Dr. Diego Bohórquez

Yes, and then Professor Tony Sclafani, he had been studying these behaviors and he went in so far to suggest that perhaps the sodium glucose transporters are some of the ones that are detecting the sugar as it enters the intestine and that's what is causing the behavior.

So we began working on the system and we wonder, could these cells,

be the ones that are guiding that behavior.

And around the time that we published this work, Professor Charles Zucker at Columbia also further advanced that area by building on the previous work and demonstrated that there were a population of neurons in the brainstem that were integrating this information from the gut

And by that, the gut and the brain were guiding this behavior.

Correct.

And as I usually say, I call it instinctively because our mother doesn't have to teach us, hey, Diego, that is glucose, you know.

It may present us in some ways, but at the end of the day, I have to go and get my glucose, get my amino acids, right?

Because eating is very simple.

We're just trying to solve this issue of getting our carbons, getting our nitrogen, getting our phosphorus, our potassium, our sodium, and our chloride in so many different ways, shape, or forms, right?

So I went back to the experiment, the key experiment.

So when we were able to put these opsins and bring the light and shut off these cells very rapidly, when we had presented the animal with a choice of sweetener over sugar, then all of a sudden the animal became blind to the solutions.

It couldn't discern between the stevia, so to speak, or the sweetener from the actual sugar.

The intestine.

That's right.

Right after the stomach.

It's like just a small portion of the intestine.

The conscious sweet taste.

Which of you think about it?

It's not fully conscious, right?