Fatty Foods and Sugar Addictive Like Cocaine

An article at Bloomberg.com reports:

"Cupcakes may be addictive, just like cocaine.

A growing body of medical research at leading universities and government laboratories suggests that processed foods and sugary drinks made by the likes of PepsiCo Inc. and Kraft Foods Inc. (KFT) 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.”

"Lab studies have found sugary drinks and fatty foods can produce addictive behavior in animals. Brain scans of obese people and compulsive eaters, meanwhile, reveal disturbances in brain reward circuits similar to those experienced by drug abusers."

To repeat, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse believes that  "The data is so overwhelming the field has to accept it."  Read more here.

It seems science has discovered a few new things about how food affects us since the early 20th century when German scientists believed, incorrectly, that insulin made people fat.

Read Stephan Guyenet's series about food reward starting here.