Eating junk food is like snorting coke.

The wonderful ways you can become an addict.

What a relief it must be to the typical coke/crack head to know that s/he’s not the only junkie on the block. Why? Because scientists have finally worked out what we’ve been sensing ever since we walked past Mcdonald’s.

From health.com

A new study in rats suggests that high-fat, high-calorie foods affect the brain in much the same way as cocaine and heroin. When rats consume these foods in great enough quantities, it leads to compulsive eating habits that resemble drug addiction, the study found.

So even though one Big Mac might do the trick, who can really resist the urge to do one more bump, oops we meant one more side order of fries.

Doing drugs such as cocaine and eating too much junk food both gradually overload the so-called pleasure centers in the brain, according to Paul J. Kenny, Ph.D., an associate professor of molecular therapeutics at the Scripps Research Institute, in Jupiter, Florida. Eventually the pleasure centers “crash,” and achieving the same pleasure–or even just feeling normal–requires increasing amounts of the drug or food, says Kenny, the lead author of the study.

Which sounds like a round about way of saying if you live anywhere near a 7- 11 you’re in luck, otherwise you are going to be licking last week’s grease wrappers from the bin to get your extra fix.

What does this mean for the American constitution, that whether it’s coke, blow, crack, dope or fillet mignon, we just can’t get enough. But after all isn’t that what makes us so American in the first place? And just as an after thought does this all mean it won’t be long when we’ll be snorting our Big Macs up our nose?

They began to eat compulsively, to the point where they continued to do so in the face of pain. When the researchers applied an electric shock to the rats’ feet in the presence of the food, the rats in the first two groups were frightened away from eating. But the obese rats were not. “Their attention was solely focused on consuming food,” says Kenny.

We’ll be seeing you at 7-11 later this evening or if our crack dealer gets here fast enough perhaps we’ll just stay in tonight and get high the way we used to get high way back in the 80’s.

Health.com