It’s no joke, I DID get addicted to Apple Fritters last year

By katiebird | Published November 12, 2007

From the L.A. Times this important discovery:

This explains your doughnut addiction

In a study, rats overwhelmingly prefer sweetened water to cocaine, even those already hooked on the drug.

By Denise Gellene, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
November 10, 2007

Researchers have learned that rats overwhelmingly prefer water sweetened with saccharin to cocaine, a finding that demonstrates the addictive potential of sweets.

Offering larger doses of cocaine did not alter the rats’ preference for saccharin, according to the report.

Scientists said the study, presented this week in San Diego at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, might help explain the rise in human obesity, which has been driven in part by an overconsumption of sugary foods.

In the experiment, 43 rats were placed in cages with two levers, one of which delivered an intravenous dose of cocaine and the other a sip of highly sweetened water. At the end of the 15-day trial, 40 of the rats consistently chose saccharin instead of cocaine.

When sugar water was substituted for the saccharin solution, the results were the same, researchers said.

Further testing the rat sweet tooth, scientists subjected 24 cocaine-addicted rats to a similar trial. At the end of 10 days, the majority of them preferred saccharin.

This entry was posted in Asides. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

3 Comments

  1. Posted November 13, 2007 at 2:31 am by catdog | Permalink

    But heroin addicts are notorious for craving sweets. Hmmm……

    Rats would rather have sweets than cocaine and human opiate addicts crave sugary foods.

    Something going on, that’s for sure !

  2. Posted November 14, 2007 at 10:20 am by FARfetched | Permalink

    Not to mention the classic “munchies” syndrome in pot smokers.

    Could sugar be a “cure” for a nose-candy addiction? Does coke produce a buzz similar to a sugar bomb? I’m not joking, more study is needed here.

    If the religious right weren’t already hooked, they’d probably agitate to make sugar a controlled substance. :-D

  3. Posted November 14, 2007 at 10:48 am by katiebird | Permalink

    I don’t know, FAR…

    I guess so. I think our fears of addiction have repressed our study of it. So there’s a lot we don’t know. And our belief that Will-Power can conquer anything.

    It CAN, of course. But, it’s more complicated than that.

    When I read that study, it was like a gigantic weight rolled off my shoulder. Because I actually do have a lot of will power and self-discipline.

    But, I’ve said before that nearly ALL my periods of weight-gain can be traced to sugar/candy. Even that first one, when I was 13 and we moved near a 5 & Dime with candy galore.

    So, I suspect that this topic is going to be a recurring theme (weekly?) at this site.