No, Oreos Aren't As Addictive As Cocaine

Daniel_Stuckey writes "If you give a mouse a cookie, you can spend all day following it around the house while it wants to do a bunch of tedious activities. Or, you can trap it in a box, keep feeding it cookies, and then make the outrageous claim that Oreos are as addictive as cocaine. Students at Connecticut College opted for the second option, and the consequences that ensued were much more annoying than making some arts and crafts with a darn mouse. Fox News reported that a 'College study finds Oreo cookies are as addictive as drugs,' Forbes explained 'Why Your Brain Treats Oreos Like a Drug,' and a ton of other sites ran with the story as well. Here's how the experiment, which has not been peer reviewed and has not been presented yet, went down. Mice were placed in a maze, with one end holding an Oreo and the other end holding a rice cake. The mice, without fail, decided to eat the Oreo over the rice cake, proving once and for all that mice like cookies better than tasteless discs with a styrofoamy texture."

Comments

Re:Press release from a not even published poster.

[Anonymous Coward]

And you can't even be mad at this one since it is done by undergrads.

Yes, actually you can, this "study" isn't acceptable even by High School standards. For someone pursuing a Major course of study to make such obvious, fundamental procedural errors it's downright shameful.

They never ran any kind of control on the maze. They should have put rice cakes at BOTH exits and ran the mice through a large number of times to prove that the design of the maze isn't leading the mice to the "drugs" exit more frequently.
They never ran any direct comparison between the Oreos and the Cocaine. Just because mice chose Cocaine over Rice, and chose Oreos over Rice, DOES NOT lead to the conclusion that Oreos are the same as Cocaine. That's basic, fundamental logic they should have learned in GRADE SCHOOL.

There are only TWO possible explanation for this "study". Either these undergrads are a pack of completely incompetent fucking morons.... or they snorted all the Coke they were supposed to be using for the experiment and faked the data.

Re:Press release from a not even published poster.

[TapeCutter]

And you can't even be mad at this one since it is done by undergrads.

Yes, actually you can....

Seriously, a press beat up about a bunch of collage kids screwing up their class science project makes you "mad"? - And who are you mad at? - Strangely it's not the "journalist" who manufactured the beat up, it's the kids!! Little wonder the American public are so easily manipulated via their own media outlets.