A recently-conducted study revealed that overeating causes the brain to go haywire. Eating like a swine will trigger a vicious cycle and you will want to eat more. Overeating also surely causes a cascade of damage to your organism and creates the conditions to develop illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease and other.

The first and most important effect that overeating has is that it activates a dormant immune system pathway in the brain. Your organism will become very confused and won’t fight the incoming illnesses as it should, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found.

The researchers reported their detailed findings in the Oct. 3 issue of journal “Cell.” The findings of their study may help health experts explain more clearly why obesity causes a series of so many other diseases.

Dongsheng Cai, one of the researchers, said that overeating activates a dormant immune system pathway in the brain which sends immune cells to annihilate invaders that are not present in the human body at that time.

"We discovered a very general disease pathway in the hypothalamus, a structure in the middle part of the brain which functions to regulate appetite, feeding behavior, energy and therefore body-weight balance and metabolic processes," Cai said.

By stimulating that pathway with excessive amounts of calories, one can trigger the response before the overt onset of obesity and this can easily lead to overeating. Mr. Cai described this process as a “vicious cycle."

The experiments involved in the study were carried out on mice, but researchers said the findings also apply to humans. When researchers fed mice a high-fat diet, their bodies paid no attention to signals from leptin (helps regulate appetite) and insulin (helps convert food into energy).

Now the tricky part: researchers switched off the master switch inflammation (IKKbeta/NF kappa B) in the hypothalamus of mice. After the switch, the small animals maintained a normal body weight despite being provided with a high fat diet.