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Not only is this tied to weight gain, especially in the belly, but it also leaves you with cravings. Aspartame is 200 times sweeter than table sugar. Serious drinkers are so used to the super-sweet taste that everything else seems bland in comparison.

Coca-Cola has a different take on what people refer to as an addiction. “Food and beverages, like chocolate, for example, can trigger what scientists call ‘reward centers’ in the brain, but so can other things like music or laughter,” said Daphne Dickerson, a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola. “Regularly consuming food and beverages that taste good and that you enjoy is not the same as being addicted to them.”

In September 2020, Ms. Beller was diagnosed with breast cancer. She didn’t quit Diet Coke until after surgery, when doctors found more cancer and she realized she’d have to undergo chemotherapy.

She used the Quitzilla app, a habit breaker and sobriety counter, which tracked her progress. “Every time I had a craving, just looking at the app did something good in my brain,” she said. She didn’t have a lot of physical side effects, but she did long for the drink. She credits the app with helping her stay on track.

During adolescence, the neurocircuitry strengthens and allows for multitasking, enhanced ability to solve problems, and the capability to process complex information. Furthermore, adolescent brain plasticity provides an opportunity to develop talents and lifelong interests; however, neurotoxic insult, trauma, chronic stress, drug abuse, and sedentary lifestyles may have a negative impact during this sensitive period of brain maturation

Biologists call this need “sleep pressure”: Stay up too late, build up sleep pressure. Feeling drowsy in the evenings? Of course you are—by being awake all day, you’ve been generating sleep pressure! But like “dark matter,” this is a name for something whose nature we do not yet understand.

The search for the hypnotoxin was not unsuccessful. There are a handful of substances clearly demonstrated to cause sleep—including a molecule called adenosine, which appears to build up in certain parts of the brains of waking rats, then drain away during slumber. Adenosine is particularly interesting because it is adenosine receptors that caffeine seems to work on.

For instance, if adenosine puts us under at the moment of transition from wakefulness to sleep, where does it come from? “Nobody knows,” remarks Michael Lazarus, a researcher at the institute who studies adenosine. Some people say it’s coming from neurons, some say it’s another class of brain cells. But there isn’t a consensus. At any rate, “this isn’t about storage,” says Yanagisawa. In other words, these substances themselves don’t seem to store information about sleep pressure. They are just a response to it.

A few years ago, the group discovered a mouse that just could not seem to get rid of its sleep pressure. Its EEGs suggested it lived a life of snoozy exhaustion, and mice that had been engineered to carry its mutation showed the same symptoms. “This mutant has more high-amplitude sleep waves than normal. It’s always sleep-deprived,” says Yanagisawa. The mutation was in a gene called SIK3. The longer the mutants stay awake, the more chemical tags the SIK3 protein accumulates. The researchers published their discovery of the SIK3 mutants, as well as another sleep mutant, in Nature in 2016.