UK - Cupcakes as addictive as cocaine

I've been up for a week, eating cupcakes every 20 minutes, and the FDA has been following me around in a white van.
 
when i was a kid i used to keep filling up my bowl with coco pebbles till i was shaking and shivering, i thought i was just cold from the milk , but now i realized i was getting jacked on the sugar
 
I'm sure it has been said before, but chocolate is addictive because of a chemical in it. Most studies I know about that have investigated a "sugar high" have shown that there's no real evidence for it. I suppose sugar could be addictive because of our evolutionary nature to desire high calorie foods, ya know for survival and all.

As far as being as addictive as cocaine, yea fucking right. If everyone who has tried sugar tried cocaine as well, there'd be a lot more skinny folks walking around. I wonder if heart conditions would be more or less pervasive though
 
spaceyourbass said:
I suppose sugar could be addictive because of our evolutionary nature to desire high calorie foods, ya know for survival and all.
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What other pathway could there be to any addiction, if not based on evolutionary selected desires to pursue pleasure inducing activities? I reckon the reinforcement experienced through eating sugar relies on much the same brain networks as those involved with the reward experienced when doing a drug. IMO, drugs are just an artificially enhanced version that give us a shortcut to tap straight into our pleasure centres, without doing the beneficial activity first for which the pleasure and reward initially evolved for.

xstayfadedx said:
Again people trying to blame their choices on something other than them.
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I don't think it's an either/or situation. There's no doubt addictions have a neuro/biological aspect, and surely researching the pathways behind addictions, goals, motivations etc is only going to lead to better understanding of addictions and people in general, and may even lead to better outcomes for people suffering these problems, too.
 
Fatty Foods Addictive Like Cocaine in Growing Body of Scientific Research

A growing body of medical research at leading universities and government laboratories suggests that processed foods and sugary drinks made by the likes of PepsiCo Inc. and Kraft Foods Inc. (KFT) aren’t simply unhealthy. They can hijack the brain in ways that resemble addictions to cocaine, nicotine and other drugs.

“The data is so overwhelming the field has to accept it,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “We are finding tremendous overlap between drugs in the brain and food in the brain.”

The idea that food may be addictive was barely on scientists’ radar a decade ago. Now the field is heating up. Lab studies have found sugary drinks and fatty foods can produce addictive behavior in animals. Brain scans of obese people and compulsive eaters, meanwhile, reveal disturbances in brain reward circuits similar to those experienced by drug abusers.

...


The cost to society is enormous. A 2009 study of 900,000 people, published in The Lancet, found that moderate obesity reduces life expectancy by two to four years, while severe obesity shortens life expectancy by as much as 10 years. Obesity has been shown to boost the risk of heart disease, diabetes, some cancers, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea and stroke, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The costs of treating illness associated with obesity were estimated at $147 billion in 2008, according to a 2009 study in Health Affairs.

...

Those changes look a lot like addiction to some experts. Addiction “is a loaded term, but there are aspects of the modern diet that can elicit behavior that resembles addiction,” said David Ludwig, a Harvard researcher and director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Children’s Hospital Boston. Highly processed foods may cause rapid spikes and declines in blood sugar, increasing cravings, his research has found.

...

In one 2010 study, scientists at Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida, fed rats an array of fatty and sugary products including Hormel Foods Corp. (HRL) bacon, Sara Lee Corp. (SLE) pound cake, The Cheesecake Factory Inc. (CAKE) cheesecake and Pillsbury Co. Creamy Supreme cake frosting. The study measured activity in regions of the brain involved in registering reward and pleasure through electrodes implanted in the rats.

...

The rats that had access to these foods for one hour a day started binge eating, even when more nutritious food was available all day long. Other groups of rats that had access to the sweets and fatty foods for 18 to 23 hours per day became obese, Paul Kenny, the Scripps scientist heading the study wrote in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The results produced the same brain pattern that occurs with escalating intake of cocaine, he wrote.

“To see food do the same thing was mind-boggling,” Kenny later said in an interview.
Researchers are finding that damage to the brain’s reward centers may occur when people eat excessive quantities of food.

In one 2010 study conducted by researchers at the University of Texas in Austin and the Oregon Research Institute, a nonprofit group that studies human behavior, 26 overweight young women were given magnetic resonance imaging scans as they got sips of a milkshake made with Haagen-Dazs ice cream and Hershey Co. (HSY)’s chocolate syrup.

The same women got repeat MRI scans six months later. Those who had gained weight showed reduced activity in the striatum, a region of the brain that registers reward, when they sipped milkshakes the second time, according to the study results, published last year in the Journal of Neuroscience.

“A career of overeating causes blunted reward receipt, and this is exactly what you see with chronic drug abuse,” said Eric Stice, a researcher at the Oregon Research Institute.
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Read the whole article at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...ve-as-cocaine-in-growing-body-of-science.html

It mentions a study of rats that showed that they replaced more and more of their usual diet with sugar water when they had access to it, and they showed withdrawal symptoms later!

And - get this - one study showed that rats preferred sugar-sweetened water to hits of cocaine!!8o
 
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Sugar is a highly over looked addiction- that's without a doubt. I would say that there are many stages to both addictions:

Cocaine
and
Sugar

That determine the level of relapse. I never was fully engulfed by cocaine. My urges to get more would last for about 2 weeks before they would dissipate and be replaced by other urges.

Sugar on the other hand, I could not go a day without. The first few coca-colas I had in the morning would determine the outlook of my entire day. From there it was a zebra-cake with lunch and ice cream after dinner. It was so readily available and had such an effect on my mood that I could never see it as a negative thing.

That was until I looked in the mirror one day when I was 17.

Now most of my sugar is from fruit. I feel much better not having any desire to eat cake or drink soft drinks.
 
this not a joke: there were kids in my grade 6 or 7 class who used to snort pixie stix powder. NOT A JOKE!!! :S
 
Many years ago there was a print advertisement in a newspaper that said "Smoking is harder to quit than heroin" . I thought to myself, well I quit smoking 2 years ago. I proceeded to have a decade long addiction to heroin.
Liars.
 
Felt like posting here, some darned sweetened soymilk I had earlier left me fiending for sugary drinks. I try to avoid sweetened beverages for that very reason, though I've been unusually sober lately so it would make sense my psyche is more prone to use food in drug like ways because of it.
 
honestly...if by now people dont realize that processed sugar is addictive as fuck......

why is it that one gets cravings for sweets?
What happened to all the broccoli cravings?!
 
Once I eat something sugary it definitely makes me crave more sugary things for the rest of the day, with the craving stronger then the ones I get an hour or so after smoking a cigarette, or even after doing some harder drugs (sugar craving > dope craving, although I almost never do dope). I totally buy that sugar is very addictive.
 
This article is a bit silly. All they're really saying is both sugar and cocaine are associated with dopamine release. These articles come along every now and again saying some everyday activity like going for a run, playing online games, reading wikipedia etc. is analogous to taking cocaine or heroin. Of course there are going to be parallels since drugs work by hijacking natural pathways, but to suggest that they are at all comparable is a bit misleading. I'm not saying that sugar isn't addictive, but surely it's better to observe actual human behaviour than extrapolate from brain scans. We know that drugs that are theoretically very similar in terms of their effect on the brain can have very different addiction potentials.
 
Y'know, this reminds me... I got home today and after buying up on 5 cheap softdrinks that lasted me 5 days.
I got home just wondering.. "hmm, how am I going to get my softdrink today? I need it."

And then I thought to myself, how much that reminded me of what it was like on oxycodone.

though, the big difference between sugar and cocaine, (apart from the social stigma) is the damage to the heart.
Though, I'm not sure what kills more people, sugar related diseases leading to death (obesity, diabetes) or cocaine deaths (including DEA raids, and the deaths of young lives wasting away in jail.)
 
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