Sugar Abuse

It's the wee hours of the morning and ScienceDaily has caught my eye yet again. What a treasure trove of weird and wonderful articles.

Asa Mackenzie is an associate professor of neuroscience at Appsala University who recently led a study on mice with inactive VGLUT (Glumate transporters), sugar and cocaine. Imagine that - mice doing blow.


As we all know, the brain has it's own way of rewarding us when we do exercise or if we eat something delicious etc - it gives us a good feeling. This good feeling is associated with the release of the neurotransmitter, dopamine. Illicit drugs can take advantage of this system and that's why (theoretically) is feels good to take drugs - "get high". Howoever, in comparison to the brain's rewards, cocaine etc, has effects which are too strong, and this gives rise to addiction. 

Dopamine has been observed to co-signal with glutamate (which is transported via VGLUT). As previously mentioned, mice which didn't have VGLUT (as well as the usual control group) were put on nutritious diet of sugar and cocaine. The study yeilded the following results: the mice with inactive VGLUT ate more (sugar and cociane, that is), and their memory show a huge increase in regards to places in the study environment associated with getting the sugar and cocaine. The non-VGLUT mice also showed hypersensativity (to the stimulants(?)) and their levels of dopamine showed a decrease. 


The research is significant in opening the door to future studies between VGLUT and its relationship with addiction. (Mackenzie, 2011)

Cocaine

It occurred to me while reading this that the part about the mice remembering where to get their goods made complete sense - obviously crack addicts know where to go get their fixes, otherwise they wouldn't have, and ergo, wouldn't be crack addicts. Furthermore, I'm interested to know how mice in general would react to stimulants such as cocaine and amphetamines - simultaneously cruel and hilarious. No mention of sugar-only, cocaine-only test groups were apparent in the source. 

Sucrose - table sugar

I read a book quite a while ago on sugar metabolism in the human body. While there are regulatory mechanisms to regulate the amount of fats and carbohydrates ingested, no such system exists to monitor sugar intake, as sugar (in the form we know it today, table sugar) in nature appears in such small concentrations, and is therefore supposed to comprise a minuscule portion of our diet.  Could this absence of a regulatory mechanism possibly contribute to enabling an addiction to sugar? 


One hopes not to see seedy crack smoking mice wobbling out of dark alley ways, noses bleeding with bags of table sugar in hand.