Bacon is addictive

[liv]

So my local newspaper today have the cute headline (on the first page)

Bacon alters brain in the same manner as heroin.

It was cute - my first thought was who the **** paid big bucks for that conclusion. Do we not all know that?

The study was all over the net yesterday. Here is one
PhysOrg Mobile: Compulsive eating shares addictive biochemical mechanism with cocaine, heroin abuse: study

"The new study, unlike our preliminary abstract, explains what happens in the brain of these animals when they have easy access to high-calorie, high-fat food," said Kenny. "It presents the most thorough and compelling evidence that drug addiction and obesity are based on the same underlying neurobiological mechanisms. In the study, the animals completely lost control over their eating behavior, the primary hallmark of addiction. They continued to overeat even when they anticipated receiving electric shocks, highlighting just how motivated they were to consume the palatable food."

The scientists fed the rats a diet modeled after the type that contributes to human obesity—easy-to-obtain high-calorie, high-fat foods like sausage, bacon, and cheesecake. Soon after the experiments began, the animals began to bulk up dramatically.

"They always went for the worst types of food," Kenny said, "and as a result, they took in twice the calories as the control rats. 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. The change in their diet preference was so great that they basically starved themselves for two weeks after they were cut off from junk food. It was the animals that showed the "crash" in brain reward circuitries that had the most profound shift in food preference to the palatable, unhealthy diet. These same rats were also those that kept on eating even when they anticipated being shocked."

After showing that obese rats had clear addiction-like food seeking behaviors, Johnson and Kenny next investigated the underlying molecular mechanisms that may explain these changes. They focused on a particular receptor in the brain known to play an important role in vulnerability to drug addiction and obesity - the dopamine D2 receptor. The D2 receptor responds to dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is released in the brain by pleasurable experiences like food or sex or drugs like cocaine. In cocaine abuse, for example, the drug alter the flow of dopamine by blocking its retrieval, flooding the brain and overstimulating the receptors, something that eventually leads to physical changes in the way the brain responds to the drug.

The new study shows that the same thing happens in junk food addiction.

"These findings confirm what we and many others have suspected," Kenny said, "that overconsumption of highly pleasurable food triggers addiction-like neuroadaptive responses in brain reward circuitries, driving the development of compulsive eating. Common mechanisms may therefore underlie obesity and drug addiction."

So what exactly did the rats eat? I need to check. Are they blaming fat for what carbs cause again is my question.

[liv]

Re: Bacon is addictive

OK so I found the study

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/pdf/nn.2519.pdf

Here is what they fed the rats on the diet they would call the cafeteria diet

The cafeteria diet consisted of bacon, sausage, cheesecake, pound cake, frosting and chocolate, which were individually weighed before being made available to the rats.

So how many carbs is that?