So the answers to addiction may lie not in the substances themselves, but in the relationship people have with them and the settings in which they are consumed.
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2011/04/04/heroin-vs-haagen-dazs-what-food-addiction-looks-like-in-the-brain/#ixzz1IkRbAeo0
Heroin vs. Häagen-Dazs: What Food Addiction Looks Like in the Brain
Is Häagen-Dazs ice cream as addictive as heroin? Or, put another way, is heroin as addictive as Häagen-Dazs?
The study, published Monday in the Archives of General Psychiatry, involved 39 healthy women, who ranged in weight from lean to overweight or obese. The participants were asked to complete the Yale Food Addiction Scale, which tests for signs of food addiction. Women with full-fledged eating disorders of any type were not included in the study.
Then, using fMRI, researchers led by Yale's Ashley Gearhardt and Kelly Brownell looked at the women's brain activity in response to food. In one task, the women were asked to look at pictures of either a luscious chocolate shake or a bland, no-calorie solution. For another brain-scan task, women actually drank the shake — made with four scoops of vanilla Häagen-Dazs ice cream, 2% milk and 2 tablespoons of Hershey's chocolate syrup — or the no-calorie control solution, which was designed to be as flavorless as possible (water couldn't be used because it actually activates taste receptors).
The scientists found that when viewing images of ice cream, the women who had three or more symptoms of food addiction — things like frequently worrying about overeating, eating to the point of feeling sick and difficulty functioning due to attempts to control overeating or overeating itself — showed more brain activity in regions involved with pleasure and craving than women who had one or no such symptoms.
Similar to people suffering from substance abuse, the food-addicted participants also showed reduced activity in brain regions involved with self-control (the lateral orbitofrontal cortex), when they actually ate the ice cream.
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