Paul Smeets

Paul Smeets is an affiliated associate professor at the UMC Utrecht (guest). He trained in Behavioral Biology after which he started his career in food-related neuroimaging with MRI at the Image Sciences Institute (UMC Utrecht) in 2002. Currently, he is associate professor at the Division of Human Nutrition and Health of Wageningen University. A central theme in his research are the decisions that govern eating behaviors such as food choice, meal initiation and meal termination. These are taken in the brain on the basis of multiple neural as well as hormonal signals that reflect various determinants of eating such as sensory signaling, hunger state, stomach contents, appetite-related gut hormones, food reward and food-related cognitions. In recent years he has been expanding an innovative research area focused on the development and cross-disciplinary application of novel MRI techniques to monitor the behavior of food in the stomach, its digestion and associated physiological effects.

Research line

Nutritional and Translational Neuroscience

Most recent key publications

1: Smeets, P., Deng, R., Van Eijnatten, E., & Mayar, M. (2021). Monitoring food digestion with magnetic resonance techniques. Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 80(2), 148-158. doi:10.1017/S0029665120007867

2: Smeets PAM, Dagher A, Hare TA, Kullmann S, van der Laan LN, Poldrack RA, Preissl H, Small D, Stice E, Veldhuizen MG. Good practice in food-related neuroimaging. Am J Clin Nutr. 2019 Mar 1;109(3):491-503. doi: 10.1093/ajcn/nqy344.

3: van Meer F, van der Laan LN, Viergever MA, Adan RAH, Smeets PAM; I.Family Consortium. Considering healthiness promotes healthier choices but modulates medial prefrontal cortex differently in children compared with adults. Neuroimage. 2017 Oct 1;159:325-333. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.08.007.

4: van Meer F, van der Laan LN, Charbonnier L, Viergever MA, Adan RA, Smeets PA; I.Family Consortium. Developmental differences in the brain response to unhealthy food cues: an fMRI study of children and adults. Am J Clin Nutr. 2016 Dec;104(6):1515-1522.

5: Camps G, Mars M, de Graaf C, Smeets PA. Empty calories and phantom fullness: a randomized trial studying the relative effects of energy density and viscosity on gastric emptying determined by MRI and satiety. Am J Clin Nutr. 2016 Jul;104(1):73-80. doi:10.3945/ajcn.115.129064.

6: van Meer F, van der Laan LN, Adan RA, Viergever MA, Smeets PA. What you see is what you eat: an ALE meta-analysis of the neural correlates of food viewing in children and adolescents. Neuroimage. 2015 Jan 1;104:35-43. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.09.069.