by Barry Marcus

Created on: June 12, 2009   Last Updated: June 23, 2009

The fast and busy lifestyle of the early twenty first century has led many up and coming professionals to turn to fast foods as a major source of their nutritional needs. But eating fast foods on a regular basis carries a high risk. Fast foods could be addictive.

Recent research has indicated that fast food is addictive. It is the vast quantity of fats and sugars contained in fast food that do it. The evidence suggests that fast food eaten on a regular basis causes biological changes that can result in serious withdrawal symptoms when the fast food is withdrawn.

Research in 2002 by Princeton University neuroscientist Bart G. Hoebel, supports this theory. Hoebel and his colleagues fed rats on a diet containing 25% sugar. These rats fell into severe anxiety states when the sugar was withdrawn. The symptoms bore a striking resemblance to cold turkey withdrawal from morphine and nicotine.

Not only are these substances addictive, but they cause certain hormones to function incorrectly. The hormone Leptin is the main regulator of appetite, energy intake and expenditure. Subjected to a high fat diet, the body loses the ability to know when it has had enough to eat.

Research by endocrinologist Professor Michael Schwartz of the University of Washington suggests that the brain becomes resistant to Leptin as body weight increases. The signals that normally tell the brain that one has eaten enough become severely weakened.

The University of Wisconsin Medical School's Dr. Ann Kelley studied the behaviour of rats fed on a sweet, salty, high fat diet. She identified a link between these foods and the brain's pleasure centre. The effects on the brain chemistry were long term and very similar in nature to the effects of opiate addiction. No wonder so many people enjoy eating fast foods!

The brain's response to fatty and sugary foods is to produce extremely high levels of dopamine. These levels are paralleled only by the intake of drugs such as heroin.

Many of the fast foods on the market are high in calories, saturated fats and sugar. A Big Mac, for example, has a total fat content of 30 grams of which 10 grams are saturated fats. One serving contains 560 calories (270 fat calories) and 80 mg of cholesterol. Add to this the oily French fries and a sweet milk shake and the fat, sugar and calorie intake become quite alarming.

The result of fast food addiction can be quite devastating. In what appears to be a rapidly accelerating world-wide trend, Millions of people are

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