The way to a woman's heart may be through her stomach, according to a recent study.

Researchers at Drexel University found that women's brains respond more to romantic cues on a full stomach than an empty one, Yahoo Health reported.

"We found that young women both with and without a history of dieting had greater brain activation in response to romantic pictures in reward-related neural regions after having eaten than when hungry," Alice Ely, first author of the study, said in a statement.

Ely said the results are contrary to several previous studies, which showed that people typically demonstrate greater sensitivity to rewarding stimuli when hungry. Such stimuli may include things like food, money and drugs.

For the study, researchers looked at whether the brain's reward response to food differed significantly in women at risk for future obesity (historical dieters) versus those who had never dieted. All of the study participants were young, college-age women of normal weight.

They found that the brains of women with a history of dieting responded more dramatically to positive food cues when fed as compared to women who had never dieted or who were currently dieting.

"In the fed state, historical dieters had a greater reaction in the reward regions than the other two groups to highly palatable food cues versus neutral or moderately palatable cues," Ely said.

Highly palatable cues included foods like chocolate cake; neutral cues were things like carrots.

According to The Examiner, the study also supports "the concept that there is a shared neurocircuitry for both food and sex."

Ely said the data suggests that women who have dieted before may be predisposed by their brain reward circuitry to desire food more than people who have not dieted.

"Based on this study, we hypothesized that historical dieters are differentially sensitive -- after eating -- to rewards in general, so we tested this perception by comparing the same groups' brain activation when viewing romantic pictures compared to neutral stimuli in a fasted and fed state," she said.

While both groups' reward centers responded more to romantic cues when fed, the historical dieters' neural activity noticeably differed from the non-dieters in one brain region that had also turned up in the earlier food studies.

The findings are detailed in the journal Appetite.