- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - People
who say they are addicted to chocolate or pizza may not be exaggerating,
U.S.-based scientists said on Tuesday.
-
- A brain scan study of normal, hungry people showed their
brains lit up when they saw and smelled their favorite foods in much the
same way as the brains of cocaine addicts when they think about their next
snort.
-
- "Food presentation significantly increased
metabolism
in the whole brain (by 24 percent) and these changes were largest in
superior
temporal, anterior insula, and orbitofrontal cortices," they
wrote.
-
- These areas are associated with addiction. For instance,
the orbitofrontal cortex has been seen to activate in cocaine users when
they think about the drug.
-
- The study, published in the April issue of the journal
NeuroImage, may support the argument that food advertising is helping drive
the U.S. obesity epidemic.
-
- "These results could explain the deleterious effects
of constant exposure to food stimuli, such as advertising, candy machines,
food channels, and food displays in stores," Dr. Gene-Jack Wang of
Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, who led the study, said
in a statement.
-
- "The high sensitivity of this brain region to food
stimuli, coupled with the huge number and variety of these stimuli in the
environment, likely contributes to the epidemic of obesity in this
country."
-
- An estimated 30 percent of Americans are obese, meaning
they have a body mass index of more than 30. This ratio of height to weight
usually works out to being about 30 pounds (14 kg) overweight for a woman
and 35 to 40 pounds (16 to 18 kg) overweight for a man.
-
- Wang and colleagues studied 12 men and women with an
average age of 28. The volunteers fasted for just under a day and then
underwent positron emission tomography, or PET scans, which measure brain
metabolism.
-
- They were asked to describe their favorite foods and
how they like to eat them while they were presented with some of those
foods.
-
- "A cotton swab impregnated with the food was placed
in their tongues so they could taste it," the researchers
wrote.
-
- "The favorite food items most frequently selected
by the subjects were bacon-egg-cheese sandwich, cinnamon bun, pizza,
hamburger
with cheese, fried chicken, lasagna, Bar-Be-Que rib, ice cream, brownie,
and chocolate cake."
-
- Several leading addiction experts worked on the report
including Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug
Abuse.
-
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