The hypothalamic feeding-center model, articulated in the 1950s, held that the
hypothalamus contains the interoceptors sensitive to blood-borne correlates of available or
stored fuels as well as the integrative substrates that process metabolic and visceral afferent
signals and issue commands to brainstem mechanisms for the production of ingestive
behavior. A number of findings reviewed here, however, indicate that sensory and
integrative functions are distributed across a central control axis that includes critical …