Junk food affects brain like an addictive drug

[Sheila]

By Robert Langreth and Duane D. Stanford
Bloomberg News
6 Nov 2011

A growing body of medical research at leading universities and government laboratories suggests that processed foods and sugary drinks aren’t simply unhealthy. They can hijack the brain in ways that resemble addictions to cocaine, nicotine and other drugs.

“The data is so overwhelming the field has to accept it,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “We are finding tremendous overlap between drugs in the brain and food in the brain.”

The idea that food may be addictive was barely on scientists’ radar a decade ago. Now the field is heating up….Twenty-eight scientific studies and papers on food addiction have been published this year, according to a National Library of Medicine database. As the evidence expands, the science of addiction could become a game-changer for the $1 trillion food and beverage industries.

If fatty foods and snacks and drinks sweetened with sugar and high fructose corn syrup are proven to be addictive, food companies may face the most drawn-out consumer safety battle since the anti-smoking movement took on the tobacco industry a generation ago.

“This could change the legal landscape,” said Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity and a proponent of anti-obesity regulation. “People knew for a long time cigarettes were killing people, but it was only later they learned about nicotine and the intentional manipulation of it.”
….

Sugars and fats, of course, have always been present in the human diet and our bodies are programmed to crave them. What has changed is modern processing that creates food with concentrated levels of sugars, unhealthy fats and refined flour, without redeeming levels of fiber or nutrients, obesity experts said. Consumption of large quantities of those processed foods may be changing the way the brain is wired.

Those changes look a lot like addiction to some experts. Addiction “is a loaded term, but there are aspects of the modern diet that can elicit behavior that resembles addiction,” said David Ludwig, a Harvard researcher and director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Children’s Hospital Boston. Highly processed foods may cause rapid spikes and declines in blood sugar, increasing cravings, his research has found….


http://nhne-pulse.org/junk-food-can-...like-drugs-do/

[Luc]

Highly processed foods may cause rapid spikes and declines in blood sugar, increasing cravings, his research has found.

That's a total havoc wrought on the system. What does it do to the kids out there, darn... junk food + drugs... Mind-boggling.

[Junior]

This doesn't surprise me at all. In fact it is clearly demonstrated by the hefty (pun intended) rise in obesity. A generation ago, only a few people were obese. Everyone has school photos that include one fat kid in the class. But it scares me to see so many large young children. To say nothing of the 20-25 year olds having the same surgery I've just had. I was NOT fat when I was that age.