Have you just eatten a huge piece of cake and wouldn’t mind to take another one? Well don’t get so surprised. It has been finally scientifically proved that fatty foods can be addictive. Fattening food is now compared to cocaine or heroin for affecting the brain pretty much the same way. If this habit stays uncontrolled, it can lead to compulsive eating habit that kind of reminds of drug addiction.
Basically, eating this kind of food little by little overloads the pleasure centers that exist in the brain so that finally they “crash”. In order to get the same pleasure, the amounts of food has to be increased. So it’s no always only about your will to stup eatting junk food.
The study have been basically based on three groups of rats. For forty days one of the group was fed rat food, the second one – fatty food like sausage, cheesecake, bacon and other high calorie food once a day and te third one te a fatty food by ours a days as much as they wanted. After checking brain electrodes that were implanted for rats, scientists have noticed that the third group started to feel a need for more food in order to feel high. The same effect is felt because of cocaine or heroine.
Moreover, rats from the third group became so obese that they were not even runnig from electrick shock applied on their feet and stayed eating. Scientists have again comapaired food with cocaine. In order to make coca leaves work efficiently on your brain, people started to purify cocaine.
The same happened to food. We choose while bread instead of whole grain bread, french fires instead of simply boiled potatoes, etc. As a result, we start eating unconciously.
Even though this research cannot prove that exactly the same is happenening to people’s brain, it helps to understand how mechanisms that drive overeating work which might be helpful in treating obesity.