Ever heard of intuitive eating? If you know the phrase “listen to your body,” that’s exactly it. The thinking goes that if you’re in tune with your biological signals, you’ll know when to start and stop eating, and what to put in your mouth.

That’s why the results of a study on rats who ate junk food for a couple of weeks, published in Frontiers in Psychology, are utterly terrifying.

The two groups, named Chow and Cafeteria, both had access to standard, healthy rat fare. But on the side, Cafeteria also got to nosh on processed human favorites, like cookies, cakes, and more.

Guess what happened? Exactly what you’d expect. Cafeteria rats were way more interested in snacking on their new junky faves than on the rat food they used to love.

That might not sound all that scary on its own, but here’s why it should freak you out: the love for junk food, or perhaps the chemical reaction it produced in their bodies, overrode their body’s natural signals to eat a healthy diet.

In other words, eating junk food turned off their innate ability to eat intuitively — it seems to have altered their brain chemistry.

Basically, science says, this is what junk food will do to you:

In conclusion, just like cigarettes, junk food can turn you into an addict.

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