Behavioral Controls of the Feeding Behavior

Abstract

It has been known that chemical properties of foods control feeding behavior. For example, when animals are deficient in nutrition, they choose the foods which contain deficient nutrition selectively. On the other hand, neophobia and conditioned taste aversion work to avoid the food poisoning. Recently we found physical properties of foods, such as hardness and temperature, also affect the food choice. In this review, we demonstrate how chemical and physical properties of foods control feeding behavior.