Burgers as Addictive as Cocaine for Fast Food Junkies
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New research from Florida shows fast food affects the brain in the same way as hard drugs.
New research from scientists in America suggests that junk food such as chocolate, burgers and chips are as addictive as Class A drugs such as cocaine and heroin.
A team from the Scripps Research Institute in Florida found that lab rats became addicted to high-fat foods, displaying similar brain responses to those animals given drugs.
Rats were split into three groups: one had a highly regulated diet of healthy food; one was given access to a little junk food; and one was completely unrestricted in the amount of high-calorie junk food it was given.
Unsurprisingly, the third group of rats quickly became obese, but what was more interesting for the researchers was that the rats got into a habit of binge eating, refusing healthy foods and gorging themselves on those foods with the highest fat and sugar content.
Lead scientist on the project, Dr Paul Kenny told The Daily Telegraph: “They always went for the worst types of food and as a result, they took in twice the calories as the control rats. When we removed the junk food and tried to put them on a nutritious diet – what we called the “salad bar option” – they simply refused to eat.”
When the researchers monitored the rats’ levels of pleasure through electronic stimulation, those on the junk food diets consistently needed higher levels of stimulation to gain the same amount of pleasure than non-junk food rats.
As the rats became harder to please, they ate more food as a last resort for happiness. The same behaviour has been observed in rats, and humans addicted to cocaine and other hard drugs. Dr Kelly said the research, “presents the most thorough and compelling evidence that drug addiction and obesity are based on the same underlying neurobiological mechanisms.”
Just great, first they eliminate normal healthy food and try to stuff us full of aspartame and high fructose corn syrup then when people get fat and unhealthy they want to develop a pill for it which will probably turn out to be worse than the disease. Yes, food is addictive, I’ve been on it myself for quite some time. There’s an interesting post over at the Health Journal Club that makes the case that people should just not eat anything that wasn’t a food 100 years ago. Gets rid of the aspartame, bleached GM flour, high fructose corn syrup garbage they try to pass off as food these days.