Junk Food-Addicted Rats Chose to Starve Themselves Rather Than Eat Healthy Food
August 17th, 2010

Via: 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.

…

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.”

In a recent video I watched, about a Los Angeles family surviving a collapse, I learned something related to this.

Apparently a person will NOT necessarily "eat everything" when he's starving. That goes against the common myth, repeated by my mom countless times, that "if you were ever really starving to death, you'd eat bugs, you'd eat absolutely everything!"

That sullen, picky teenager who lives on Chef Boyardee? You might have to watch him literally starve to death as he thumbs his nose up at the only food in the house (crushed bean meal, a snake, a squirrel, an unfamiliar stew, etc.)

The post above (regarding rats starving themselves) lends extra weight to the above tidbit about people starving even with food present.

Imagine the frustration when your own offspring refuses to live -- just because you didn't train him in his youth to mortify his sense of taste. It would be especially difficult because parents don't want to outlive their children. If your offspring choose to die, what does it matter if YOU live or die? Your proverbial "line" will end.

Matthew

This is not at all surprising. We weren't raised on a lot of junk compared to the rest of our family and friends, as my mom was one of the only women around who was home and cooked from scratch. We always had our own large garden so much of our food was "organic", although naturally we didn't term it that way, it was just the garden. But we did have junk as a supplement (snacks) quite regularly and I have continued that in my own home. I have often noticed the symptoms of addiction in myself. They are milder but they are there. The longer we go without junk in the house, the less we want it but that withdrawal period can be tough, especially on my husband who was raised on junk.

I know the whole suit against McDonald's was seen as crazy because people make their own choices; but there's another side of me that thinks it's not so crazy because so many of these foods have addictive qualities, often purposely made that way by the companies (think MSG and God knows what else). I think they should be held accountable for selling garbage to people in the first place. If someone knows exactly what they are doing and does it anyway, that's one thing, but so many have no clue what is going on in the food industry and I feel badly for them. I am glad there are finally many "movements" out there making people more aware.