The wild cravings we all get for junk food from time to time may feel illogical and uncontrollable, but according to scientists junk food is in fact as addictive as hard drugs. Cheeseburgers – the legal form of crack?
A team of scientists have shown that when a group of rats were fed a diet of foods high in fat and sugars, this caused them to compulsively overeat. The team also recorded changes in the rats’ brains similar to those which happen in the human brain when someone is addicted to heroin or cocaine.
The three year study showed that a diet of junk food totally overruled the rats’ normal behaviour, causing them to either starve when their desired food was not available or overeat drastically.
The rats quickly became to desperate for the fatty food that they would even put up with painful electric shocks to obtain it. They also chose to starve themselves than eat the healthier alternatives eaten by the group that had never been exposed to junk.
By analysing the brains of the rats, the research team showed that just as a pleasure-reward system in humans becomes over stimulated through drug addiction, the rats were forced to eat more and more fatty foods to get the same high of pleasure.
The lead scientists on the study, Professor Paul Kenny of the Scripps Research Institute in Florida, said that the results provided very clear evidence that drug addiction and obesity are rooted in ‘the same underlying neurobiological mechanisms’.