Cookies = Terrorism, Cookies = Crack

…walking around like normal people… and they DON’T KNOW THEY ARE DUMB… <<shivers>> Yeah, I’m looking at YOU – MSNBC.  *headdesk*

Chocolate cookies have something in common with crack. Neuroscientists increasingly report that fat-and-sugar combinations light up the brain’s dopamine pathway — its pleasure-sensing spot — the same pathway that conditions people to alcohol or drugs.

Oh, good god!!!  Cookies have something in common with crack!!!  Like… they both exist on this earth.  They both can be made in kitchens!!  They both cause pleasure responses in the brain!  Alarming right??!!!????!!!  By this criteria, we should also fear orgasms, jogging and really ripe strawberries that are just oh so amazing. 

Did you know that my bed quilt has something in common is serial killers!!!???!!!  It has mass and weight and is three-dimensional!  Get your helmets, folks!!

I just love how these article point out the OBVIOUS and make it sound like some kinda disaster, when these types of connections and be drawn all over the place between all sorts of things that really aren’t connected.  Sigh…

How’s this for a descriptive sentence:

Food hijacked Dr. David Kessler’s brain. 

I can see it now.  Evil looking cookies holding a gun to his head and making him fat(ter) by their mere EXISTENCE! 

The scientist who once led the government’s attack on addictive cigarettes can’t wander through part of San Francisco without craving a local shop’s chocolate-covered pretzels. Stop at one cookie? Rarely.

It’s not an addiction but it’s similar, and he’s far from alone. Kessler’s research suggests millions share what he calls “conditioned hypereating” — a willpower-sapping drive to eat high-fat, high-sugar foods even when they’re not hungry.

This part really makes me giggle.  Did this guy ever consider that perhaps “conditioned hypereating” is CAUSED by dieting?  No?  Didn’t think so…  Hah.  Conditioned hypereating caused by diets.  Fits pretty well, yes?  And yet, I don’t see anyone researching that. 

Otherwise, this article is chock full of other types of diet ignorance such as labelling some foods “bad” and this little nugget of brilliance:

Retrain the brain to think, “I’ll hate myself if I eat that,” Kessler advises.

Followed by this:

“I’ve learned to eat things I like but things I can control,” Kessler says. But he knows the old circuitry dies hard: “You stress me enough and I’ll go pick up that bagel.”

Yay!  Self-esteem BASED on what one eats!  We all know how well that works out…. not well at all.  😉  Why not train the brain to play an instrument or learn a new language or to play chess?  Why all this effort to retrain the brain to base self-esteem on food?  Oh man… the stupid!  It burnsssssssssssssssssssssss….

Oh yeah, and stress-eating?  We all do it.  Even thin people.  Even normal eaters.  It’s called being HUMAN.  We also like to eat in celebration at times and to overeat foods that we know we may not have again for a really long time.  Oh gee… do you think there is some correllation to dieting and this so-called hypereating?  The body may say… “well, darn… I’m not going to get cookies again for AGES, so I better eat as many as possible before his defenses go back up again!!”  Forbidding foods can cause binging and overeating on them.  In my experience, the most effective way to deal with this is to un-forbid these things… not to go even further in the restrictive direction.  *headdesk*

There are a few research points in the article meant to prove the point that cookies are BAD.  All of them did nothing to convince me, frankly.  There was nothing new in there to me.  But, I did find this one particularly interesting:

First, the team found that even well-fed rats will work increasingly hard for sips of a vanilla milkshake with the right fat-sugar combo but that adding sugar steadily increases consumption. Many low-fat foods substitute sugar for the removed fat, doing nothing to help dieters eat less, Kessler and University of Washington researchers concluded.

I have experienced this myself.  I’ve noticed that high sugar foods sometimes make me feel so dehydrated – which makes me want more high-sugar foods, if I don’t realize that what I really need is more water.  If hydration isn’t readily available, I find it extremely hard to put down the bad of Sour Patch Kids, for example, since they are very sugary.  However, if I eat them slowly and make sure I have water readily available, I don’t have this problem at all.  I’d be interested to find out more about this study and what the over-all set-up for the rats were.  Were the rats on a restricted diet?  Was water readily available as they ate this high-sugar stuff?  Maybe rats don’t even know that water would stop the “omg… I don’t like the taste of this, but somehow I cannot stop eating this” reaction – when it stems from an unpleasant reaction to high-sugar.  Does anyone else have this reaction to high-sugar content?  Or… high-salt even… I get this reaction with potato chips as well.  😉

 My posting (and responding to comments) has been light lately… as some of you may have noticed.  I had an awesome time paintballing on Saturday and my quads have been recovering.  Seriously.  It has been very painful just to get out of chairs… and this situation hasn’t caused lots of great blogging on my part.  I expect a few more slow days (perhaps), before I get back into the swing of things.  I have some appointments today and an interview tomorrow, so I shall be focusing on those things.  But who knows… maybe I’ll blog even more during this period… I cannot predict my own reactions to such things.  😉  However, forgive me if I’m a little slow this week.

–AngryGrayRainbows