Sunday, April 25, 2010

New Research: Junk Food Is As Addictive As Crack?

Sadly, the title of this post is not even a joke.

A new article published on the CNN Health website shows that unhealthy foods can be dangerously addictive.

According to the article:

"A new 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 enough quantities, it leads to compulsive eating habits that resemble drug addiction, the study found.

Doing drugs such as cocaine and eating too much junk food both gradually overload the so-called pleasure centers in the brain, according to Paul J. Kenny, Ph.D., an associate professor of molecular therapeutics at the Scripps Research Institute, in Jupiter, Florida. Eventually the pleasure centers "crash," and achieving the same pleasure--or even just feeling normal--requires increasing amounts of the drug or food, says Kenny, the lead author of the study.

"People know intuitively that there's more to [overeating] than just willpower," he says. "There's a system in the brain that's been turned on or over-activated, and that's driving [overeating] at some subconscious level."

This research just confirms what many of us have suspected for a long time.

Eating junk food is so harmful for you in so many ways physically, and this research shows that the damage is now psychological too.

So the next time you're about to tuck into to that tasty morsel of junk food, make sure you think twice, you could be getting addicted.


--

Yudi Kerbel, CPT

Life FX Hunt Valley

ykerbel@fxstudios.com


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