Junk Food-Addicted Rats Chose to Starve Themselves Rather Than Eat Healthy Food
August 17th, 2010Via: Natural News:
A diet including unlimited amounts of junk food can cause rats to become so addicted to the unhealthy diet that they will starve themselves rather than go back to eating healthy food, researchers have discovered.
In a series of studies conducted over the course of three years and published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Scripps Florida scientists Paul Johnson and Paul Kenny have shown that rats’ response to unlimited junk food closely parallels well-known patterns of drug addiction — even down to the changes in brain chemistry.
“What we have are these core features of addiction, and these animals are hitting each one of these features,” Kenny said.
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Having established that the junk food rats had become addicted, Johnson and Kenny wanted to know how far this addiction would push them. So they took both junk-food addicted rats and rats that had not previously been exposed to such food, and exposed them to electrical shocks whenever they ate junk. Rats that had just been introduced to junk food quickly stopped eating it, while the addicted rats ignored the discomfort and kept eating.
Perhaps the most shocking finding came when the researchers took away the addicted rats’ access to junk food and started feeding them only healthy rat chow again — the same diets the rats had eaten as pups. When junk food was no longer available, the rats simply refused to eat for two weeks.
“They actually voluntarily starved themselves,” Kenny said.
“It’s almost as if you break these things, it’s very, very hard to go back to the way things were before. Their dietary preferences are dramatically shifted.”
Addicted to junk.
By obvious extension, the same is true for human beings.
By less obvious extension, what about our ‘soul food’-what we feed our minds with, almost entirely through our eyes and ears?
Finally, some good news. The perfect solution to over-population. Who’da thunk MacDonalds would emerge as the savior of mankind? And after its job is done, it disappears due to lack of customers. Kind of like a virus that kills off all those with immune systems too weak to resist, and then dies itself due to lack of a host. Natural justice; or call it God’s will. Let us give thanks.
I think this actually echoes the mind-control-parasites piece you posted above:
For the past 3 years my wife and I have followed the GAPS (Gut And Psychology Syndrome) diet as a kind of spring cleanse. In a nutshell, its thesis is that when your gut-biosphere becomes imbalanced with harmful flora, this affects your whole psychology. That eating an unhealthy diet for even a moderate period of time can change your intestinal micro-cosmos in big ways to favor bacteria that thrive on things like sugars, oils and simple carbs. And those micro-organisms, not having been adapted to live in symbiosis with our organism over the centuries, produce wastes that are essentially toxic to us. These toxins effect us most dramatically in our cognitive functioning, our state of being, and our moods.
But what I’ve found most interesting – and I’ve seen this in my own experience – is that it definitely seems that what the micro-organisms in your gut want, YOU want. You crave what will feed the flora of your gut, whether or not it’s healthy for you.
I think I can honestly say I’d never ‘craved’ a salad before…until we followed the GAPS diet for roughly 8 months. Now I crave them all the time, several times a week. What I think is funny is that my wife and her friends have this joke that, whenever one of them is hesitating over some sweet dessert or something they’ll just go, “now, now…you know that’s just the yeast talking!”.