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If you ask the owners of thousands of fast food restaurants in this country if the food they serve is addictive, they'll likely tell you that simply is not true. However, if you ask just about anyone else if fast food is addictive, you will get quite a different answer.

Recently, 49 of the nation's most prominent health and medical organizations, along with 44 prominent physicians and nutrition experts delivered an urgent message to President Obama, calling for a coordinated effort of the Departments of Health and Human Services, Agriculture, Transportation and other government officials to recognize obesity as an epidemic just as harmful to humans as global warming is to the planet. While obesity, in and of itself, does not prove that fast food is addictive, results of recent medical studies indicate that fast food may be just as addictive to those who consume it as tobacco or heroin.

Researcher Dr. John Hoebel, a psychologist at Princeton University, together with a team of physiologists from the University of the Andes in Merida, Venezuela, conducted studies on rats and found evidence to suggest that people can become dependent on the fat and sugar content in fast food. In the study, rats were fed a diet that included 25% sugar, and when the sugar was withheld, the rats showed signs of withdrawal, including chattering teeth and the shakes. Although he used drugs to speed up the process of withdrawal, the results were the same-high fat foods stimulate pleasure chemicals in the brain called opioids, and, just like rats, people can become dependent on high-fat foods, needing continued reinforcement, to sustain the level of these chemicals in the brain.

In a similar study, Ann Kelley, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin Medical School in Madison (who has since passed away from colon cancer), found more evidence to indicate that the release of opioids in the nucleus accumbens tells your brain to keep eating. By over-stimulating a rat's opioid receptors with synthetic enkephalin, an endorphin, the rats ate up to six times the amount of fat normally consumed. The rats also took in more sweet, salty foods, as well as solutions containing alcohol. Her findings led her to believe that exposure to pleasurable, tasty foods can change gene expression, suggesting a person could become addicted to food.

While some critics spend just as much money and time on trying to disprove these results, there have been other studies conducted to try and prove whether or

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