May 22, 2015 02:54 PM EDT By Staff Reporter, UniversityHerald Reporter

TV food commercials disproportionately stimulate the brains of overweight adolescents, according to a recent study.

Researchers at Dartmouth College found that in obese and overweight teens, "the brain's pleasure centers respond more robustly to fast-food advertising than they do in leaner teens," The Los Angeles Times reported.

"This finding suggests the intriguing possibility that overweight adolescents mentally simulate eating while watching food commercials," Kristina Rapuano, lead author of the study, said in a statement. "These brain responses may demonstrate one factor whereby unhealthy eating behaviors become reinforced and turned into habits that potentially hamper a person's ability lose weight later in life."

For the study, researchers examined brain responses to two dozen fast food commercials and non-food commercials in overweight and healthy-weight adolescents between the ages of 12 and 16. The commercials were embedded within an age-appropriate show, "The Big Bang Theory," so the participants were unaware of the study's purpose.

The findings that the food ads stimulated brain regions involved in attention and focus and in processing rewards. Also, adolescents with higher body fat showed greater reward-related activity than healthy weight teens in the orbitofrontal cortex and in regions associated with taste perception.

"Unhealthy eating is thought to involve both an initial desire to eat a tempting food, such as a piece of cake, and a motor plan to enact the behavior, or eating it," Rapuano said. "Diet intervention strategies largely focus on minimizing or inhibiting the desire to eat the tempting food, with the logic being that if one does not desire, then one won't enact. Our findings suggest a second point of intervention may be the somatomotor simulation of eating behavior that follows from the desire to eat. Interventions that target this system, either to minimize the simulation of unhealthy eating or to promote the simulation of healthy eating, may ultimately prove to be more useful than trying to suppress the desire to eat."

According to the study, Children and adolescents see an average of 13 food commercials per day, "so it isn't surprising they show a strong reward response to food commercials."

The findings are detailed in the journal Cerebral Cortex. 

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