Junk food is addictive

Danger of junk food

A study by scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in Florida has found that binging on junk food is as addictive as smoking or taking drugs. According to the study, it could cause compulsive eating and obesity. American researchers found burgers, chips and sausages programmed a human brain into craving even more sugar, salt and fat laden food.

The researchers found laboratory rats became addicted on a bad diet just like people who became dependent on cocaine and heroin, which could go some way to explaining the rising obesity rates and the success of fast food outlets.

While the findings cannot be directly transferred to human obesity, it found that over-consumption of high-calorie food triggered addiction-like responses in the brain.

The study comes as latest figures show that one in four people in Britain are obese with married people twice as likely to become obese than their single counterparts. By 2020, eight in 10 men and almost 7 in 10 women will be overweight or obese.

Obesity-related diseases cost the United States an estimated US$150 billion each year, according to US federal agencies. An estimated two-thirds of American adults and one-third of children are obese or overweight.

Cases of health conditions like heart disease, diabetes and stroke will increase with the nation's waistlines, the recent Government-commissioned Foresight report warned.

Dr. Paul Kenny, a neuroscientist who led the research, which was published online in Nature Neuroscience, said the study, which took nearly three years to complete, confirmed the "addictive" properties of junk food.

"Obesity may be a form of compulsive eating," he said. "Other treatments in development for other forms of compulsion, for example drug addiction, may be very useful for the treatment of obesity."

The research

For the study, the research team divided the animals into three groups, the British paper The Telegraph explains.

One group had normal amounts of healthy food to eat, another was given restricted amounts of junk food and the final group had unlimited amounts of cheesecake, fatty meat products, cheap sponge cakes and chocolate snacks.

There were no adverse effects on the first two groups. But the rats which ate as much junk food as they wanted quickly became very fat and started binging.

When researchers electronically stimulated the part of the brain that feels pleasure, they found the rats on unlimited junk food needed even more stimulation to register the same level of pleasure as the animals on healthier diets.

"They always went for the worst types of food and as a result, they took in twice the calories as the control rats," said Dr. Kenny.

"When we removed the junk food and tried to put them on a nutritious diet - what we called the 'salad bar option' - they simply refused to eat."

Dr. Kenny said the research supported what obese patients have been saying for years that, like addiction to other substances, junk food binging is extremely difficult to stop.

In the rats, the development of obesity coincided with a progressively deteriorating chemical balance in the circuitry of the brain responsible for reward.

As these pleasure centres become less and less responsive the animals quickly developed compulsive overeating habits, consuming larger quantities of high-calorie, high-fat foods until they become obese.

Jodie Humphries

Jodie Humphries graduated from Bath Spa University with a BA Hons in Creative Writing in 2008. She has worked for GDS Publishing for the digital group since July 2009. She has previous experience with writing for the web, running her own website since April 2007.

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