Research
Hormonal
Hormonal regulation of energy balance involves AMPK in the hypothalamus, where ghrelin activates it to promote feeding and leptin inhibits it to suppress feeding.
Your brain uses AMPK to decide when to eat based on hormonal signals. Ghrelin (fasting hormone) turns AMPK on to make you hungry, while leptin (satiety hormone) turns it off. Disruptions in this signaling can lead to overeating.
GoodSupportsHIGH confidence
Ghrelin activates AMPK... to promote feeding... Leptin... has the opposite effect in the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus... where it has been reported to inhibit AMPK-α2.
Why this rating
Strong mechanistic evidence from knockout studies and electrophysiology.
Source
AMP-Activated Protein Kinase: Maintaining Energy Homeostasis at the Cellular and Whole-Body Levels
D. Grahame Hardie · Annual Review of Nutrition · 2014
DOI 10.1146/annurev-nutr-071812-161148
narrative_reviewCited 253×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
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