Can Food Be Addictive? The notion of food addiction has gained attention in both the scientific literature and the popular press. At first, the concept of food as an addictive substance may seem at odds with food being a natural and necessary part of living. The problem is that many popular foods are not natural or necessary. If troubled by the concept of food as an addictive substance, try this thought experiment. Imagine sitting before a bowl of Romaine lettuce (no salad dressing) and then imagine overeating. For most, it’s a challenging thought. In real life, it’s even more challenging. Long before stuffing down thirty pounds of Romaine lettuce (2500 calories worth) most would have long before given up. Now imagine overeating steamed carrots and potatoes (no salt or other condiments). If like most, you also found this idea challenging although not quite as impossible. Now imagine a bag of your favorite snack food (cookies, chips, etc.). Then imagine eating just one and putting the bag away. For most, the difficulty of eating only one doesn’t require very much imagination – it’s a real experience that’s failed enough times to demonstrate that we respond differently to processed and ‘engineered foods.’ This tendency to overeat engineered foods has a name, it’s called ‘The Dorito Effect.’ In the book, “The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor”, Mark Schatzker provides more about why people have evolved to become flavor seeking animals and why the pleasure provided by food is so powerful that only the most strong-willed can resist. Complicating our food seeking urges is an intimate connection between flavor and nutrition that has been hijacked by synthetic flavors along with natural ingredients in unnaturally concentrated form. In a world of foods designed for maximum appeal, staying healthy is a daily struggle against overeating foods of low nutritional value (low fiber and micronutrients). As the practitioners of food science make foods more enticing with flavorings and chemicals they effectively make nutritious whole foods less appealing by comparison. The result is a generation that reaches instinctively for the Fruit Loops without so much as a glance at the food label. Today a walk down the cereal aisle reveals over a hundred ways to serve refined fat, flour, and sugar. Usually, only two cereals escape this fate. The hands-down winner is usually rolled oats. Shredded Wheat usually takes second place although still short of the nutritional value in whole wheat berries, it’s source ingredient. Sadly, you are unlikely to find whole wheat berries in a traditional grocery store. The reason for this state of affairs is the profitability per unit of the product. The wheat berries from which most packaged cereals are made cost about ten cents a pound. When the wheat berries are processed into flakes and packaged in a pretty box the cost goes up to $3-$8 per pound. From the point of profitability and marketing advantage, wheat berries have little chance of winning shelf space. Simple math reveals that the profit on ten cents worth of wheat berries can never measure up to the potential profit on a box of cereal selling for 50 to 100 time as much. For your budget and health, wheat berries like rolled oats are slam- dunk winners. Of course, the same accolades could be given to many other whole grains. Should you want to have access to a wider selection of whole grains on your grocer’s cereal aisle there remains hope. If enough shoppers ask, stores often accommodate if only grudgingly. While their motives are questionable, a grocer will bend to selling you a nutritious food in the hope you will buy a dozen more of their marked up processed foods. On a historical note, Shredded Wheat has been marketed since 1926 without any change in ingredients. For packaged cereals, this is an anomaly – a real rarity. Legend has it that in the early days of packaged cereals a group concerned about nutrition gained a concession from the big cereal makers to keep one product natural. Whether the legend is true or not, Shredded Wheat does stand out as an unusual product in a sea of engineered cereals. With a loyal following for going on 100 years, the marketing jingle below says what many felt about the cereal. "There are two men in my life, To one I am a mother, To the other, I'm a wife, And I give them both the best With natural Shredded Wheat" In view of the near exponential increase in chronic diseases and associated healthcare cost, it’s time for a change. The engineered foods that have taken hold over the last 50 years can hardly be seen as other than a science experiment-gone-bad. In an ideal world, our Government would view national health and nutrition as priorities. For now, the national discussion is little more productive than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. To refloat this ship, education about nutrition at the elementary level and up must be sufficient to overcome the marketing misinformation coming from commercial interest. The reformulation of foods for the maximum ‘bliss’ has shifted the American diet away from natural foods to addictive calorie-dense products with unnaturally high concentrations of fat, protein, carbohydrates, salt, and sugar. As a result, for most, weight gain it’s not a problem that can be solved by self-control alone. The solution also involves the foods we choose to eat. Expecting an alcoholic to overcome their condition by drinking less is not a recommended treatment. Similarly, just eating less junk food is unlikely to be successful. You may be wondering, in a world where addictive foods are everywhere, am I doomed to be a food addict? Are the chronic diseases that foods cause my fate? Fortunately, there is hope. Overcoming food addiction requires awareness, education, and a desire to change. Anyone willing to take these three steps with an action plan based on their new knowledge has success in their pocket. Interested? Let’s begin the journey together. As for taking the right step in life, never underestimate the value of taking a right step followed by a left step that’s repeated for 20-30 minutes a day. Exercise is a vital part of having and keeping good health. If you’ve not had an occasion to step out lately then consider joining me for a morning walk. Nancy Neighbors, MD Huntsville, Alabama Are You a Food Addict? You Decide In general, foods, that are rich in fat and/or sugar, are capable of promoting “addiction”-like behavior and neuronal change under certain conditions, especially in a calorie restrictive diet that leads to binge eating patterns or conditions such depression or anxiety. According to the American Psychiatric Association’s definition of addiction, for a person to be considered dependent on (or addicted to) any given substance, at least 3 of the following 7 criteria must be met at any time within a given year: 1. Tolerance (more food is needed for the same effect), 2. Withdrawal symptoms, 3. Taking a larger amount of the food or taking the food for a longer period than was intended, 4. Experiencing a persistent desire for the food or an inability to reduce or control its use, 5. Spending much time seeking or consuming the food or recovering from its effects, 6. Use of the food interfering with important activities, and 7. Use of the food continuing despite known adverse consequences. If either criterion 1 or 2 is met, then physiological dependence is diagnosed. However, a diagnosis of substance dependence does not require that criterion 1 or 2 be met. Thus, human substance dependence (or addiction) can be diagnosed using entirely behavioral criteria (4). A key feature of any addiction is a loss of control as a result of more frequent and/or larger meals. A meal that is larger than normally consumed in a given period of time under similar circumstances is a characteristic of binge eating that can lead to fatty organs (even in thin people), weight gain, depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. Research methods that can directly measure food addiction in people provide many ethical barriers. As a result, most experiments are performed with animal studies. From this research, there is strong evidence that several processed foods can induce behavioral and neuronal changes similar to those induced by drugs of abuse. For more insights about how and why food can have an amazingly strong psychological hold on us, view Dr. Doug Lisle’s video in which he describes the brain’s “Cram Circuit.” In this video he explains the evolutionary reasons for our behaviors through the lens of learning theory. |