High anxiety. Rats "addicted" to sugary food spent less time on the open parts of this maze.
Credit: Pietro Cottone
Posted on 11/15/2009 6:45:13 AM PST by neverdem
High anxiety. Rats "addicted" to sugary food spent less time on the open parts of this maze.
Credit: Pietro Cottone
If you're constantly starting new diets, then breaking them, you may have more in common with a drug addict than you know. A new study suggests that yo-yo dieters experience the same stressful pangs of withdrawal when they go on a diet that addicts experience when they go cold turkey.
The idea that bad food can be addictive is not new. But previous studies have tended to focus on the positive reinforcement side of the equation--for example, the pleasurable "rush" you get from eating chocolate cake. "This is just part of the story," says Pietro Cottone, a neuroscientist at Boston University and a co-author of the new study, which was conducted at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. The brain also has a negative reinforcement system that causes anxiety and stress during withdrawal. Rather than doing drugs for the rush, he says, addicts do drugs to relieve the stress associated with withdrawal. Dieters often follow the same pattern of abstinence and relapse as drug addicts, so Cottone and his colleagues wanted to see whether the same brain circuitry might be involved.
The researchers gave one group of rats unlimited access to regular rat food for 5 days, followed by 2 days of sugary, chocolate-flavored rat chow. ("They like it a lot," says Cottone.) The team repeated this cycle for 7 weeks and compared the rats' food intake and behavior with that of a control group of rats that had access only to standard chow.
The control rats ate roughly the same amount of food every day, but the rats in the experimental group did not: When the junk food arrived, they pigged out. By the fifth week, the experimental rats were eating roughly 20% more food when they had access to chocolate chow than rats in the control group ate. And when it was replaced with normal food, they ate less normal food, approximately 30% less by week 5. As the study progressed, the effect became stronger. What's more, the rats going through chocolate-chow withdrawal spent less time in the exposed parts of a specially designed maze, a measure of increased anxiety. When the chocolate chow was returned, the anxiety disappeared.
The researchers suspected that the anxiety was the result of corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), a hormone involved in the brain's stress response. Previous studies have shown that this molecule plays a role in drug and alcohol withdrawal. Indeed, when the researchers gave the rats a drug to block their CRF receptors, the animals ate less chocolate chow and more normal chow. They also experienced less withdrawal-associated anxiety. Further experiments revealed that the rats expressed five times more CRF during their withdrawal periods than during their binge periods.
This is the first time the CRF system has been implicated in food addiction, offering a potential drug target, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Drugs to block CRF receptors in the brain are currently being developed.
"This is a brilliant study," says Markus Heilig, a psychiatrist at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in Bethesda, Maryland, who has studied the role of CRF in alcohol addiction. "[Intermittent] dieting is not a good idea, this would seem to indicate." In fact, Heilig says, the study suggests that long-term serial dieting may be driving the biology of the brain into a state in which an individual will experience increased cravings for junk food. Whether you're talking about alcohol, drugs, or even junk food, he says, the more times you relapse, the more stress you feel during withdrawal, and the harder it is to stay on the wagon. "That is the vicious circle," says Heilig.
Love that Cosby bit!
http://www.icomedytv.com/Comedy-Videos/ID/975/Bill-Cosby-Chocolate-cake-with-transcript-0927.aspx
“And we had a ball.....until...”
Sigh sigh sigh sigh sigh sigh
Pretty much describes my behavior too, sadly.
Scary, isn’t it?
Mr G tells the g-kids not to touch the chocolate....
it’s Grammy’s medicine.
Fascinating. TFS.
Exactly!! See Girlene? Diana KNOWS!!!
Just what I was telling you!:
This madness for chocolate has been going on for a LONG time.
Back during the Exodus and that whole thing with the Golden Calf. It was really a Chocolate calf covered in gold foil. Worshiping Chocolate got those people in a LOT of trouble. So abhorrent was the SIN, they don’t even mention Chocolate in the Bible, ANYWHERE!
You remember the Epic of Gilgamesh. Searched “the world over” for the “elixir of life”. The iconic depictions of him fighting 2 lions with his bare hands? Just to get chocolate!
Then the pyramids. The people looked at that project and said NO WAY! It’s going to take 120 years! Fay Rowe said “We’ll give you chocolate when you finish!”. And it only took them 10.
Alexander the Great. “Conquered” the world in a mad lust for power and glory? Yep, you guessed it!
The Stand of The 300. “There’s no way those filthy Persians are going to get our chocolate!”
MADNESS! CRAZINESS!
Patrick Henry. “Give me chocolate or give me DEATH!” They couldn’t get him to the gallows fast enough! (Don’t EVEN TRY to bore me with “facts” on this one!)
My health had gotten so bad I had to take on my weight this past July, and lost 38 pounds. Fried foods were hard enough to give up, but the chocolate...agh.
But now my health is good and I sleep better than at any time in my plus fifty years. I actually like snacking on pears, green apples, and bananas when the night munchies come, and they usually do.
I love it!
There’s just one little thing.
Whats with the chocolate fudge “okies”? I thought we weren’t gonna go there? :-))))
Was that reply meant for someone else?
Okay, how do you safely mainline chocolate cake?
While I have been successful at maintaining my weight loss, I do have a problem with carbs. Cookies, pasta, biscuits, other sweets; ok, I need to stop before I make myself hungry. lol
Hello! I thought I would find you here!
You two are so cute. :)
You can count on it. :)
No
.......
Sunday, November 15, 2009 9:07:51 AM · 11 of 36
savedbygrace to Marty62
When Americans and others used COMMON SENSE, everyone knew that sweets were to only be a special treat. NOT a stapple (sic) of your diet.
What? . . . . . What? . . . . . What?
So what are you saying?
;-)
I still don’t understand. BTW, my 1st post was 100% a joke. Apparently, you didn’t get it.
No it’s no biggie.
I thought everyone was having problems because of my typos.
I got it after I reread it, sorry. didn’t mean to be a problem.
I am very relieved. Thank you. No worries.
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