Study finds that intense sweetness more addictive than Cocaine

[tobala]

The study is hogwash.

Cocaine goes on my cornflakes to the exclusion of all else on God's great earth.

 

[IcarusRisen]

Jamshyd has a good point. Homosexuality was once in the DSM and people used to quote that.

 

[inverse_agonist]

I'm not really hung up on the DSM definition of anything. I just wanted to make a point about good and bad ways of using animals to study things. Adrenochrome is right; craving is an important part of addiction. People model it with sensitization paradigms. Using drugs despite negative consequences is also part of addiction (and part of the DSM definition), and it can be modeled by pairing cocaine delivery with shock. You can model opiate withdrawal by giving morphine-dependent rats naloxone.

In all of those cases, you're focusing on a specific part of addiction that we already know happens in humans, and using animals to study it. We already know, using common sense, that sweetness is not more addictive than cocaine in people. Training rats in this way doesn't model anything we are trying to fix or understand, because nobody would think preferring sweetness to cocaine is a problem. The nice thing about those other models is that they allow you to study drugs that prevent sensitization or alleviate withdrawal, or see what's different about animals that continue to push a lever for cocaine when they're getting shocked and animals that don't.

 

[LuxEtVeritas]

I'm not so sure

i think we better quickly make sugar/dextrose and artificial sweeteners a Schedule II in the US and then we can also wonder what constitutes ananalogue as well to see if we are beaking the law if we say drink milk with lactose in it or eat fruit

(seriously though, no doubt there are indeed negative consequences to sugar addicitons and it is shown that artificial sweeteners are basically approved poisons)

 

[Ximot]

many people do get cravings for refined sugar... why those goddamn biscuits and not the banana even when we know the biscuits are not hralthy and the banana is. I will add that I think refined is also addictive. And the combo is, too. Why else would people eat it?

 

[hussness]

I'm not so sure

i think we better quickly make sugar/dextrose and artificial sweeteners a Schedule II in the US and then we can also wonder what constitutes ananalogue as well to see if we are beaking the law if we say drink milk with lactose in it or eat fruit

(seriously though, no doubt there are indeed negative consequences to sugar addicitons and it is shown that artificial sweeteners are basically approved poisons)

The Simpsons already did it:
Big Sugar

 

[Xorkoth]

Refined sugar is certainly addictive. Even badly so (as is horribly evident in society). But it's hard for me to believe that it's more reinforcing than cocaine.

And artificial sweeteners... that's a really sad state of affairs. Many people refuse to believe that "they" would ever give us anything that was bad for us.

 

[LuxEtVeritas]

in humans i believe refined sugars et al can be as addicitve as cocaine per specific populations ...coke as well is addicitve (by and large) to only a certain population

they are definitely hard addicitons to compare but needless to say both can be profoundly damaging to the populations that are susceptible to high levels of addicition to these substances