Ban icecream sniffing?

The Herald headline is “Icecream cravings like cocaine: study”, and it’s another paper from our friends at the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, but this time filtered through the British press.

Co-author of the study, Dr Kyle Burger, from the Oregon Research Institute, told The Daily Telegraph overeating high fat or high sugar foods appeared to change the way the brain responded to the food.

That’s not quite what the paper said he found.  The study looked at brain activity in people drinking a milkshake compared to a tasteless drink, and found that the milkshake effect was smaller in people who had eaten icecream frequently in past weeks.  But it wasn’t smaller in people who had eaten cookies, chocolate, hamburgers, cake, or chips, and there wasn’t any relationship to total dietary fat and sugar.   So, in fact, the study found that overeating high fat or high sugar foods did not appear to change the way the brain responded to the food.  As far as I can tell (and, unlike you, I can get the whole paper), the study does not report at all on the relationship between craving for icecream and the brain activity measurements.

So. The study found that brain response to a milkshake was weaker in people who eat a lot of icecream, but was unrelated to other high-fat or high-sugar foods, and that people who have cravings for icecream eat more icecream than people who don’t have cravings for it.