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 Here's how the experiment, which has not been peer reviewed and has not been presented yet, went down.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

Sounds kinda like the Rat Park study

[mayko]

Seems reasonable that when you lock an animal (including humans) in a shitty little box it's going to over indulge in activities that work on the pleasure centers of the brain. However, given freedom and a wide range of stimuli it might be less susceptible to addiction as we have defined it. See the controversial Rat Park study (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park) which showed evidence that when researchers gave lab rats a suitable and pleasurable living environment opiates were no longer addictive.