Is Food Addictive? It’s Time to Find Out

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The First Step Toward Kicking the Habit is Acknowledging the Habit

Not long ago, health and nutrition experts who dared to suggest that certain foods might be addictive were dismissed as academic outliers by those too polite to use the word crackpots, but their numbers and credentials have grown to the point that the question is going to have to be answered: are they? Indications that they might be are accumulating steadily, and while they haven’t yet reached the level of “serious evidence,” let alone proof, even doubters now acknowledge that they can’t simply be ignored. Here are a few of the morsels of fact that help feed the controversy.

• Brain scans of obese individuals tend to exhibit the same abnormalities as those of persons addicted to drugs or alcohol.
• When fed a high-fat diet, the brains of lab animals have been found to produce combinations of chemicals that make them crave more fat. As with addictions to other substances, the more fats you consume, the more you want to consume.
• Animals that had nutritious food available to them 24/7 but were only allowed to eat fatty and sugary “treat” foods such as bacon and cheesecake one hour per day would shun the healthier food all day and binge on the fattening stuff. And they did this even when eating the fattening foods led to an electrical shock.
• Animals fed high-sugar-content diets who were switched to sugarless diets went through textbook symptoms of drug withdrawal: tremors, the shivers, anxiety.
• Compared to the brains of the normally weighted, the brains of the obese lack particular dopamine receptors that empower the individual to resist compulsion and temptation, our neural firewall against overconsumption.
• People in recovery from addictions to drugs, alcohol and even tobacco routinely find themselves battling increased hunger and weight gain. Instead of being driven to stay high or drunk, they are instead often driven to stay full.
• Separate studies have found that the higher one’s BMI, the less alcohol one tends to consume, and that persons who’ve undergone gastric bypass surgery to lose weight run a significant risk of being alcohol abusers two years later. The implication is that one substance addiction simply takes the place of another.

The notion that food may be addictive still has plenty of vocal detractors, of course, the largest segment being persons in the food industry. One argument they use against the hypothesis is that if food were addictive, we’d all be addicts. Of course, that conveniently overlooks the statistical reality that if a sign of food addiction is obesity or gross overweight, we’re already halfway to becoming a population of junkies.

It also fails to note that not everyone who indulges in something becomes addicted to it. Most drinkers aren’t chronic drunks, and even most people who try drugs socially, such as marijuana or cocaine, don’t become enslaved to them, or even necessarily like them. But this fact does raise one potential problem: If food is in fact found to have addictive properties, how to do we identify those who are genuinely susceptible to and at risk of obesity resulting from addiction?

There is a good chance that brain scans will soon enable us to distinguish the neurological patterns that characterize the potential addict, but society has neither the resources nor the legal authority to scan all obese individuals to identify them, and even then, to effectively treat them. Restrictions on the kinds of snack and junk food that seem to stimulate our desire to eat more of them aren’t politically feasible; witness the firestorm over the 16-ounce limit on some sodas sold in New York City, for example.

It has been proposed that fatty and sugary snack and junk food items be treated like alcohol and tobacco products, and their sales limited only to persons over a certain age, such as 13, the reasoning being that children are too young and impressionable to be entrusted with the choice to use such products. But the industries opposed to such restrictions would have a field day presenting images of an eighth grader being asked to show an ID to buy a Coke or bag of Doritos, or being arrested as a minor in possession of Oreos.

Still, it would seem to be essential that we develop a means of identifying those whose excess weight is due to an addictive response. For one thing, a lot of obese individuals would probably feel much better about themselves if it turned out that their inability to control their eating was not mere gluttony or lack of willpower, but neurochemical in nature. For another, understanding how food triggers irresistible pleasure responses in some people’s brains is the first step toward developing drugs or therapies to mute or safely fill that overwhelming need.

In any case, the theory that a widespread addiction to high-fat and high-calorie foods contributes to our obesity epidemic now has enough momentum that researchers are beginning to take it seriously, and it’s safe to say a great amount of time and grant money will be spent in search of the truth. Hopefully, it will be a truth that can set a lot of fatty food slaves free.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):

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Is Food Addictive? It’s Time to Find Out is a post from: CalorieLab - Health News & Information Blog

Source: http://calorielab.com/news/2012/12/19/is-food-addictive/

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