Fine, great, we all like Oreos more than rice cakes. No surprise there.
Then the researchers repeated the experiment, but this time they injected rats with a dose of cocaine or morphine on one side and with a neutral saline solution on the other. Once again, as you might anticipate, the rats kept going back to the side where they had received the drugs, hoping for more.
Now here's where it gets sketchy. The researchers measured the amount of time the rats spent in each half of the chamber and claim that because the two groups of mice spent equal amount of time in the Oreo and in the cocaine area, these two stimuli are equally rewarding, or "addicting". However, they never actually compared the cocaine with the cookies! These were two completely separate groups of animals that took part in two different experiments – one testing Oreos with rice cakes and another comparing cocaine and saline. Yes the animals showed similar behaviours in response to the drugs and to the high-fat/high-sugar food, but these things cannot be equated if they are not directly compared.
To be fair, the researchers didn't just rely on behavioural tests, but also measured the amount of chemical activity that was seen in a reward region of the brain, the nucleus accumbens, in response to each of the two vices. Here they report that there was greater evidence of activation in the Oreo-eating rats than in the cocaine-consuming ones. However, again, they haven't directly compared the amount of activity seen within an animal after receiving cocaine and Oreos.
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