You say, "What, me? I don’t use drugs," but FOOD be just as addictive, and people DO get "hooked" on certain foods. Psychiatrist Ashley Gerhardt examined the links between food addiction symptoms and neural activation in 48 young women ranging from lean to obese. He found that persons with an addictive-like eating behavior seem to have greater neural activity in brain regions similar to substance dependence. read more
Milk may be dangerous in Japan, but are fish and chicken safe for US to eat? They’re great diet foods, and fish is usually very healthy (depending on how you cook it), but we keep hearing that some kinds of fish contain mercury. Mercury contamination, a worldwide environmental problem, has been called "public enemy No.1" in California’s San Francisco Bay, and scientists have finally discovered where all that mercury is coming from.
read more
You may pride yourself on the fact that you stay away from drugs, but if you eat too much, you may be an addict–to FOOD. Sweets and high-fat foods affect the brain the same way drugs do–and like drugs, eating too much of these can cause permanent changes in the parts of the brain that control our eating behavior. Both animal and human brains have special pathways that make us feel good when we eat food with lots of calories.read more
If you work hard cooking that Thanksgiving dinner, you’ll not only enjoy it more, you’re likely to eat less of it. It’s commonly accepted that we appreciate something more if we have to work hard to get it, and a new study bears that out, at least when it comes to food. It seems to suggest that hard work can even enhance our appreciation for fare we might not favor, such as the low-fat, low calorie variety. At least in theory, this means that if we had to navigate an obstacle course to get to a plate of baby carrots, we might even prefer them to a Snickers bar.
read more