Hooked on sugar rush

Nothing sweet about addictive hold on human brain

SUGAR changes the brain in the same way as alcohol and nicotine addiction does, while scientists have also mapped the way our brains crave salt.

Researchers are trialling a mobile phone app that uses brain training to regain control of the circuits in the brain that are hijacked on unhealthy diets.

The Queensland University of Technology laboratory of Selena Bartlett found that the quit-smoking drug Champix could be used to treat sugar addiction in animals.

Researchers found that in the long term sugar and nicotine worked on the same receptors in the brain, acting on the same reward and pleasure centre of the brain.

And like drug addicts needed larger ‘hits’ over time to achieve the same reward, they found the same was true for sugar consumption.

Associate Professor Bartlett has now used those findings to design a brain training program, which works by first educating adults about poor food choices and then training them to overpower the stresseating response.

They will measure the change in waist circumference after three weeks.

As GPs now write prescriptions for exercise to treat many physical and psychological illness, after growing evidence of its medicinal impact, Prof Bartlett said she believed brain training would soon be a mainstay of obesity treatment.

“We have control over it. This is the bit that is missing in the conversations, the brain part of it,” she said.

“Everyone talks about exercise and dieting and mindful and yoga. But nobody is talking about the fact people can access control to retrain the brain and rewire it.”

Meanwhile, Joel Geerling, from the University of Iowa, also presented research at the Australasian Neuroscience Society’s annual scientific meeting in Brisbane this week, that uncovered the brain cells that drive our appetite for salt.

“If you are of the opinion we are eating too much sodium, then it’s critically important to work out how to eat less,” Dr Geerling said.

“If there was a pharmacological way to help people stick to it, understanding the biology of the circuit — and what it has in common with other types of appetite — would be important.”