06 Jul Why does cannabis give people the munchies?

It’s more than hunger. It’s a taste-obsession that cannot go unquelled.

I know most of us at Green Cross of Torrance have all been there. Combining things like Pringles and Cool Whip, eating the questionable noms from the back of the pantry, waiting on pizza like it’s water in a desert wasteland…ah, the munchies. While most cannabis enthusiasts or even dabblers are familiar with the experience, knowing why they happen is less common.

It’s probably apparent to you that cannabis affects how the brain functions. It does this because our brains have cannabinoid receptors that cannabis’s cannabinoids, like the popular THC and CBD, interact with. (Our bodies also make endocannabinoids which work with the same receptors.) This interaction affects all kinds of things, including controlling one’s appetite. According to Smithsonian, a team of European neuroscientists found that THC fits into these receptors in the olfactory bulbs of mice, which increased their ability to smell food.

So, at least partially, cannabis could cause the munchies simply because it increases one’s ability to smell; and as a result, taste. But there’s more. In addition to making our ability to smell and taste more acute, cannabinoids also affect on what chemicals are released in the brain – to put it simply, it flips the hormone from the one that ought to make mice (or humans) aware that they’re full, to telling them they’re H-U-N-G-R-Y.

Research is really just beginning, but it’s already fascinating. But why would a plant evolve to make an eater hungrier? Is this  function flipping because of other functions having also been switched by cannabis? The questions are still far more numerous than answers, but scientists are excited. Let’s celebrate over some Funyuns!