Healthy Utah / Summer 2018

Page 17

BIT Carb

Addiction? It turns out there’s a good reason why you can’t put down that macaroni and cheese, or why those french fries are so addicting. A new study finds that carbohydrates and fats light up the same areas of our brain, the ‘reward centers’, as drugs. Researchers had participants look at photos of various food items and place a price on how much they’d pay for those snacks. They then hooked them up to an MRI scanner to see which parts of their brain were most active. It’s one of the issues that’s creating the world’s obesity epidemic. “Food has become our favorite drug here in America. And it’s just as harmful. The current generation of children will not live as long as their parents, not because of opioids, but because they are eating foods filled with fat, leading to obesity and a whole host of health problems,” says Joseph Galati, M.D., a hepatologist at Texas Liver Specialists.

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OUTDOOR 2018

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