Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with cannabis can tell you the munchies are real. Although it’s a phenomenon that’s well known to science, the research on it is lacking. Or at least it was until a study from Washington State University researchers was published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
To better characterize what’s going on when we experience the munchies (or “acute hyperphagia,” as they call it), Carrie Cuttler and Ryan McLaughlin of Washington State University asked 82 lucky participants to vape either 20 or 40 milligrams of cannabis or a placebo and allowed them to choose from a selection of snacks.
“The human study found irrespective of body mass index, time of last food consumption, sex, or how much cannabis was consumed, human participants who used cannabis during the trial ate significantly more food,” McLaughlin said in a statement.
So the munchies seem to be a universal experience among cannabis-consuming humans, but what about rats? To answer that question, Cuttler and McLaughlin turned to their colleagues Matthew Hill and Catherine Hume from the University of Calgary. They performed a similar experiment, getting rats stoned in a controlled environment and allowing them to press levers for a food reward. Just like their human counterparts, the stoned rats experienced serious snack attacks.
Read more: “The Psychology of Getting High—a Lot”
“The sober animals are kind of like, ‘I’m full. Why do I care?’ They don’t put in any effort at all. They barely work in any capacity to get access to food,” Hill said. “But you get them stoned again, and even though they’re now full and they’ve eaten, they go right back as if they’re starving.”
What exactly is going on? Our bodies naturally produce cannabinoids (called endocannabinoids) that regulate a host of things—from memory and mood to pain and appetite—by binding to receptors in our brains and throughout our bodies. Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) throws things into disarray.
To find out which receptors THC acts on, the researchers blocked cannabinoid receptors in the peripheral nervous systems of some rats and in the brains of others. They found that blocking cannabinoid receptors in the peripheral nervous system did nothing to curb rats’ appetites, but blocking them in the brain did.
“That’s what really gives us the opportunity to look at whether this is something brain-mediated or gut-mediated, and this generally shows ‘the munchies’ are mediated by the brain,” McLaughlin explained.
Going forward, the researchers hope these new findings will lead to better treatments for disorders marked by a declining appetite. “There are a lot of different diseases, conditions, and disorders associated with wasting syndromes and lack of appetite, and this study really supports the idea that cannabis can be used medicinally to increase appetite in people who have conditions like HIV, AIDS, or who are on chemotherapy,” Cutler said.
Until then, feel free to conduct your own research, responsibly of course. 
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Lead image: Chmee2 / Wikimedia Commons
