Doctors compare the love to potato chips with drug addiction. Why?
We assume there’s barely a person who’s not familiar with the following situation: you open a pack of potato chips and after tasting 2-3 of them you can’t stop eating before you’ve eaten up the whole pack. The scientists from the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, studied this phenomenon and presented the results at the 245th American Chemists Society National Meeting & Exposition.
The chips study involved giving rodents different foods with the same caloric value (including crisps). And the MRT (magnetic resonance tomography) tested the activity of the rats’ brains. As it turned out, eating chips made the brain areas responsible for pleasure more active than other kinds of foods. At the same time, while the rodents were eating chips, another link was found. Other brain areas got activated as well, namely those responsible for addictions, including drug addiction.
By the way, the survey also showed that it’s chips that cause a diet meltdown most often.
After having eaten the chips, the rats started playing and running around more actively, and this activity rise was caused by triggering the mentioned brain areas. It can also be said, that the rodents got into some kind of euphoria, which also includes hyperactivity in humans normally.
By the way, the scientists also noticed that after some time the hyperactivity changed for apathy and drowsiness in those rats having eaten chips. And those are pure and simple abstinence syndrome symptoms! It’s also noticeable, that those rats who had eaten other kinds of foods didn’t show the symptoms.
