June 10, 2026
Author
Michael Platt, Communications
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The mutual appreciation may not extend to midnight pizza pops and The Big Lebowski, but new University of Calgary research shows that rats on cannabis do share an acute craving for food with human marijuana users.
The study is helping scientists understand the mechanics of why cannabis stimulates appetite — knowledge that may in turn help with eating disorders and loss of appetite in cancer patients and others.
“We know cannabis consumption acutely promotes food intake, or the ‘munchies,’ as it is known, but these appetitive effects have not been looked at in depth,” says Dr. Matthew Hill, PhD, a professor at UCalgary’s Hotchkiss Brain Institute at the Cumming School of Medicine.
The joint project by researchers at UCalgary and Washington State University was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Hill and first author, Dr. Catherine Hume, PhD, led the UCalgary portion of the work, focusing on rats and the munchies, while the Washington State team carried out a parallel human clinical study involving 82 study participants between the ages of 21 and 62. Vaporized delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)-dominant cannabis was used in the study.
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Comparing humans and rats, they found that cannabis “acutely and robustly” triggered the munchies in both species. For humans, the fast, intense wave of hunger after using cannabis is a built‑in behavioural reaction that shows up no matter your sex, age, body size, or how recently you’ve eaten, or how full you were before consuming cannabis.
“The sober animals are kind of like, ‘I’m full. Why do I care?’ They don’t put in any effort at all. They barely work in any capacity to get access to food,” Hill says. “But, you get them stoned again, and even though they’re now full and they’ve eaten, they go right back as if they’re starving.”
The researchers also found cannabis consumption did not alter human macros preference. The researchers expected that people with the munchies might eat more carbohydrates (carbs), instead people just increased food consumption, for a time, with no preference for carbs, protein or fat.
It was the same with rats. They appeared to lose preference when offered a variety of treats, enthusiastically pulling all treat-releasing levers for as long as food was available.
Interestingly, while they may rush to eat, pot users don’t actually eat more than non-users, when it comes to total calories consumed over the course of a day, researchers found.
This research could open doors when it comes to new approaches for treating people who struggle with appetite loss. Insight on how cannabis drives food consumption could have therapeutic potential to stimulate weight gain in people who live with anorexia or are experiencing weight loss from the side effects of chemotherapy.
This work was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
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