"ADICCIÓN" AL AZÚCAR: ¿MITO Ó REALIDAD? Revisión

A person with a “sweet tooth” has a weakness for sugar and is popularly considered addicted to sweets. However, so far there has been no systematic research on the existence of an “addiction” to a natural food. This concept of “addiction” to a food has gained great importance in developed countries where a fierce legal battle against the major fast food chains has started. It has been suggested that these companies use food strategies that promote an addictive behavior and could be responsible for one of the worst epidemics of our history, obesity. Experts in the field define drug addiction as a compulsive and uncontrollable use of a drug. They describe a series of stages in the acquisition and development of this disease. The first stage is bingeing and escalation of the drug use, followed by dependence, and a last stage determined by craving and relapse. In the present review, we will show a new animal model of sugar dependence with characteristics that mimic those of a drug of abuse. This research shows that foods, especially sugar, and drugs of addiction probably share the same neural systems.