Some of the most popular food headlines over the past week all sound strangely familiar, such as "Can Eating Junk Food Really Be an Addiction?" from Time Magazine on April 3, "Rats Starve Rather Than Eat Healthy Food" from CBS on March 29 and "Junk food addiction may be clue to obesity" from Reuters on March 28. The New York Daily News even boldly claimed on March 29 that "Fatty foods may be just as addictive as heroin and cocaine."
The stories all sound pretty provocative, but let's compare them to some headlines from 2009: "Junk food turns rats into addicts" from Science News on Nov. 21 and "‘Food addiction' plays major role in obesity epidemic" from the Health News blog on Dec. 23.
So why are some major news sources seemingly reporting old news?
They technically aren't, but there is definitely a disconnect between science publications and mainstream news sources in reporting stories.
Back in October 2009, scientists from The Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla., presented the results of a study involving rats and junk food at the Society for Neuroscience's annual conference. Led by Paul Johnson and Paul Kenny, the team studied the effects of overeating fatty foods on the pleasure center of the brains of rats. The scientists fed three groups of rats: One was fed a "normal" diet, one was allotted junk food for one hour each day and a final group had access to unlimited amounts of unhealthy food, including cheesecake, bacon and frosting.
After just five days of this junk food diet, the third group of rats became compulsive eaters, and their brain functions started to change, while the first two groups showed normal levels of activity. In order for their brains to consistently register the same level of pleasure, the affected rats needed to eat more and more food, leading the Scripps scientists to compare this behavior to that of drug addicts.
The study was lauded in the scientific community because of its innovative approaches to studying the impacts of food on the brain. It was also one of the first studies to correlate drug addiction to issues of food and obesity. But the research seemed to have stayed within the science arena; with the exception of a quick 266−word piece in the New York Daily News, there was little mainstream reporting on the study.
Flash forward one year. Kenny and Johnson have continued working on their research, and, on March 28, 2010, the Scripps team published the full results of its research online in Nature Neuroscience. In my quick Google News search yesterday, I found over 130 distinct stories on the report.
So why is there such a vast difference between reporting on last year's conference results and on this year's journal article?
I think a lot of it has to do with the news climate in which the 2010 journal article was released. In the past year, Americans have become increasingly obsessed with all things food−related, from cooking clubs to food blogs to scientific ways to combat obesity. The study was released in the midst of ABC airing "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" — when you do a Google News search for the word "food," the top results for the past two weeks have consistently been about this show — and five days after The New York Times printed a story about new federal legislation that requires fast food chains to post calorie counts for their offerings on their menus and drive−through signs.
This one−year disconnect in reporting makes me wonder about what other scientific developments are out there that have yet to break into the mainstream news. The scientific community is clearly making breakthroughs in studying our complicated relationship with food, and this information needs to be made as widely available as possible.
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Caryn Horowitz is a senior majoring in history. She can be reached at Caryn.Horowitz@tufts.edu.
