Binging on cheesecake and Ding Dongs can make you chunky - and turn you into a junkie.
A new study found that delicious, fatty foods are as addictive as cocaine and heroin.
Florida scientists looking into the causes of obesity let lab rats gorge round-the-clock on cake frosting and sweet treats, as well as bacon and sausage, and discovered that it triggered addiction-like responses in their brains.
To maintain their food-induced highs, the rats consumed more and more fatty treats - and got obese in the process.
Writing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, researcher Paul Kenny of the Scripps Research Institute said he suspects the same chemical changes that happen to rats when they devour unhealthy foods might also be happening in humans.
"People know intuitively that there's more to [overeating] than just will power," he says. "There's a system in the brain that's been turned on or overactivated, and that's driving it at some subconscious level."
"Obesity may be a form of compulsive eating," he wrote.
And like heroin addicts hungry for the needle, food-addicted rats are not deterred by the threat of excruciating pain, the researchers found.
When they zapped the rats' feet with electric shocks, they only paused from their gnawing.
"Their attention was solely focused on consuming food," Kenny said.
In previous studies, rats hooked on heroin or cocaine exhibited similar brain changes - and also didn't appear to care about the consequences.
The findings of the Scripps scientist came as no surprise to Dr.Gene-Jack Wang at Long Island's Brookhaven National Laboratory.
"We make our food very similar to cocaine now," he told Health.com. "We purify our food. Our ancestors ate whole grains, but we're eating white bread. American Indians ate corn; we eat corn syrup."
Two-thirds of American adults and one-third of children are believed to be obese or overweight, causing a health care plague that costs the country an estimated $150 billion each year, the feds estimate.
source: nydailynews
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