GOURMAND SYNDROME

GOURMAND SYNDROME

“Gourmand Syndrome” Is The Most Delicious Kind Of Brain Injury

Gourmand syndrome is a rare, benign condition that sometimes occurs in people who sustain injuries to the right frontal lobe. These people develop a new, post-injury passion for gourmet food. It was first described by Regard and Landis in the journal Neurology.

The disorder is caused by lesions in a certain part of the brain. The lesions are always in the right hemisphere of the brain and cluster around the limbic system and the basal ganglia – the gooey center of the brain which deals with emotion and motivation. The lesions could be brought on by a stroke or by an injury to the head. Either way, after the lesions appear, something strange starts to happen.

Sometimes the strangeness is confined to specific behaviors and occasional outbursts. The person suddenly felt deep cravings for really good pesto, despite not finding pesto especially enthralling before. Sometimes the strangeness changes the injured person’s entire life. The journalist, who had been interested in politics, quit his job and became a food writer.

What was consistent was the fact that the strange behavior centered around food. Sufferers thought about food, discussed it, wrote about it, and of course ate it. Usually, the food had to be high quality. People were interested in fine dining, not in cramming down whatever food they could get their hands on. This is why the behavior, when it was finally named in a paper in 1997, acquired the name “Gourmand Syndrome,” not “Glutton Syndrome.”

The paper describes about thirty-four patients who became preoccupied with really good food and found they had lesions in a specific part of their brain and the syndrome doesn’t appear to be curable.