It is Tuesday, 10:30 PM, when I find myself standing in my kitchen.
It started with “just one cookie” from the fresh cookies I baked for the office tomorrow, but here I am, stuck on either five… or is it six?… of them.
As I reach for another, a vague thought again runs: Why is it so impossibly hard to stop?
If you have ever been in this situation—and let’s be honest, who hasn’t?—you are not alone, and more importantly, you are not without willpower. There is actually some terrific research about that sweet, round treat’s hold on us, and it’s far more than just simple hunger.
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Why Cookies Are Irresistible?
High fat and sugar content are not usually found within the same food products in nature. Fruits contain natural sugars, but very little fat; nuts, on the other hand, contain a lot of fat and little or no sugar. Cookies, however, provide this powerful combination in each bite and what scientists call a supernormal stimulus, meaning that it activates our pleasure centers even more actively than natural objects.
Ashley Gearhardt, who specializes in food addiction, discovered in her study conducted in 2011 that this combination elicits the same responses in the brain as the substances of abuse. Sugar and fat are sent to our brain at the same time, and this sends a message to our brains that this is a high-energy-dense food source worthy of chasing after, she says.
However, more than the sugar-fat mix, cookies are hard to resist for a number of reasons. Their texture is also very important as well. A study carried out proves that humans prefer foods with complex textures, like a crispy outside and a soft inside, because they involve more of the senses.
Cookies, especially fresh cookies, provide this great texture to the recipe.
Then there’s the aroma.
Such stimuli, like the smell of cookies being baked, elicit feelings that automatically stimulate hunger. When the sweet, buttery smell arrives at the olfactory bulb, our body is rehearsing to eat and starts the cephalic phase, where insulin is released. It is this early insulin release that helps to control the blood sugar levels prior to a meal.
Besides, things such as the sight and smell of foods can stimulate the brain reward system to secrete more ghrelin, a hormone that promotes hunger. This form of hormonal reaction might make us hungrier when smelling freshly baked cookies.
When you bite into a cookie, then?
This is where it gets really interesting. What happens in our brain when we bite a cookie? The answer is both simple and complex.
When people eat foods with high sugar content and fats, there is an increase in the nucleus accumbens, also referred to as the brain’s ‘reward center,’ when compared to the effects of sugar or fat as a separate entity.
This pleasure center secretes the chemical dopamine, the same chemical that plays its part in love, addiction, and other pleasurable events.
However, with natural foods, the dopamine signal does not shut off in the same manner as it does with processed foods, especially cookies. Dr. David Ludwig of Harvard Medical School said this is because our brains never developed a stop mechanism for processed foods that contain such high levels of sugar and fat.
Besides, our brain has very strong associations with cookies. Our memory processor, the hippocampus, records not only the taste but also the smell, the environment, and all the feelings. This is why the smell of cookies… Baking could take one directly back to the time he spent in his grandmother’s kitchen or back to childhood.
Exposure to cookies makes the brain produce dopamine in preparation for the reward in the first bite. It then becomes hard to stop once we have taken the first bite because the brain releases neurochemicals and hormones that compel us to continue eating.
The Sugar-Insulin Cycle
What occurs in our bloodstream helps explain why that first cookie creates a chain reaction that leads to overindulgence.
It is a fact that when we take a cookie, blood sugar level increases very fast because of the refined carbohydrate.
This sudden increase tends to invoke a secretion of insulin from the pancreas in an effort to get blood sugar levels down.
But a candy bar or cookies, for example, may trigger a kind of response that scientists dub an insulin overshoot—a reaction in which the body produces slightly more insulin than is truly required.
This leads to less blood sugar than the normal baseline, which creates a physiologic state that leads to cravings for sugars.
The Emotional Connection
No other food item seems to carry the emotional baggage that cookies do.
Cookies occupy a very special niche in one’s emotional geography. Often they are first treats given to children for good behavior. It’s one of the most potent psychological reward systems that can last a lifetime.
Moreover, the statistics validate it.
An International Food Information Council poll conducted on consumers in 2020 found that cookies conjured up positive memories or emotions in 85% of respondents, the highest for any dessert.
Masterful marketing has undoubtedly succeeded in appealing to emotions.
The average American is showered with lots of cookie-related advertisements every year, and many such promotions evoke the memories and emotions associated with cookies rather than focusing on the cookie itself.
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Get out from this cookie cycle.
An understanding of our rather complicated relationship with cookies does not mean we are in their hands truly.
- It gets to that personal habit loop of cookies. Every habit has three components: a trigger, a routine, and a reward. By identifying these elements in our cookie-eating patterns, we can begin to modify them.
- Some truly practical ways come from research done. The studies show that just putting cookies into opaque containers and into a less-accessible location reduces consumption.
- Mindful eating techniques also work.
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I hope you enjoyed reading. This blog post comes from what I’ve learned and what I think and believe. Sign up for my Medium newsletter.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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The post The Science Behind Why We Can’t Stop After One Cookie appeared first on The Good Men Project.