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Even though they try to diet, some obese people continue to overeat despite negative physical and social consequences, a feature shared by people with addictions. In a series of rat experiments, researchers examined links between obesity from overeating and striatal reward-processing systems also involved in addictions.
The researchers implanted stimulating electrodes in the lateral hypothalamus of rats trained in a reward threshold task and verified that reward systems were intact. All rats were given unrestricted access to chow plus unrestricted access, 1-hour-daily access, or no access to tasty energy-dense foods (cafeteria diet). The unrestricted cafeteria-diet group ate twice as much as, and gained substantially more weight than, the ot…