"Much of what we eat nowadays contains more calories than the food we ate in the 1970s and 1980s, but it also contains the sorts of calories -- particularly a combination of sugar, salt and fat -- that appeal to what are commonly called the reward centers in the brain," says Grucza, an assistant professor of psychiatry. "Alcohol and drugs affect those same parts of the brain, and our thinking was that because the same brain structures are being stimulated, overconsumption of those foods might be greater in people with a predisposition to addiction."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101230172414.htm
