By SUE ELLEN ROSS – Staff Reporter

LAPLACE – Lisa Vermont thought her preference for certain foods would go away after she delivered her baby last winter. During her pregnancy, the LaPlace mom experienced a fondness for sugar cookies, and cheese and crackers, foods she didn’t eat much of before.

“I tried every cheese they sell,” she said. “I loved them all.” She added that the sugar cookies were bought in the large family-size packages, seriously adding to her pregnancy weight gain.

But the food cravings did not go away after the young mom delivered her son.

Recent medical studies have shown that some normal people will crave food the same way addicts crave drugs.

Using sophisticated brain scans, researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Connecticut found that the sight and smell of food makes a hungry person’s brain look like the brain of an addict craving drugs.

Researchers say earlier studies show that the brains of obese people are low on dopamine receptors. Dopamine is a brain chemical involved in feeling pleasure and reward. If you have a low number of receptors

The new findings show that constant exposure to food itself, as well as food advertising, makes a craving worse. Obese people may find this craving unbearable. These results could explain the negative effects of constant exposure to advertising, candy machine, food channels and food displays in the stores, according to Dr. Gene Wang, one of the researchers. He added that by constantly keeping our brain in a mode of craving, the food stimuli contributes to the epidemic of obesity in this country.

Researchers tempted 122 healthy, normal-weight volunteers who didn’t eat for 17 hours before the study.

They were tempted with their favorite food, warmed up to make it smell appetizing. As you might expect, this made the subjects’ brains light up on the brain scan, particularly a region called the right orbit frontal cortex. This part of the brain also becomes active in cocaine-craving addicts.

Other researchers speculate that cravings come into play as an attempt to supply the body with nutrients it lacks. For example, carbohydrate cravings commonly experienced by dieters may be due to a diet low in calories.

“Carbohydrate cravings can simply arise from hunger because your blood sugar levels are low,” said Susan Schifffman, Ph. D., professor of medical psychology at Duke University Medical Center. She added that such cravings could also be based on other physiological needs.

Research on food cravings is on-going. Information can be found on the Internet, as well as in medical publications.