14 DAY TRIAL // In a new study, researchers in Italy have managed to prove the craving can override adversity to pain. The work was conducted on lab mice, which were trained to have a conditioned response to painful stimuli. The researchers say that the rodents, which were craving for chocolate, were ready to brave assured pain in order to get their fixes, which is something that falls in tune with the behavior human junkies exhibit when searching for a sample of their drug of choice, AlphaGalileo reports.
“We used a new model of compulsive behavior to test whether a previous stressful experience of hunger might override a conditioned response to avoid a certain kind of food – in this case, chocolate,” Rossella Ventura, the leader of the team behind the investigation, says. The group was based at the Santa Lucia Foundation, in Rome. This study basically focused on analyzing the interactions between stress and compulsive food-seeking, in an approach that could prove to be useful in generating new forms of therapy for humans as well.
Details of the team's research appear in the latest issue of the open-access scientific journal BMC Neuroscience. In the experiments, two sets of rats were separated. One was given enough food so that it did not crave for anything, whereas the other was starved. All the animals were trained to seek chocolate in a single chamber, rather than go out into a new, empty one. After the training, the scientists added another conditioning – a small, electric shock that was associated with the chamber containing the sweet stuff.
Unsurprisingly, the mice that were well fed did not bother to go after the chocolate, seeing how this would have brought them an undesired electric shock. However, those in the hungry group had nothing to hold them back, so they continued to venture inside the electrified room, in hopes of discovering a treat. According to the investigators, this is an index of compulsive behavior. They add that a similar type of index can also be found in humans that continue to compulsively search for food, despite adverse conditioning.