Although quantifying substance addiction is difficult, if the answer to this question turns out to be definitive and "yes," it's likely that few people will be surprised.
If you're short on time or too lazy to read papers or even abstracts, here's the money section of a paper published on PLoS by researchers at the University of Bordeaux in France:
[W]hen rats were allowed to choose mutually-exclusively between water sweetened with saccharin-an intense calorie-free sweetener-and intravenous cocaine-a highly addictive and harmful substance-the large majority of animals (94%) preferred the sweet taste of saccharin. The preference for saccharin was not attributable to its unnatural ability to induce sweetness without calories because the same preference was also observed with sucrose, a natural sugar. Finally, the preference for saccharin was not surmountable by increasing doses of cocaine and was observed despite either cocaine intoxication, sensitization or intake escalation-the latter being a hallmark of drug addiction.Our findings clearly demonstrate that intense sweetness can surpass cocaine reward, even in drug-sensitized and -addicted individuals.
The paper is clear and instructive, and the researchers' methods leave little apparent room for questioning their findings. Good stuff, although I prefer a nice bowl of Cap'n Crunch or some blow.
An important limitation here is that rat brains are not human brains. Specifically, humans have the ability to know that something they're putting into themselves might get them "hooked" and that this might not be good; rats, presumably, neither know not care and are driven only by the sensations produced by behaviors. So, while people stripped of cognition and free of legal and other restraints might be inclined to attack a pile of candy bars as avidly as they would a mound of cocaine, studying rodents obviously yields an incomplete picture. Since sugar is perfectly legal while cocaine is not, the threat of legal consequences can be employed as a partial deterrent to using the latter but not the former, and sugar, for all its potential cavity-inducing and waistline-bloating havoc, is unquestionably a nutrient, whereas cocaine's benefits, even were it legal, are limited at best.
Comments
Just a question because it is unclear, to me anyway, and sounds contradictory. How could the rats choose "mutually exclusively" in the case when they were in a state of "cocaine intoxication". They can't have excluded then, they are already high, right? So its "get some food" vs ... nothing. I think I am misunderstanding something there.
Posted by: Markk | August 2, 2007 9:00 AM
Well, I quite agree, yet I think in many cases people *do* act like rats attacking a pile of candy bars.
Consider the situation with shared P2P music. Nobody pays for it. The effect is to strip all the revenue out of the industry and leave music only as a promotional device for bands that already have a brand name and already tour.
So new bands that don't have a brand, and don't tour, all have a gigantic disincentive to spend thousands of hours creating great music in a professional format. It will never make them any money.
So music gets worse and worse over time as musicians bother less and less to create and refine their product, instead leaning on computers to create most of the tracks. Many don't even bother learning to play an instrument. It's just not cost-effective.
This was all quite foreseeable from 1999 on and neatly explains exactly what we have, in fact, seen. But instead of realizing that and saying "Oh, well, perhaps we shouldn't pirate, then -- we love music and piracy will gradually destroy music" people simply attacked the P2P candy bars like rats.
Posted by: Wes S. | August 2, 2007 11:57 AM
body "expects glucosa after eating and sensing it. In case of saccharin, that is mo accomplished so it demands more than before. In my country there is a famous phrase: fat people use saccharin, may be it explains a bit what is happening.
In the past, when sugar was fabricated or discovered it was at first forbidden because of its addictive properties (this are in some few books)
Posted by: Guillermo | August 2, 2007 11:59 AM
Now I have a memory of my eighth-grade social studies teacher holding up a test tube full of sugar and shouting, "THIS IS A DRUG!"
Heh.
(I'm not sure what the music industry has to do with this. Making a living as a musician has never been easy; I played semi-professionally from 1996 through 2002 and that business was a shark tank well before the advent of P2P filesharing. As a matter of fact, I've discovered and bought more great music in the past five years than I ever did before, and online music distribution--of which there are plenty of legit forms, by the way--plays a major role in that.)
Posted by: G. Williams | August 2, 2007 12:29 PM
@Mark: That was excatly my question when I read this article: how can rats choose between saccharin and intravenous cocaine?
Posted by: Saulo | August 2, 2007 1:45 PM
Ease up folks. English is not the first language of the group and if you read the article, the "mutually exclusive" thing only occurs once or twice. I can't figure out exactly how they are using it on first blush but I also can't see how it alters the interpretation of the data.
interesting stuff down in the discussion where they attempt to handwave away prior data showing that monkeys do prefer cocaine to sugar pellets.
Posted by: Drugmonkey | August 2, 2007 3:04 PM
Saulo:
It looks like the rats had an option of two levers, one of which administered cocaine into a catheter that was surgically inserted earlier, while the other delivered sweetened water into a dish. I still wonder if the results aren't confused by the manner of administration though...
Also: They used a "lickometer". To measure licking. Awesome.
Posted by: Wisaakah | August 2, 2007 3:16 PM
"interesting stuff down in the discussion where they attempt to handwave away prior data showing that monkeys do prefer cocaine to sugar pellets."
Noting that the earlier study used a much smaller dose of sweetener is hardly "handwaving," in my opinion. Also, interesting choice for a nickname. :D
Fascinating paper. I'm curious to see what future experiments in this vein (no pun intended!) go.
Posted by: Samuel | August 2, 2007 10:07 PM
Um, I'm kinda lost. Isn't sugar naturally occurring in our bodies? Isn't this kind of like saying that Oxygen is more addictive than cocaine?
Site that you should check out: http://www.dhmo.org/
Posted by: ebbomega | August 3, 2007 3:29 AM
I'm a bit confused as well. How does this show addictiveness? If the rats kept choosing the sugar, maybe they just liked it better than the intravenous cocaine. That's just a preference. I would've thought the addiction would only come in when they were on high doses of sugar and they had adverse effects when they stopped offering it.
Posted by: Silmarillion | August 3, 2007 6:42 AM
so should the government ask coca-cola to put the cocaine back in and dump all the sugar?!?
Posted by: JJ | August 3, 2007 11:49 AM
Just another ridiculously inferred conclusion to result in tenure, guys. Nothing to see here.
Posted by: Tom @Thoughtsic.com | August 3, 2007 12:05 PM
sugar is a kind of food that the body doesn´t need as it is. The body is designed to make glucose from fruit, some vegetables and fat. Sugar increase glucose level in blood too fast, and the brain demands more. Of course this little daily addiction is not the same as a drug such as cocaine.
The important matter is at least to be conscius of all the kind of addiction we have, and the complex reasons (cultural, economical, biological) that supports this.
Posted by: Guillermo | August 3, 2007 12:54 PM
How could you say that sugar is a nutrient? Isn't table sugar (refined, white sugar) completely stripped of anything that would make it a nutrient and that's why metabolizing it saps nutrients from within the body?
Posted by: Bruce | August 3, 2007 3:18 PM
Bruce,
Sugar is a nutrient in that it has energy value-- it supplies calories. The same can be said of ethyl alcohol. Don't confuse this with "nutritious," though.
Posted by: Kevin Beck | August 3, 2007 5:54 PM
?? Bands that don't have a brand and don't tour have never made money, have no way to make money. Who goes and buys an album of a band they have never heard of? What stores stock unknown bands? And popular bands with no musicians long predate P2P pirating.
If cocaine is an illegal substance with harse consequences and sugar has some nutritional merit (in that you won't starve to death anyway) wouldn't this just enhance the preference for sugar over cocaine in humans? That would be my initial hypothesis anyway. It might not be true but I don't see a good argument against this trend being likely in humans as well.
Posted by: Drekab | August 29, 2007 11:42 AM
There I go posting on long dead threads again. Dang "Most Emailed" category.
Posted by: Drekab | August 29, 2007 11:43 AM
It might be old but...
Properly, sugar (or carbohydrate) is referred to as a macronutrient (along with protein, fat, and water). Sugar in any of its common forms (sucrose, glucose, fructose; actually table sugar or sucrose breaks down into glucose and fructose, aka fruit sugar) is extremely useful. As you can't survive without glucose, sugar does have serious nutrient value. If I was stuck in desert somewhere without food and I had to choose between an unlimited supply of sugar or an unlimited supply of vitamin pills, I'd take the sugar hands-down.
Posted by: JimFiore | August 29, 2007 1:31 PM