By Kathy Summers

Think you’re addicted to…fill in the blank: chocolate, pizza, ice cream? Good news! You may be able to enjoy the thrill of your favorite food without the calories. Research shows that just smelling or even looking at your Ben & Jerry’s is enough to give your brain a boost. Scientists recently acknowledged that for some people, even a whiff of a favorite food “lights up” a region of the brain normally associated with drug addiction.

To measure reactions to favorite fast-food fixes, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory looked at hungry volunteers’ brains with positron emission tomography (PET) scans. Even without actually eating the food, simply seeing or smelling a favorite food significantly increased overall metabolic brain activity by 24 percent. The study, reported in NeuroImage Scans (April 2004), suggests what some of us suspected all along—the same part of our brain that controls drive and pleasure also activates hunger and desire for food.