Oreos Are Just as Addictive as Cocaine. It's Science!
The Oreo. Has a better cookie ever been created? If you're asking Americans, then no. The cookie, which first hit the grocery store shelves in 1912, has been the most popular cookie for many years now. There's just something… Special about it. Let the first person who hasn't downed an entire sleeve of Oreos in one sitting cast the first objection to its greatness. Oreos have been so popular for so long that a group of researchers decided to analyze them. Unsurprisingly, they found that Oreos are as addictive as cocaine.
The National Biscuit Company (now you know where the name "Nabisco" comes from) introduced Oreos in 1912, and almost immediately became a success. Of course this was unfortunate news for the Hydrox cookie, which Nabisco ripped off to make the Oreo. The Hydrox debuted in 1908, but was rendered a sideshow when the Oreo came around. Oreos were so instantly popular that the block in New York where they were created is now named "Oreo Way." This seemingly random and instant success was behind the research conducted by the University of Connecticut's Professor Joseph Schroeder, neuroscience major Jamie Honohan, and a group of U-Conn students.
The team wanted to show just how powerfully addictive sugary foods are, and what better food to do that than the Oreo? "My research interests stemmed from a curiosity for studying human behavior and our motivations when it comes to food,” Honohan explained in a University of Connecticut media release about the study. "We chose Oreos not only because they are America’s favorite cookie, and highly palatable to rats, but also because products containing high amounts of fat and sugar are heavily marketed in communities with lower socioeconomic statuses."
Through experiments with the rats, they found that the furry rodents felt the same pleasure from eating an Oreo as they did when being injected with coke or morphine. Not only that, in one respect, the Oreo beat out drugs. They found that eating cookies made the brain's "pleasure center" fire more neurons than when it was on drugs.
Pleasure Overload
Oreos fired more neurons in brain's reward center than cocaine/morphine injections.
To test the power of the Oreo, the group of researchers devised a maze. On one side they gave a group of hungry rats some Oreos. On the other side they gave them a control food, which in this case was rice cakes. Then they would see which side of the maze the rats preferred to hang out at. They did the same thing to some rats injected with coke and some injected with nothing but salt water. The Oreo side and the coke side won easily.
Maze Proof
Rats preferred Oreo side over rice cakes, just like drug rats chose cocaine over saline.
As Schroeder explained, this proved that Oreos are as addictive as the worst possible drugs, yet we don't regulate them the same way. "Even though we associate significant health hazards in taking drugs like cocaine and morphine, high-fat/ high-sugar foods may present even more of a danger because of their accessibility and affordability," he said. One other note from the study: The rats ate the middle of the Oreos first, just like us. Damn those cookies. Damn them right to our bellies.
[Pic via Flickr - Rob Boudon]
