Hello everyone! I’m Crystal here with DNews. Now I don’t know about you, but I had really

strict parents and they rarely let me eat sugar as a kid. And now that I’m an adult,

candy basically makes up one of my major food groups. According to a new study out of the

University of California San Diego, the brains of some children respond differently to sugar

than others and are more likely to appear “addicted” to sugar.

The discovery that addicted brains are structurally and functionally different from non-addicted

brains is not new, but this study reveals that those neurological changes can happen

very young, while the brain is still developing.

Those of you who watch a lot of these videos probably already know that the brain matures

back to front, with the frontal cortex (which is responsible for our rational decision making

abilities) maturing last, in our early twenties. At adolescence the regions of our brains that

are responsible for emotion and “reward” (that happy feeling we get when we encounter

something we like) are fully on-line before we have the ability to regulate and control

our reactions to them and this fact has been used to explain why adolescents, who physically

appear very adult, make decisions that are so. very. dumb. (sorry mom)

Approaching obesity as a symptom of food addiction, Scientists at UCSD examined the brains of

obese and non-obese pre adolescent children using fMRI to identify any functional differences

in their response to sugar. The children’s ages ranged from 8 to 12 and they were asked

to close their eyes and focus on the taste of a sugar-water solution while they swirled

it around in their mouth.

The resulting images showed that obese children had more activity in the insular cortex and

amygdala, brain regions associated with emotion, perception, contextual awareness and taste.

But what was most surprising, is that the obese children did not show any increased

response to sugar in the striatum.

The striatum is involved in our perception of salience, which is how much an item or

experience stands out when compared to others and it is also known to play an important

role in our experience of reward so scientists were surprised to see no increase in activity

in children they tested. This result was also surprising because increased activity in the

striatum has been associated with obesity in adults.

The DA reward pathway involving the striatum, substantia nigra, nucleus accumbens and the

ventral tegmental area is the accepted neuroscientific roadmap for how we experience pleasure and

develop addictions (ask me about my thesis sometime) but we are starting to learn more

about the role of the amygdala in emotional regulation in the development of addiction

states. A recent rodent study showed that clinical activation of the amygdala in a lever

press experiment made a sugar solution MORE “ADDICTIVE” (or at least more rewarding).

So it may be that rats and children whose amygdala activation in response to sugar are

more likely to seek out sweets due to the emotional memory of the experience.

Obviously there are many causes for obesity and food addiction is just one of them. Are

scientists going down the right path? Subscribe to D News and let us know in the comments

down below! You can also come find me on twitter at PolyCrystalHD