Are Oreos as addictive as cocaine? An undergraduate student did a research on Oreos cookies. Accordingly a lot of articles with headlines like “Oreos May Be as Addictive as Cocaine” and “College study finds Oreo cookies are as addictive as drugs” were released based on this research.
According to the college, students put rats in a maze and rewarded the ones who traversed it with Oreos on one side. On the other side, the ones who couldn’t make it, got rice cakes. The students measured how long did the rats spent on each side and they found out that Oreos are more popular than rice cakes. The students then repeated the experiment, but this time the reward was Morphine and on the other side they put saline, which is a solution of salt in water.
The results revealed that rats that chose Oreos spent as much time as those who chose Morphine. That doesn’t necessarily mean Oreos are addictive as Morphine.
The students also measured the effect of a protein called "C-Fos", which indicates brain cell activity in the nucleus accumbens. This part of the brain is responsible for the pleasure and is involved in addiction because of the pleasure people feel when they do drugs. They also found out that the nucleus accumbens of the rats activate more strongly on eating Oreos.
According to the research, I think that Oreos produce pleasure as much as drugs do, or may be more but they are not as addictive as drugs.
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