Today's Food Addictive as Blow

A new study published in Nature Neuroscience suggests that high-calorie, high-fat foods may be just as addictive as cocaine and heroin. "When rats consume these foods in great enough quantities, it leads to compulsive eating habits that resemble drug addiction, the study found," Health.com reported. The rats in the study that were fed these unhealthy foods developed a tolerance to the pleasure it gave them and had to consume more and more to experience the same level of satisfaction. "The fact that junk food could provoke this response isn't entirely surprising, says Dr. Gene-Jack Wang, M.D., the chair of the medical department at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, in Upton, New York," Health.com reported. " 'We make our food very similar to cocaine now,' he says." Dr. Wang means that we purify our food in a way that our ancestors never could: Instead of eating corn, for example, we eat corn syrup. In other words, just as cocaine has been purified over many years, so to has our food. "The ingredients in purified modern food cause people to 'eat unconsciously and unnecessarily,' and will also prompt an animal to 'eat like a drug abuser [uses drugs],' says Wang."

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