And because this is such riveting news the Oregonian felt the need to post the same article, with different titles, in the news and living section of the website.
Few foods stir brain cells like the chocolate milkshake.
“It’s the cocaine of food,” says Eric Stice, a senior scientist at Oregon Research Institute in Eugene. “It’s really good at firing up reward circuitry.”
Does this mean it’s genetically impossible to not like chocolate milkshakes? I mean, seriously. How can a legitimate scientist even make a connection between an addictive drug and a /food/. As if the title of these “articles” weren’t off-putting enough, the first two lines of the article throw the creditability of the study out the window.
Here’s where chocolate milkshakes enter the picture. Stice and colleagues at the University of Oregon and two other centers wanted to compare how the brain’s reward center responds to pleasing foods in obese and lean individuals. They needed something delicious that people could eat with a minimum of jaw movement to avoid blurring the brain scans. Volunteers, ranging in age from 14 to 22, were all female because the researchers recruited them from an ongoing study on eating disorders.
The group of volunteers in this study seem to be the worst choices. The participants are already dealing with eating disorders. So likely they are consumed with the shamed and hatred that comes with this disease. These women belittle themselves for every sip of milkshake which tastes good, they are plagued with thoughts of how many calories they are intaking and how horrible of a person they are if they enjoy anything food related. These women do not have positive body image, couldn’t that play into the response their brains are giving off? Do these women have any other diseases which may alter their brain chemistry like depression, anxiety, or faltering taste buds? What effect does puberty have on these women’s body chemistry and brain processes? Again, the study comes across as so flawed right out of the gate. No consideration was giving to these outside forces. It’s a simply fat=bad standpoint, with no real science taking place.
The taste of a milkshake stirred activity in the brains of overweight volunteers, but far less than in the brains of lean volunteers. Reward center activity was even more blunted in overweight volunteers who tested positive for a particular gene variation, called TaqIA A1, which seems to reduce brain dopamine receptors.
Researchers tracked weight for one year in some volunteers. Those with low brain activation in response to the milkshake who also had the gene variant were significantly more likely to pack on pounds.
I think it’s just precious how the /one/ gene related to /possible/ obesity is thrown in to give this study just a molecule of legitimacy. They’re not reaching, no, honestly, they’re not. And the gene which is possibly related to obesity coupled with the low response to milkshakes is the perfect evaluational explanation of why people are fat. Just like the formula for weight loss is watching calories, or wait, maybe it’s carbs, oh no, wait, carbs are okay, it’s calories. Really, calories are the culprit. And you need to exercise at least 30 minutes a day, wait no, three to four times a week, oh wait, no, in order to maintain thinness one needs to exercise three to four hours a day. Yes, that’s the ticket. And for those people who have no restraint WLS is the answer, we’ll just cut off a piece of your stomach. Oh, that causes complications, well, how about if we just bind it to let as little food into their system as possible? That’s the ticket, starve these people. That’ll keep them from being fat. Serves them right for not having any self-control to begin with.
He says research shows that the brains of obese people differ in other significant ways. In experiments requiring subjects to complete tasks to earn food rewards, obese people tend to work much harder than lean people, evidence of greater cravings. Brain imaging studies show that obese people experience greater expectation of reward than lean individuals. But Stice is convinced they don’t receive the emotional rewards experienced by people of normal weight.
“The big implication,” he says, “is if you can get people to improve diet quality, you may be able to prevent this reward system from unraveling.”
I hate to repeat myself, but I am just so flabbergasted that scientists can’t seem to ask these questions themselves when performing such experiments. Are these test subjects completely equal and healthy in order to have a fair comparison? No, as has been answered, these volunteers suffer from eating disorders. Are we surprised that the thin people, who have the unhealthy compulsion to starve themselves or binge after eating, work less rigorously to receive a food reward? No, we are not. They have spent considerable time training themselves to hate themselves, their desire to eat, and food as a whole. Us fatties are a whole different ballgame, neither one “better” or “worse”, and so of course the reaction to “food rewards” is going to be different. Speaking from my own perspective, I thrive to get any kind of rewards. That’s one thing that can happen when a person suffers severe neglect and abuse as a child. That doesn’t mean my eating is compulsive or uncontrollable. Another consideration is a person’s need for acceptance, which can be due to low self-esteem or self-worth, and is not exclusive to overweight or “lean”.
Another aspect of this study that bothers me is the idea that fat people only consume unhealthy foods. I know several fatties who eat well and don’t touch refined sugar, chemicals, HFCS, and other “unhealthy” foods. Yet, they are still fat. I also know incredibly thin people who gorge themselves on processed foods. They never exercise and hate anything deemed “healthy”, yet they are still thin. I wonder when scientists are going to catch onto this fact. To be some of the most educated people in our society, they sure do have a penance for publishing the most idiotic and poorly thought out studies I’ve ever seen. This study is akin to a study showing how smoking kills based on research of 70-80 year old men with cancer.
