Word: foodes
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...funny thing is that the same headlines are still making news - except written in reverse. On March 29, the New York Daily News declared: "Fatty foods may be just as addictive as heroin and cocaine: study." Indeed, a look at Americans' collectively expanding waistline - with two-thirds of adults qualifying as overweight or obese - would suggest that the Scientific American article may have actually understated the addictiveness of junk food, not cocaine. Some addiction researchers might even argue that potato chips - and other high-fat, high-calorie foods - are more effective than a crack pipe in terms of keeping "users...
...most recent study to examine the addictive quality of fattening foods was published online March 28 by the journal Nature Neuroscience. For the paper, researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla., examined three groups of lab rats that were fed various diets for 40 days. One group was given typical rat chow only; a second group was offered rat chow, plus a buffet of bacon, sausage, cheesecake, chocolate frosting and other delectable goodies for one hour a day; and a third group was allowed extended access to the fatty buffet for up to 23 hours...
...extended-access group began consuming twice as many calories as the other rats, and, not surprisingly, became obese. The limited-access rats, meanwhile, developed a binge pattern of eating, consuming most of their daily calories during the single hour they were allowed in the junk food "cafeteria...
...what shocked the researchers was that extended-access rats also showed deficits in their "reward threshold." That is, unrestricted exposure to large quantities of high-sugar, high-fat foods changed the functioning of the rats' brain circuitry, making it harder and harder for them to register pleasure - in other words, they developed a type of tolerance often seen in addiction - an effect that got progressively worse as the rats gained more weight. "It was quite profound," says study author Paul Kenny, an associate professor of neuroscience at the Scripps Research Institute. The reward-response effects seen in the fatty-food...
...regulation of this dopamine D2 receptor," says David Shertleff, director of the division of basic neuroscience and behavioral research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. "This system is geared toward motivating behavior normally, but what's happening here is, with chronic exposure to highly fatty and sweet manufactured food, you're actually getting to a pathological state...