A new study conducted at Miriam Hospital has discovered why some severely obese individuals don't know when they've eaten to their full capacities and finding it difficult to control the amount of food they consume during a meal.

The study said that the physiological process, which makes person feel full after consuming food to the point of being truly full may be impaired in severely obese people.

Dale Bond, PhD, of The Miriam Hospital's Weight Control and Diabetes Research Center along with his expert group analyzed how two groups of people reacted to repeat tasting of lemon juice.

The study researchers probed the reactions of two groups of people to repeated tasting of lemon juice.

One group included 34 obese people who were ready to have bariatric surgical procedure that lessens the stomach's capacity, whereas the second group consisted of 18 normal-weight people.

The study researchers evaluated how much partakers salivated after having a taste of lemon juice.

The participants in second group gradually salivated less each time they tasted some of the juice, pointing that they had habituated, or adjusted, to the stimulus of lemon juice.

But the participants in first group continued to salivate the same amount all through the tastings.

“The failure of bariatric surgery candidates to habituate suggests that satiation, or the feeling of fullness while eating, is impaired in this population. This could play a role in the inability of some severely obese individuals to regulate or control the amount of food that they eat during a meal,” Bond said.

The findings of the study support earlier research comparing people with mild obesity and normal-weight people.

However, the researchers said that that this is the primary research to examine this model in a severely obese group.

The results of the study appeared online in Obesity Surgery.