POMC and Anxiety: Unlike the animals that received ethanol, mice in the MS+SUC group presented anxiety/stress‐related behavioral changes in comparison with group C+SUC, thus corroborating the conclusion that the ethanol was able to mask the effects of stress.When evaluating the genes of the HPA axis and the serotonergic system in animals that received sucrose, we observed that Pomc remained up‐regulated in the hypothalamus and Crhr1 and Crhr2 remained up‐regulated in the hippocampus of MS+SUC mice in comparison with C+SUC mice, similar to what we observed for the MS and C mice in T1.