Scientists know the stomach talks to the brain, but two new studies from Rutgers Health researchers suggest the conversation is really a tug-of-war, with one side urging another bite, the other signaling “enough.”

Together, the papers in Nature Metabolism and Nature Communications trace the first complementary wiring diagram of hunger and satiety in ways that could refine today’s blockbuster weight-loss drugs and blunt their side effects.

One study, led by Zhiping Pang of Robert Wood Johnson Medical School’s Center for NeuroMetabolism, pinpointed a slender bundle of neurons that runs from the hypothalamus to the brainstem.