Experiments on rats reveal why once you pop, you can almost never stop

Apr 12, 2013 08:11 GMT  ·  By

A team of researchers speaking at yesterday's (i.e. April 11) meeting of the American Chemical Society shed new light on a condition referred to by the scientific community as hedonic hyperphagia.

For those unaware, said term is no more and no less than one very fancy way of talking about some people's behavior of eating not because they are hungry, but because they derive pleasure from doing so.

As Tobias Hoch, Ph.D puts it, “It’s recreational over-eating that may occur in almost everyone at some time in life.”

In order to gain a better understanding of hedonic hyperphagia, the researchers carried out several experiments of laboratory rats, Newswise reports.

Thus, they allowed several such rodents to feast on chips, whereas others were given the opportunity to eat as much run-off-the-mil rat food as they wanted to.

With the help of MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), the scientists closely monitored what happened inside the brains of these two groups of rats.

Despite the fact that the two types of foods that the rodents were presented with had the same fats and carbohydrates content, it appears that the rats displayed a clear preference for the chips.

This led the researchers to believe that, contrary to previous assumptions, there is more to chips than their high ratio of fats and carbohydrates that makes them so appealing.

“The effect of potato chips on brain activity, as well as feeding behavior, can only partially be explained by its fat and carbohydrate content. There must be something else in the chips that make them so desirable,” Tobias Hoch explains.

By the looks of it, potato chips stimulate the reward, addiction, food intake, sleep, activity and motion centers in the brains of the rats in a way different from that of the standard chow.

The researchers hope that, once they carry out several other investigations, they will be able to pin down the precise molecular triggers responsible for allowing potato chips and other similar snacks to stimulate the brain differently from other types of foods. Once they succeed in doing so, they wish to develop treatments for people's addiction to such unhealthy treats.