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Wire: BLOOMBERG News (BN) Date: Nov 2 2011 12:01:00
Fatty Foods Addictive as Cocaine in Growing Body of Science
By Robert Langreth and Duane D. Stanford
Nov. 2 (Bloomberg) -- 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. 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. 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.
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.
‘Fun-for-You’
“This could change the legal landscape,” said Kelly
Brownell, director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food
Policy & 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.”
Food company executives and lobbyists are quick to counter
that nothing has been proven, that nothing is wrong with what
PepsiCo Chief Executive Officer Indra Nooyi calls “fun-for-
you” foods, if eaten in moderation. In fact, the companies say
they’re making big strides toward offering consumers a wide
range of healthier snacking options. Nooyi, for one, is as well
known for calling attention to PepsiCo’s progress offering
healthier fare as she is for driving sales.
Coca-Cola Co., PepsiCo, Northfield, Illinois-based Kraft
and Kellogg Co. of Battle Creek, Michigan, declined to grant
interviews with their scientists.
No one disputes that obesity is a fast growing global
problem. In the U.S., a third of adults and 17 percent of teens
and children are obese, and those numbers are increasing. Across
the globe, from Latin America, to Europe to Pacific Island
nations, obesity rates are also climbing.
Cost to Society
The cost to society is enormous. A 2009 study of 900,000
people, published in The Lancet, found that moderate obesity
reduces life expectancy by two to four years, while severe
obesity shortens life expectancy by as much as 10 years. Obesity
has been shown to boost the risk of heart disease, diabetes,
some cancers, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea and stroke, according
to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The costs of
treating illness associated with obesity were estimated at $147
billion in 2008, according to a 2009 study in Health Affairs.
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.
A Lot Like Addiction
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.
Education, diets and drugs to treat obesity have proven
largely ineffective and the new science of obesity may explain
why, proponents say. Constant stimulation with tasty, calorie-
laden foods may desensitize the brain’s circuitry, leading
people to consume greater quantities of junk food to maintain a
constant state of pleasure.
In one 2010 study, scientists at Scripps Research Institute
in Jupiter, Florida, fed rats an array of fatty and sugary
products including Hormel Foods Corp. bacon, Sara Lee Corp.
pound cake, The Cheesecake Factory Inc. cheesecake and Pillsbury
Co. Creamy Supreme cake frosting. The study measured activity in
regions of the brain involved in registering reward and pleasure
through electrodes implanted in the rats.
Binge-Eating Rats
The rats that had access to these foods for one hour a day
started binge eating, even when more nutritious food was
available all day long. Other groups of rats that had access to
the sweets and fatty foods for 18 to 23 hours per day became
obese, Paul Kenny, the Scripps scientist heading the study wrote
in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The results produced the
same brain pattern that occurs with escalating intake of
cocaine, he wrote.
“To see food do the same thing was mind-boggling,” Kenny
later said in an interview.
Researchers are finding that damage to the brain’s reward
centers may occur when people eat excessive quantities of food.
Sweet Rewards
In one 2010 study conducted by researchers at the
University of Texas in Austin and the Oregon Research Institute,
a nonprofit group that studies human behavior, 26 overweight
young women were given magnetic resonance imaging scans as they
got sips of a milkshake made with Haagen-Dazs ice cream and
Hershey Co.’s chocolate syrup.
The same women got repeat MRI scans six months later. Those
who had gained weight showed reduced activity in the striatum, a
region of the brain that registers reward, when they sipped
milkshakes the second time, according to the study results,
published last year in the Journal of Neuroscience.
“A career of overeating causes blunted reward receipt, and
this is exactly what you see with chronic drug abuse,” said
Eric Stice, a researcher at the Oregon Research Institute.
Scientists studying food addiction have had to overcome
skepticism, even from their peers. In the late 1990s, NIDA’s
Volkow, then a drug addiction researcher at Brookhaven National
Laboratory on Long Island, applied for a National Institutes of
Health grant to scan obese people to see whether their brain
reward centers were affected. Her grant proposal was turned
down.
Finding Evidence
“I couldn’t get it funded,” she said in an interview.
“The response was, there is no evidence that food produces
addictive-like behaviors in the brain.”
Volkow, working with Brookhaven researcher Gene-Jack Wang,
cobbled together funding from another government agency to
conduct a study using a brain scanning device capable of
measuring chemical activity inside the body using radioactive
tracers.
Researchers were able to map dopamine receptor levels in
the brains of 10 obese volunteers. Dopamine is a chemical
produced in the brain that signals reward. Natural boosters of
dopamine include exercise and sexual activity, but drugs such as
cocaine and heroin also stimulate the chemical in large
quantities.
In drug abusers, brain receptors that receive the dopamine
signal may become unresponsive with increased drug usage,
causing drug abusers to steadily increase their dosage in search
of the same high. The Brookhaven study found that the obese
people also had lowered levels of dopamine receptors compared
with a lean control group.
Addicted to Sugar
The same year, psychologists at Princeton University began
studying whether lab rats could become addicted to a 10 percent
solution of sugar water, about the same percentage of sugar
contained in most soft drinks.
An occasional drink caused no problems for the lab animals.
Yet the researchers found dramatic effects when the rats were
allowed to drink sugar-water every day. Over time they drank
“more and more and more” while eating less of their usual
diet, said Nicole Avena, who began the work as a graduate
student at Princeton and is now a neuroscientist at the
University of Florida.
The animals also showed withdrawal symptoms, including
anxiety, shakes and tremors, when the effect of the sugar was
blocked with a drug. The scientists, moreover, were able to
determine changes in the levels of dopamine in the brain,
similar to those seen in animals on addictive drugs.
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i knew it all along ... : )
