Posts Tagged ‘addiction’

Addiction is the new eating disorder of the 21^st century.

Eating Disorders

The list of eating disorders is reduced to either starving yourself, or stuffing yourself and purging. What if there are reasons to call our obsession with and binging on junk food one of the most dangerous trends. The shocking part it is a growing movement, making its way to the most vulnerable victims our children.

U.S. researchers working with rats have shown for the first time the compulsion to overeat has the same biological mechanism as the addiction to drugs such as cocaine and heroin. It affects the brain’s pleasure circuitry in a similar way.

The study was conducted by Scripps Research Associate Professor Paul J Kenny and graduate student Paul M Johnson. The Scripps Research Institute is in Jupiter, Florida. It was published in the online issue of Nature Neuroscience.

Addiction

According to a statement from the Scripps Research Institute the study confirms what many obesity patients have been saying for years binging on junk food is just about impossible to control.

Kenny and Johnson show that as pleasure centers in the brain become less responsive, rats quickly develop compulsive overeating habits. This is the same progressively deteriorating chemical balance in reward brain circuits seen in rats that over consume cocaine or heroin.

Kenny said the study confirms that junk food can become “addictive.” One of the tests of addictive behavior is to train lab animals to anticipate an electric shock. At first the animals receive the mild shocks at the same time as light coming on, eventually they learn to anticipate the shock when they see the light and avoid doing the thing that triggers the shock.

In rats that become “addicted’ to junk food ignored the light and continued to binge. The junk food consisted of what people eat: cheesecake, bacon, sausage, and Ding-Dongs a chocolate like cake.

Junk Food Wins

Junk food wins even with rats. Lab rats were divided into three groups. The first group got a balanced healthy diet, the second group had access to high-calorie “junk” food for one hour a day, and the third group was fed healthy food, but had unlimited access to the high-calorie “junk food.”

The third group quickly showed a preference for the junk food, eating it all day long and becoming obese.

“They always went for the worst type of food,” Kenny said. “As a result, they took in twice the calories as the control rats,” when they removed the junk food and left the healthy diet, they refused to eat.

“ The change in the diet preference was so great that they basically starved themselves for two weeks after they were cut off from junk food,” said Kenny.

Conclusion

It doesn’t take a genius to know what group we belong to. We are in the third group minus the healthy food. What will it do to us, just look around. The next eclipse will be because we block the view.

Understanding this should make us realize we are being left without the power, or ability to withstand the temptations.

Nicotine keeps smoking by leaving a residue from the tobacco smoke. This is the smoke odor that is hard to get rid of. It can cling to virtually all surfaces for a long time. It reacts with the common indoor air pollutant nitrous acid to produce carcinogens.

Third Hand Smoke

Third hand smoke is a relatively new term. While everyone who ever stayed in a motel room knows that smokers leave telltale evidence. Some non-smokers have had the experience of staying in a hotel room vacated by smokers.

This problem and the implications were seen in a muti-institutional study led by researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

“The burning of tobacco releases nicotine in the form of a vapor that absorbs strongly onto indoor surfaces, such as walls, floors, carpeting, drapes and furniture. Nicotine can persist on those materials for days, weeks, and even months. Our study shows that when this residual nicotine reacts with ambient nitrous acid it forms carcinogenic tobacco-specific nitrosamines or TSNAs,” stated Hugo Destaillats, a chemist with the Indoor Environment Department of Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division. “TSNAs are the most broadly acting and potent carcinogens present in unburned tobacco and tobacco smoke.”

Destaillats is the corresponding author of a paper published in the Proceedings on the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) titled “Formation of carcinogens indoors by surface-mediated reactions of nicotine with nitrous acid, leading to potential third-hand smoke hazards.”

Co-authoring the PNAS paper with Destaillats were Mohamad Sleiman, Lara Gundel and Brett Singer, all with Berkeley Lab’s Indoor Environment Department, plus James Pankow with Portland State University, and Peyton Jacob with the University of California, San Francisco.

Dangerous Places

Most human exposure to TSNAs is from inhalation of dust, contact with the skin as in touching carpet or clothes. Walking on carpet bare footed in a motel room, which was previously occupied by a smoker is not wise. Opening windows to ventilate a room does not eliminate the hazard.

Any place a smoker has been is a place for alarm. This is usually a confined spaced such as a room, and elevator, bars, or restaurants. Even when people go outside to smoke they bring the smoke back on their clothes, hands, and breath. They are finding that breathing the air in a place where people smoked yesterday can be harmful.

“Nicotine, the addictive substance in tobacco smoke, has until now been considered to be non-toxic in the strictest sense of the term,” says Kamlesh Asotra of the University of California’s Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program, which funded this study. “What we see in this study is that the reactions of residual nicotine with nitrous acid at surface interfaces are a potential cancer hazard, and these results may be just the tip of the iceberg.”

Crossroads

We are at the crossroads of recognizing and calculating the health risks from our lifestyle in this decade. We seem to look at the risk vs.reward mode. Getting pleasure from some noxious habits including the faux food excesses, may have dire consequences. It will take time to crack the code and find the impact all this is having on our health. We may not be the land of the rising sun, but the nation of the setting sun.

Big Pharma 

We are a pharma nation and it is our way of life. Because, prescriptive drugs are so prevalent, it goes unnoticed by us except when see it abused by a younger generation.  We eagerly down pills for just about anything, from being anxious, sleepless, fat, high blood pressure, cholesterol, and sugar levels, almost all brought about by our lifestyle choices.  Prescription and over the counter potions to treat heartburn, constipation, aches and pains, headaches, erectile dysfunction, PMS, addictions, hair loss, and skin conditions are in most medicine cabins.  If there is anything we do not have a pill for it’s in the pipe line.

War on Only Half the Drug Problem

You can not have a war on drugs, and look the other way on the wholesale abuse of regular everyday pharmaceuticals.  The problem is they are considered normal and everyday when they have no right to be in that category.  The first thing that happens when a celebrity overdoses on an abuse of legal pharmaceuticals, the powers that be scours the place in the search of illegal substances.  Never mind, that they used a mix of different legal substances in large doses that can do collateral damage.  Remember, this generation is setting the example for the next.  We are saying if it comes from the pharmaceutical industry it is good, and we can solve problems with a pill.

Personal Responsibility

Personal responsibility is abrogated to a large medical industry, with you having little control over your own health.  This is the message we are sending to future generations.

Having given very little thought to why we are in this situation, and buying the profit making giants promises of a bright tomorrow, bliss is just a pill away.  Without a pharmaceutical industry we would be finding ways to alleviate our aches and pains and sleepless nights naturally.  Most of the children diagnosed with things called hyper-activity, and attention deficit, we would instead contribute to poor diet, lack of sleep, or lack of discipline.

Youth and Drugs

If we are drugging youngsters, and treating problems in that way, they now have a model of how things are done.  Also, it shortens the stretch to recreational drugs.  The difference isn’t that far except for the terms legal, and illegal, which does not hold that much weight to young people who see the hypocritical nature of the beast.  When children see adults with a pill, and a glass of water often enough it becomes a common place experience.  I really do not see how we can lead by example; in that case the words are empty.  Adults seem to need substances to function in today’s world, and the same seems to sadly hold true for our children.

Wake Up Call

The answer is to wake up from the pharmaceutical daze, and see clearly that this is not the direction to attain health. Then, and only then can we help ourselves and our children brake free of the addiction cycle.  It is somewhat easier than you think, just go to your pantry and refrigerator and see what is there.  There you will find the answer to the problem that lurks in your medicine cabinet.