Wow. That’s quite interesting…and sad. What makes a find like this even more disheartening is that junk food is both easier and (in most cases) cheaper than healthier food.
A commercial aired a few days ago showing that the top three soda companies (Coke, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper/7Up) were removing all full calorie drinks from school vending machines. It’s a small step, but one in the right direction. Hopefully the next few generations will see better foods make a comeback.

For anyone interested in more information on this, there’s an excellent book that came out last year on exactly this topic:
The End of Overeating
Taking control of the insatiable American appetite
David A. Kessler, M.D.
He discusses how changes in the the food industry have helped manipulate eating habits and food choices in the US, and how to take back control.

Wow, I mean, at least cocaine keeps you skinny.

So maybe I’m jaded, but it seems to me that scientific research like this, when published in non-scientific media, are usually way off in the details, so much so that they can be downright misleading. When I first read your blog post above, for instance, I immediately thought of this post over at Language Log (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2111) where they actually looked at the data collected in a similar study about “mice risking electrical shocks to get to chocolate.” Turns out, the study involved first starving the mice, and then using chocolate (instead of nutritional “mice chow”) as the reward for braving the electrical shocks:

Basically, mice like chocolate, but if you give them electric shocks when they try to get at it, their “chocolate-seeking behavior” is “suppressed”, i.e. they tend to learn not to enter a section of their cage (the “chocolate-chamber”) where the chocolate can be found, instead spending more time in the “empty-safe chamber”. However, if you first starve them a bit (by subjecting them to a “moderate food-restriction schedule” adjusted to cause a loss of 15% of body weight over five days, and then give them two days of ad libitum feeding to cancel acute nutritional deficits), the electric shocks are less effective at suppressing their chocolate-seeking behavior.
Thus the control-group mice and the food-restricted mice have exactly the same experience of chocolate, and exactly the same innate taste for it. The FR group is not so much “chocolate-craving” as “food-craving”. Rather than “chocolate-craving mice are ready to tolerate electric shocks to get their fix”, a more accurate description would be “mice who have been starved are more willing to ignore possible electric shocks to get at food”.

It really makes me wonder if the study you link to above isn’t along these same lines. And in any case, do we really need such studies to tell us the obvious truth that eating healthy is good for you, and eating junk food has nasty physical and mental side-effects?

Junk food have the same effect on the humans