You knew it all along, didn’t you — that Oreos are as addictive as cocaine?
To lab rats, at least.
And I suspect there’s a little rat in all of us.
;)
The Oreos don’t even have to be the deep fried variety currently on sale at the North Carolina State Fair (no, I didn’t eat any): straight from the package will do.
A professor at Connecticut College and some of his students have demonstrated that rats respond to high fat/high sugar foods — with Oreos as the test product — in the same way they respond to injections of cocaine or morphine. In fact, when they measured the expression of cFos, a protein produced in the pleasure center of the brain, they found that eating sweet cookies stimulated even more neurons than the hard drugs.
Oreos have never been my problem: I always worry about have dark crumbs from the cookies getting stuck between my teeth. But ice cream is another matter, especially on those risky days when I throw caution to the wind and eat straight from the carton.
I’ll just have a couple of spoonfuls to take the edge off, I say, not really worth messing up a bowl. Before I know it, a sizeable slab of Rocky Road has gone missing, and I really need to even up the rough spots so what’s left will be smooth. Then the outside starts melting a little, and running the spoon around the side to pick up some of that soft-serve consistency amazement gets a little too tempting. Where do you stop?
Seriously: once you start eating ice cream from the carton, you’re done for, and pretty soon you start feeling like a rat, especially if there are others in the house who might have been counting on ice cream as a bedtime snack and you’ve “evened it up” right down to the flat bottom of the carton.
I’m wondering if I should report the local grocery store when it offers a two-for-one sale on Breyer’s, Blue Bell, or Ben & Jerry’s. Is the store management so different from a street-corner pusher?
I guess Daniel and his buddies were on to something when they passed on the king’s rich foods and requested vegetables only: that Babylonian blow could be dangerous stuff.
Professor of Old Testament at Campbell University Divinity School in Buies Creek, North Carolina, and the Contributing Editor and Curriculum Writer at Good Faith Media.
