Researchers say ultra - processed foods like Coca - Cola - flavored Oreos activate the same brain pathways as nicotine

dmnews.com · Feb 26, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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Add DMNews to your Google News feed. Tension: A woman who has never smoked recognizes that her nightly Oreo ritual feels identical to nicotine addiction — and neuroscientists say she’s not imagining it. Noise: We’re told to eat mindfully and exercise discipline, but ultra-processed foods are engineered at the molecular level to override conscious decision-making by targeting the same subcortical reward pathways as addictive drugs. Direct Message: The nightly craving isn’t a failure of willpower — it’s a product working exactly as designed, and treating it as anything less than a neurochemical hijack is the real delusion. To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology. Denise, a 38-year-old paralegal in Tampa, doesn’t smoke. She’s never touched a cigarette. She runs three mornings a week and packs her kids’ lunches with sliced cucumbers and hummus. But every night around 9:15, after the house goes quiet, she sits on her couch and eats a sleeve of Oreos — sometimes more — with a precision and compulsion she finds genuinely frightening. “It’s not hunger,” she told me. “It’s like a switch flips. I don’t decide to eat them. My hand just goes into the package.” She described a moment last month that stopped her cold. She was mid-cookie, watching some reality show she couldn’t even name, and she realized she felt exactly the way her college roommate used to describe needing a cigarette. The craving wasn’t in her stomach. It was in her brain — a pull, an itch, something that wouldn’t release until she complied. Denise wasn’t imagining the connection. A growing body of neuroscience research is now confirming that ultra-processed foods — especially those engineered to combine high sugar, high fat, and novel flavor profiles — activate the same dopaminergic pathways that nicotine, alcohol, and even cocaine exploit. And the latest generation of products, things like Coca-Cola-flavored Oreos and other brand-crossover novelties, may represent the most precisely targeted version of this neurochemical hijack ever sold in a grocery store aisle. Photo by Vietnam Hidden Light on Pexels A landmark 2023 paper published in the BMJ by researchers at the University of São Paulo and other institutions analyzed data from multiple cohorts totaling nearly 10 million participants. Their findings linked ultra-processed food consumption to over 30 adverse health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, depression, and all-cause mortality. But what made the paper particularly striking was its framing: ultra-processed foods, the researchers argued, should be understood not merely as poor nutrition but as substances that exploit reward circuitry in ways fundamentally similar to addictive drugs. This isn’t a metaphor. Ashley Gearhardt, a clinical psychologist at the University of Michigan who developed the Yale Food Addiction Scale, has spent over a decade documenting how certain foods trigger compulsive consumption patterns that meet clinical criteria for substance use disorder. Her 2023 review in Addiction argued that ultra-processed foods — particularly those combining refined carbohydrates and fats at doses not found in nature — produce addictive responses in the brain that parallel nicotine and alcohol. The key word there is “not found in nature.” Fruit has sugar. Nuts have fat. But nothing in the natural world delivers both in the precise ratio that, say, a Coca-Cola-flavored Oreo does. That combination — engineered through industrial food science — hits the nucleus accumbens like a key sliding into a lock. The dopamine spike is fast, intense, and quickly fading, which is exactly the profile that builds dependence. Marcus, a 51-year-old electrician in Columbus, Ohio, quit smoking seven years ago using nicotine patches and sheer willpower. He’s proud of that. What he doesn’t talk about as readily is the 40 pounds he’s gained since — almost entirely from nightly processed snack binges that started innocuously. “I traded one thing for another,” he said, with the flat honesty of someone who’s run the numbers and doesn’t like the total. His doctor recently told him his fasting glucose was pre-diabetic. Marcus wasn’t surprised. He was tired. As scientists have increasingly pointed out, the obesity crisis is the slow-moving catastrophe we keep finding ways to look past. We fixate on novel threats — microplastics, electromagnetic fields, the supplement of the week — while the thing most consistently destroying metabolic health sits in plain sight on every kitchen counter and office break room in America. What makes this conversation so uncomfortable is the intentionality behind it. Food scientists don’t stumble onto these formulations. The concept of the “bliss point” — the precise combination of sugar, salt, and fat that maximizes craving — was described decades ago by Howard Moskowitz, a psychophysicist hired by major food corporations to optimize consumption. The modern novelty-flavor industrial complex, where Oreos taste like Coca-Cola and cereal tastes like birthday cake, takes this a step further. It leverages what researchers call sensory-specific satiety — the brain’s natural tendency to lose interest in a single flavor — by layering novel sensory experiences that keep the reward system guessing, seeking, consuming. The brain, in other words, can’t get bored of something that keeps surprising it. Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels Reena, a 44-year-old high school biology teacher in Portland, described her relationship with ultra-processed snacks as something she thinks about with the same clinical language she uses in class. “I teach my students about neurotransmitters,” she said. “I know what dopamine does. I know what a feedback loop looks like. And I can watch myself get caught in one every single evening, completely aware and completely unable to stop.” She paused. “Awareness doesn’t break the circuit. That’s the part nobody tells you.” Reena’s observation lands on something important. We live in an era that celebrates consciousness — mindful eating, intuitive eating, food journaling, macro tracking. These tools help some people. But when a food product is literally engineered to override conscious decision-making by targeting subcortical brain regions that operate below awareness, the advice to “just be mindful” starts to sound a lot like telling a person with clinical depression to “just cheer up.” This connects to a broader pattern we keep encountering — the gap between what we know and what that knowledge actually does for us. As explored in a recent piece on supplement stacks and cognitive decline, people often invest heavily in health interventions that feel proactive while ignoring the baseline behaviors doing the most damage. Marcus takes fish oil capsules every morning. Denise drinks green smoothies. Reena meditates for ten minutes before school. None of these practices are wrong. But none of them address the nine o’clock pull that rearranges their evenings. There’s a cultural dimension here, too. The brand-crossover trend in processed foods — Coca-Cola Oreos, Dunkin’ cereal, Pop-Tart-flavored everything — isn’t just about flavor. It’s about identity, nostalgia, and social currency. These products go viral. They trend. They become content. A Korean pop star posts a novelty snack to Instagram and it sells out in twelve countries by morning. The line between eating and performing has blurred in ways that make the neurochemical problem harder to see, because consumption is wrapped in cultural participation. You’re not bingeing. You’re joining a moment. And the food industry knows this. They don’t need you to eat these products every day. They need you to crave the next one. The limited-edition model — borrowed from streetwear and sneaker culture — ensures the novelty signal never dies. There’s always a new flavor, a new collaboration, a new reason to re-engage the reward pathway. It’s addiction with a marketing calendar. Psychologists studying aging and well-being have found that curiosity is one of the strongest predictors of healthy aging. People who remain engaged, who seek out new experiences and challenges, tend to preserve cognitive function and emotional resilience far longer than those who don’t. But there’s a shadow version of curiosity that ultra-processed food exploits — the novelty-seeking drive redirected toward consumption rather than discovery. The brain wants something new. The question is whether that something is a walk through an unfamiliar trail or a limited-edition cookie that tastes like a soda. It matters that we’re having this conversation now, because the regulatory landscape is shifting. Countries like Brazil, Chile, and Israel have begun implementing front-of-package warning labels specifically for ultra-processed foods. As research on meal timing and cardiovascular risk continues to refine our understanding of when and what we eat, the ultra-processed question sits at the center of almost every finding — because these are the foods people eat late, eat fast, eat past fullness, and eat alone. Denise told me something at the end of our conversation that I haven’t been able to shake. She said she doesn’t feel guilty about the Oreos anymore. She stopped moralizing it. What she feels instead is something quieter and worse — a recognition that her nightly ritual isn’t a failure of discipline. It’s the system working exactly as it was designed to work. She is the intended outcome. The product didn’t malfunction. She did exactly what it was built to make her do. That recognition — not as self-blame, not as helplessness, but as clarity about the forces at play — might be the only honest starting point. Not willpower. Not another wellness hack. Just the uncomfortable acknowledgment that some of the most familiar, comforting, culturally celebrated products on Earth were designed, at the molecular level, to make it nearly impossible to stop at one. Trend