Only the RF diet decreased activity in brain-reward regions in response to food cues.
CORTEX
Participants rated the pleasantness of a variety of food images during fMRI sessions 4.5 hours after lunch on the fifth day (third inpatient day) of the first eucaloric baseline diet period and on the fifth day of the RC and RF diets. Voxel-wise blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) responses to food images were compared with fixation within an a priori reward-region mask encompassing orbitofrontal cortex and striatal-pallidal neurocircuit as previously reported (Compared with baseline, only the RF diet resulted in reduced activity in bilateral striatal clusters in caudate and putamen after correction for multiple comparisons as described in Methods (