I always knew dieting was hard, but I had no idea it was this hard. It's the same as kicking an addiction.
Dieting can be as hard as kicking a heroin addiction, new research suggests.
According to the study, overloading your body with a good thing can cause an addiction, as your brain comes to expect and seek out those feelings of satisfaction and well-being.
Whether that good feeling comes from injecting yourself with heroine or having one more bite of coffee cake is irrelevant.
"A defining characteristic of overweight and obese individuals is that they continue to overeat despite the well-known negative health and social consequences," wrote authors Paul Johnson and Paul Kenny, who conducted the study at the Scripps Research Institute. This is "analogous to the compulsive drug-taking behaviour seen in human drug addicts."
Becoming addicted to unhealthy food is remarkably simple, actually. And it all starts with a single bite triggering what scientists call a reward threshold.
When you first start to eat, or take drugs, the reward threshold is low. It takes less food and less drug to make you feel good.
But as you overeat, and as you continue to use drugs, it takes more and more to make you feel good. Your reward threshold increases. Most people then continue to eat what makes them feel good, or use the drugs, and slowly become addicts to that behaviour.
"Ease of access and consequent overeating of cafeteria-style diets in humans is considered an important environmental contributor to the current obesity epidemic in Western societies," wrote the authors.
They also found that once the addiction to high-fat food has been established, addicted rats were willing to subject themselves to extremely uncomfortable situations if it meant they would have access to that food again.
Rats that had no experience with the high-fat cafeteria diet avoided the same uncomfortable experience and stayed healthier.
"These data are, as far as we know, the strongest support for the idea that overeating of palatable food can become habitual in the same manner and through the same mechanisms as consumption of drugs of abuse," one of the researchers told Science Daily.
The study was published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
Dieting can be as hard as kicking a heroin addiction, new research suggests.
According to the study, overloading your body with a good thing can cause an addiction, as your brain comes to expect and seek out those feelings of satisfaction and well-being.
Whether that good feeling comes from injecting yourself with heroine or having one more bite of coffee cake is irrelevant.
"A defining characteristic of overweight and obese individuals is that they continue to overeat despite the well-known negative health and social consequences," wrote authors Paul Johnson and Paul Kenny, who conducted the study at the Scripps Research Institute. This is "analogous to the compulsive drug-taking behaviour seen in human drug addicts."
Becoming addicted to unhealthy food is remarkably simple, actually. And it all starts with a single bite triggering what scientists call a reward threshold.
When you first start to eat, or take drugs, the reward threshold is low. It takes less food and less drug to make you feel good.
But as you overeat, and as you continue to use drugs, it takes more and more to make you feel good. Your reward threshold increases. Most people then continue to eat what makes them feel good, or use the drugs, and slowly become addicts to that behaviour.
"Ease of access and consequent overeating of cafeteria-style diets in humans is considered an important environmental contributor to the current obesity epidemic in Western societies," wrote the authors.
They also found that once the addiction to high-fat food has been established, addicted rats were willing to subject themselves to extremely uncomfortable situations if it meant they would have access to that food again.
Rats that had no experience with the high-fat cafeteria diet avoided the same uncomfortable experience and stayed healthier.
"These data are, as far as we know, the strongest support for the idea that overeating of palatable food can become habitual in the same manner and through the same mechanisms as consumption of drugs of abuse," one of the researchers told Science Daily.
The study was published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
