Eating addictive as sex, drugs: Study

Oct. 20, 2006. 05:36 AM

JOSEPH HALL

HEALTH REPORTER

Sex and drugs and guacamole.According to a new study by Yale University, food can be just as addictive as recreational drugs or sex.The hormone most associated with making you hungry affects the same pleasure-inducing, addictive area of the brain that marijuana or cocaine do, said Dr. Tamas Horvath, chair of comparative medicine at Yale University's school of medicine, in New Haven, Conn."And if you think about it, you need to be addicted to eating. It's a must," Horvath said."It has to be (addictive) if you consider it, because without that you would die."The study, partially sponsored by the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, will appear today in an online edition of the Journal of Clinical Investigation.What Horvath found in rats was that the hormone ghrelin — produced in the stomach to promote eating — is actually acting on a part of the brain, the ventral tegmental area (VTA), that has long been associated with the pleasurable effects of things like drugs and sexual activity.Horvath, a veterinarian and neuroscientist, says an addiction mechanism to promote eating would have evolved naturally in our brains to ensure we took the trouble to find food."Not necessarily today, when you can open the refrigerator, but when you consider us as animals, you'd need to go out and be interested in seeking the food and to go and get it," Horvath said."Therefore, it makes sense that it has this type of reward value. It emerged to make you more efficient at survival."The newly discovered neural pathway could lead to treatments for addictive eating, or even to "curb the munchies," said Carlton University psychologist Alfonso Abizaid, who contributed to the study.Abizaid said that knowledge of the neurological mechanism could spur the development of drugs that would interfere with it, adding one more weapon to the arsenal against obesity.Horvath said a new diet drug, known as Rimonabant and available in Europe as an obesity treatment, works on the brain's VTA region.