I'm So Hungry I Could...

Throw Up! Lemme guess, you were thinking I would say "eat a horse" right? Well, for some people that may be the way they feel. But feeling nauseous or throwing up are also options. Maybe not super common, but hey, the world needs a little variety right?

I must admit I haven't really experienced this myself. Mostly when I'm hungry I get really irritated and short tempered and nobody wants to be around me. Same goes for when I'm really tired. So basically as long as I am fed and well rested I'm a pretty pleasant person. According to my mom this has been the case pretty much since I was born. What can I say, I'm a creature of habit.

But back to the original point which is that some people experience nausea or even vomiting when they are really hungry. Elise first brought this phenomenon to my attention and asked why it would be the case (she seems to have a lot of good questions like that). And I have finally found an answer. I think.

At first I thought that it had something to do with Substance P. And no, I didn't just make that up. Substance P is a neurotransmitter associated with pain and inflammation. It is found in high quantities in the emetic (read: vomiting) center of the brain. There is also a drug that is a Substance P antagonist that is used to stop nausea and vomiting in patients on chemotherapy. So I thought that maybe when your body has little or no food in it Substance P levels increase and cause nausea and this may be the case. But only because I couldn't find any studies saying that this wasn't the case: )

Amazingly enough, scientists who are interested in studying Substance P do so in rats and apparently it's hard to measure nausea in a rat, since they can't really see it and the rats can't fill out surveys or anything. So there just aren't really any studies to confirm my hypothesis. And considering the way my experiments tend to go I am thinking it's best that I don't set up a study myself : )

There is however a disease (I hesitate to call it that because it sounds so dirty and really it's not. So we'll call it a condition ) that can cause these symptoms. And its pretty common. Hypoglycemia to be exact. (Literally meaning "under-sweet blood." Which makes me wonder how you would know the proper sweetness level of your blood to begin with.) Anyway, it turns out that a common symptom of hypoglycemia is nausea. So it is possible that people who would rather throw up than eat a horse when hungry (and honestly I don't think anybody really wants to do either) may be slightly hypoglycemic. You'd have to go to your Dr. to be sure, but if the problem goes away after you eat then there's a pretty good chance that this could be the case. Unless you did eat a horse, in which case you have bigger problems to deal with : )