Word: high-fat
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...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" hooked long-term...
...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...
...food labels, echoes that sentiment. "There is evidence that consumer pressure generated through the traffic-light scheme can lead to product reformulation by retailers," she says. "One major retailer told me how their least healthy sandwich range was phased out when labeling was introduced, as people stopped buying the high-fat and -salt options." (See "Cutting Salt Can Have Big Health Benefits...
Which points to another problem: the fat-free diet. It's difficult to maintain and, over the long term, nutritionally unsound; humans need fat to survive. "People don't lose any more weight on a low-fat diet than they do on a high-fat one," says David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children's Hospital Boston...
Gordon also found in his mouse populations that changing the animals' diet caused a dramatic and rapid shift in the population of bacteria in their gut. Switching a mouse from low-fat plant chow to a high-fat Western diet resulted in an explosion of Firmicutes in less than...