Quote of the week: "We make our food very similar to cocaine now"
That remark was made by Dr. Gene-Jack Wang, M.D., the chair of the medical department at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, in Upton, New York. His comment was in response to a new scientific study published published online March 28, 2010, in Nature Neuroscience. The study in rats suggests that high-fat, high-calorie foods affect the brain in much the same way as cocaine and heroin. When rats consume these foods in great quantities, it leads to compulsive eating habits that resemble drug addiction.
According to Paul J. Kenny, Ph.D., an associate professor of Molecular Therapeutics at the Scripps Research Institute, in Jupiter, Florida, doing drugs such as cocaine and eating too much junk food both gradually overload the pleasure centers in the brain. Eventually the pleasure centers "implode," and achieving the same pleasure requires ever increasing amounts of the drug or food. Kenny was the lead author of the study.
The study tracked three groups of lab rats for forty days. One of the groups was fed regular rat food. A second was fed bacon, sausage, cheesecake, frosting, and other fattening, high-calorie foods for one hour a day. The third group was allowed to eat unhealthy foods for up to twenty-three hours a day.
The rats that ate fatty human food quickly became obese of course. But their brains also changed. The researchers found that the rats in the third group gradually developed a tolerance to the pleasure the food gave them and had to eat more fat to experience a high.
The rats began to eat compulsively, to the point where they continued to do so despite applied electric shocks. When the researchers applied an electric shock to the rats' feet in the presence of the food, the rats in the first two groups were frightened away from eating, but the obese rats were not. "Their attention was solely focused on consuming food," says Kenny. In previous studies, rats have exhibited similar brain changes when given unlimited access to cocaine or heroin. Rats have similarly ignored punishment to continue consuming cocaine, the researchers noted.
Coca leaves have been used as a “natural” high for centuries, as Wang pointed out, but people learned to purify or alter cocaine to deliver it more efficiently to their brains. This made the drug more addictive. According to Wang, food has evolved in a similar way. "We purify our food," he says. "Our ancestors ate whole grains, but we're eating white bread. American Indians ate corn; we eat corn syrup."
Of course one cannot transfer these results as a template for human behavior, but the similarities are obvious. Excessive consumption of fatty foods begets itself. You are what you eat.
Richard Wottrich
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