Why we can't keep our hands off chocolate bars and co.:
Chocolate bars, crisps and fries - why can't we just ignore them in the supermarket? Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research in Cologne, in collaboration with Yale University, have now shown that foods with a high fat and sugar content change our brain: If we regularly eat even small amounts of them, the brain learns to consume precisely these foods in the future.
[...] To test this hypothesis, the researchers gave one group of volunteers a small pudding containing a lot of fat and sugar per day for eight weeks in addition to their normal diet. The other group received a pudding that contained the same number of calories but less fat. The volunteer's brain activity was measured before and during the eight weeks.
The brain's response to high-fat and high-sugar foods was greatly increased in the group that ate the high-sugar and high-fat pudding after eight weeks. This particularly activated the dopaminergic system, the region in the brain responsible for motivation and reward. "Our measurements of brain activity showed that the brain rewires itself through the consumption of chips and co. It subconsciously learns to prefer rewarding food. Through these changes in the brain, we will unconsciously always prefer the foods that contain a lot of fat and sugar," explains Marc Tittgemeyer, who led the study.
Journal paper highlights:
- Daily consumption of a high-fat/high-sugar snack alters reward circuits in humans
- Preference for low-fat food decreases while brain response to milkshake increases
- Neural computations that support adaptive associative learning are also enhanced
- Effects are observed despite no change in body weight or metabolic health
Journal Reference:
Sharmili Edwin Thanarajah, Alexandra G. DiFeliceantonio, Kerstin Albus, et al., Habitual daily intake of a sweet and fatty snack modulates reward processing in humans [open], Cell Metabolism, 2023, ISSN 1550-4131, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2023.02.015
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26 2023, @02:16AM (1 child)
Because you're a drug addict? 😉
I still like ice cream but I can stop with one scoop every few weeks and not finish a whole tub in one sitting.
I'm not convinced that's all to it. If it were that simple those food and snack companies wouldn't need to have so many researchers trying to figure out how to make more addictive snacks or how to make their snacks more addictive. Go make a bowl of sugar and cooking oil for yourself. How addictive is that?
Also if you get used to feeding your addiction instead of denying it and making yourself prefer other stuff, then it won't be surprising if your brain keeps wiring itself accordingly.
Ever heard of acquired tastes? Rewire your brain to prefer healthier stuff. Go acquire some taste to broccoli or similar, and/or acquire a preference to not consume so much sugar. After a while you'd find that many of those soda drinks and snacks are really too sweet.
You might even start preferring 90% cocoa real chocolate instead of low cocoa and 40-56% sugar candy bars[1]. You'd rather die faster than to reduce the amount of sugar you consume? That's fine with me.
[1] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/284117451 [tesco.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey_bar [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26 2023, @02:23AM
Oh yeah another thing. Given so many US people are addicted to sugar it's weird that so many researchers use actual sugar pills as placebos.
Isn't that a bit like using crack cocaine as a placebo on crack addicts? 😂
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday March 26 2023, @04:04AM (2 children)
Upon consuming something that proves calorie-efficient (that is, more calories for the same effort), the successfully adaptive animal will naturally tend to seek out that same food again.
Or why all animals tend to prefer foods that are relatively calorie-dense.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 26 2023, @06:48AM (1 child)
Indeed, what changed is that it is no longer high-effort to get high-energy food. When it was high-effort, it was necessary to have high reward, to motivate the effort.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday March 26 2023, @06:59AM
Yep, resulting in an evolutionary mismatch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_mismatch [wikipedia.org]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.