[dropcap size=small]A[/dropcap] new study in rats confirms what many of us fatty, fat fats have believed for decades. Scientists believe that fatty foods like bacon, cheesecake, and other treats are as addicting as cocaine.
Paul J. Kenny, Ph.D., an associate professor of molecular therapeutics at the Scripps Research Institute believes that doing drugs like cocaine and eating bacon will gradually overload our pleasure sensors in the brain. The belief is that the brain will cause the pleasure centers to crash, and if you want to achieve the same high you will have to snort more and more cheesecake.
“People know intuitively that there’s more to [overeating] than just willpower,” he said in an interview with CNN. “There’s a system in the brain that’s been turned on or over-activated, and that’s driving [overeating] at some subconscious level.”
From CNN:
In the study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Kenny and his co-author studied three groups of lab rats for 40 days. One of the groups was fed regular rat food. A second was fed bacon, sausage, cheesecake, frosting, and other fattening, high-calorie foods–but only for one hour each day. The third group was allowed to pig out on the unhealthy foods for up to 23 hours a day.
Not surprisingly, the rats that gorged themselves on the human food quickly became obese. But their brains also changed. By monitoring implanted brain electrodes, the researchers found that the rats in the third group gradually developed a tolerance to the pleasure the food gave them and had to eat more to experience a high.
They began to eat compulsively, to the point where they continued to do so in the face of pain. When the researchers applied an electric shock to the rats’ feet in the presence of the food, the rats in the first two groups were frightened away from eating. But the obese rats were not. “Their attention was solely focused on consuming food,” says Kenny.
Dr. Gene-Jack Wang, M.D., the chair of the medical department at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory added that “We make our food very similar to cocaine now,” he says. “We purify our food. Our ancestors ate whole grains, but we’re eating white bread. American Indians ate corn; we eat corn syrup.”
Dr. Wang believes that we “eat unconsciously and unnecessarily.” He believes that bingers will eat “like a drug abuser [uses drugs],” says Wang.
Wang cautioned against applying these results to humans immediately, saying “You can’t mimic completely human behavior, but [animal studies] can give you a clue about what can happen in humans,” Wang says.
The scientists believe that if there is a way to develop therapeutics for drug addiction, a similar cure may be found for overeaters.
