Seduced by Food: Obesity and the Human Brain - Boing Boing

Seduced by Food: Obesity and the Human Brain - Boing Boing: "In 1960-1962, the US government collected height and weight measurements from thousands of US citizens. Using these numbers, they estimated that the prevalence of obesity among US adults at the time was 13 percent. Fast forward to the year 2007-2008, and in the same demographic group, the prevalence of obesity was 34 percent (1). Most of this increase has occurred since 1980, when obesity rates have more than doubled among US adults, and extreme obesity has more than tripled. Welcome to the ‘obesity epidemic’. Today, more than one third of US adults are considered obese, an additional third are overweight, and largely as a consequence, each child born today has an estimated one in three risk of developing diabetes in his or her lifetime.



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. ..Although rodents aren’t humans, they resemble us in many ways. Just like humans, rodents evolved to regulate body fat around an ‘optimal’ level to maximize survival and reproduction, and their systems for doing this are very similar to ours. Rodents also offer us the ability to control variables much more tightly than in human research. There are many ways to make a rat obese, but some are more effective than others. High-fat pelleted diets, composed of refined ingredients, are most common because they’re reliably fattening and their composition can be tightly controlled. But another diet, seldom used, is the most fattening of all: the ’cafeteria diet’. This diet has a lot to tell us about the expanding American waistline.

First described in 1976 by Anthony Sclafani, the cafeteria diet is basically a rat-sized buffet of human junk food, in addition to regular rat chow (9). The menu for a recent cafeteria diet study included such delectable items as Froot Loops, mini hot dogs, peanut butter cookies, Cheez-its, Cocoa Puffs, nacho cheese Doritos, cake, and BBQ pork rinds (10). These are what's known in the business as ‘palatable’, or pleasurable to the taste. On this regimen, rats ignored their regular chow, ate junk food to excess and gained fat at an extraordinary rate, far outpacing two comparison groups fed high-fat or high-sugar pelleted diets. Yes, human junk food happens to be the most effective way to overwhelm the body fat homeostasis system in rats, and neither fat nor sugar alone is able to fully explain why it’s so fattening. Importantly, over time, rats become highly motivated to obtain this diet—so motivated they’ll voluntarily endure extreme cold temperatures and electric shocks to obtain it, even when regular bland rodent pellets are freely available (11,12).