Study: Overeating fuelled by the same brain mechanisms that

Hey everyone! I found this article and thought it was really interesting: http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/01/12/a-magic-calorie-ride/

"The term “food addiction” is controversial, but recent studies have shown that high-calorie foods engage the same regions of the brain as drugs like heroin and cocaine. Over time, scientists say, a high-fat diet can impair the brain’s pleasure centres like those drugs do, encouraging ever-larger binges and making it harder to quit. Remarkably, a mother’s diet might even hard-wire her baby for obesity later on in life. “It’s too early to call it food addiction,” says Teresa Reyes of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, who studies how the brain adapts to changes in diet. “But there is absolutely increasing evidence showing that the brain responds to high-sucrose, high-fat diets in a very similar way that it responds to drugs of abuse.

At the Society for Neuroscience’s annual conference in November, Reyes presented her latest work: mice that were fed a high-fat diet for a long period of time, she found, showed changes in parts of their brains associated with pleasure and reward. Just like cocaine or heroin, unhealthy foods seem to trigger the brain’s pleasure centres, eventually desensitizing them. It becomes a vicious cycle. “To reach the same level of reward, the person needs to eat more rewarding food,” Reyes says. “It’s very similar to what happens in chronic drug abuse.”

Once someone starts regularly gorging on high-fat, high-sugar foods, a rewiring of the brain seems to occur. In March, researchers published an influential study showing, for the first time, that the same molecular mechanisms that influence drug addiction can fuel the urge to overeat. The two researchers provided lab rats with all sorts of unhealthy foods—like “cheesecake, bacon, sausage, and chocolate icing,” says Kenny, a drug addiction expert at the Scripps Research Institute in Florida—on a limited, or an unlimited, basis. (A separate group of rats had no access to junk food.)

Rats also had healthy food available to them, but opted for junk whenever it was provided. When fatty foods were taken away, “the obese animals basically starved themselves for days on end, rather than eat the regular food,” Kenny says. The animals’ brain reward circuitries were actually impaired, they found. Whether these pathways can ever change back again to respond more normally remains an open question."

I've been doing some serious impulsive "binging" on sweets since the holidays, and I know that doesn't compare to what the article focuses on, but it hit home nonetheless.