data collection has been facilitated by a variety of wearable sensors, which detect meal patterns and food intake dynamics that occur under real-world circumstances (36).…”