Oreo study doesn’t stretch the imagination too far

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Neal C. Lauron | Dispatch
Oreo cookies
By The Hartford Courant  • 


Joseph Schroeder, assistant professor of neuroscience at Connecticut College, and his students also found that eating the cookies activated more neurons in the brain’s “pleasure center” than exposure to cocaine or morphine.



The research was the inspiration of neuroscience major Jamie Honohan, who was interested in the prevalence of obesity in lower-income communities.


Honohan said she chose Oreos because she wanted to use a common grocery product and, she said, some research had shown that rats like Oreos.

In one experiment, rats were given Oreo cookies in one chamber and rice cakes in an adjoining chamber. It was clear, Honohan said, that the rats preferred the Oreos, splitting the cookies apart and devouring the cream, then the cookies. While they often didn’t bother to finish the rice cakes, that wasn’t the case with the Oreos.

In a second experiment, rats were given a shot of cocaine or morphine in one chamber, while they received a shot of saline in the other. Again, the substances were removed and the rats were given the choice of which chamber to spend time in. They favored the drug chamber.

The research showed that cookie-conditioned rats chose to spend as many hours in the Oreos chamber as the drug-conditioned rats spent in the drug chamber.

“Maybe we can approach obesity the same way we address people addicted to drugs, because neurologically, it’s the same,” Honohan said.