Researchers at the Connecticut college have recently found in a study that rats show strikingly similar behavior towards oreo cookies as they do addictive drugs like cocaine and morphine.
A team of four undergraduate students led by Connecticut College neuroscience professor Joseph Schroeder, put some rats inside a maze that had Oreos on one side, and then rice cakes on the other side, and measured the time the rats spent on each side.
"Just like humans, rats don't seem to get much pleasure out of eating [rice cakes]," Dr. Schroeder observed.
The rats' cravings for Oreos were startling. Schroeder and his team also conducted another experiment wherein instead of Oreos and rice cakes he used cocaine and morphine injections on one side, and saline injections on the other. The rats spent just as much time in the morphine side as they did in the Oreos experiment.
"Our research supports the theory that high-fat/high-sugar foods stimulate the brain in the same way that drugs do," Schroeder said of the experiment, "It may explain why some people can't resist these foods despite the fact that they know they are bad for them."
Drugs affect the brain by hijacking its pleasure center, which has evolved over millions of years to reinforce the behavior needed to pass on genes to succeeding generations. Studies suggest that food high in sugar, fats, and salts activate these pleasure centers, resulting in behavior not different from drug addicts.
Upon studying the stimulation the cookies had on the pleasure centers of the rats' brains, it was found that Oreos activated more neurons than it did cocaine and morphine.
Oreos were chosen for the study because of its palatability to rats, and humans especially on the lower socioeconomic status, to whom high sugar and high fat products, like Oreos, are highly marketed.
As a final disclaimer though, rats don't behave like humans, and studies are yet to be tested on humans to see whether Oreo cookies are as addictive to humans, but researchers have found that, like humans, rats had preference over how they ate their Oreos: they used the "twist and lick" method in which the rats break open the Oreo and eat the cream center first.
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