Robert Lustig explains why milkshakes are so rewarding to the brain. He uses research from Oregon Health Sciences University to show how sugar triggers addiction pathways, the same ones activated by drugs and alcohol.
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Sugar is addictive. National Geographic said why? We can't resist it, in fact. That's right. So what's going on in the brain? Well, what makes a milkshake rewarding? Is it the fat or is it the sugar? Turns out it's not the fat. How do we know? Because Eric Stice at Oregon Health Sciences University constructed this great contraption with two bottles, one with fat, one with sugar. And when you suck, okay, you get different amounts depending on a regulator that he controls as to how much fat and how much sugar makes your milkshake. And he stuck people in an MRI scanner while they were sucking on the milkshake to determine what was happening to the reward center. And it turned out that the fat did not stimulate the reward center. The fat only stimulated the somatosensory cortex. Mouthfeel only sugar stimulated the nucleus accumbens, the reward center. So it's the sugar that actually drives the reward in a milkshake.