Why is One Never Enough?

When it comes to junk foods, you can never eat just a single chip or one piece of candy or when it comes to a recent study done by undergraduate students at Connecticut College, one Oreo. Using rats they wanted to test the theory that food, especially junk food, can have an addictive quality and the availability of said junk food in low income households has contributed to the obesity epidemic in America.
Rats were put into a maze that was split into two sides, on one side the rats were given rice cakes and on the other, Oreos. After their exposure to the food they were given the choice of what side of the cage that they wanted to go to. They compared the time that was spent on each side of the maze to a similar experiment where the rats were given cocaine or morphine on one side and saline on the other. They also looked at the pleasure center of the brain of the rats while eating Oreos.
What they concluded  was that they spent as much time on the cookie, or "drug," side of the maze as the rats that were exposed to actual drugs. They also noticed that the pleasure center of the brain was more active while the rats were eating the Oreo than the rats that were injected with drugs. This, in turn, proves that Oreos, and junk food in general, have an addictive quality. These results could be used to understand why, even though it is a known fact that junk food is bad for us, we still eat it and have a hard time stopping.
The "addictive" nature that this study showed junk foods have could give light to the reason why obesity is a problem. The availability and affordability of junk foods makes it easy to obtain and for people that don't have the money to buy fresh produce, such as fruits and vegetables, fall into the trap of buying all this unhealthy food. This shows that people who have a hard time controlling their food intake, especially if they only have junk around the house, are susceptible to obesity. These findings could help find a way to control the "addiction" that the pleasure of having sweets gives us.

References
Wilson, J. (2013, October 16). Oreos as 'addictive' as cocaine in lab study. Retrieved from http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2013/10/16/oreos-as-addictive-as-cocaine-in-lab-rat-study/