A group of scientists are now claiming that fatty foods could be as addictive as so-called “hard drugs” like heroin and cocaine:
Binging on cheesecake and Ding Dongs can make you chunky – and turn you into a junkie…
Florida scientists looking into the causes of obesity let lab rats gorge round-the-clock on cake frosting and sweet treats, as well as bacon and sausage, and discovered that it triggered addiction-like responses in their brains.
To maintain their food-induced highs, the rats consumed more and more fatty treats – and got obese in the process.
I don’t doubt the science here. Depending on a person’s brain chemistry, fried chicken could be more addictive to them than a shot of smack. What worries me is that if junk food is just as addictive as illicit drugs, and it is proven to damage the health of people who do not moderate their consumption of it, we should soon be hearing calls for locking up gourmands and criminalizing fried foods and sweets.
Well, if drug warriors were consistent we would. I know there are groups out there calling for taxes and other legal restrictions on junk food, but I think we will be spared outright bans in this case because there is no way to easily define the potential criminals as “other.” Unlike with drugs, which were usually criminalized for reasons of race and class, almost all of us overindulge our appetites from time to time. And even if we do not personally engage in such behavior very often, we are undoubtedly close to people who do.
What this really shows is that there is nothing more innately harmful about cocaine and heroin than there is about ice cream and Krispy Kreme doughnuts. The difference is in how the government treats these products. The market for junk food is legal, so contracts are not enforced with street violence. Prices for such goods are not driven through the roof by prohibition, encouraging users to spend all of their time securing their next fix and often turning to petty theft or worse to attain the means for it. And most obviously, millions of sucrose addicts aren’t rotting away in a cage because of a personal vice.
So what will it be drug warriors: legal cocaine or criminalized cookies?
Cross-posted at The Lesson Applied.
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