Food Addiction and How Certain Foods Affect Us.

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2 years ago

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The idea that you can be addicted to food has recently gained increasing support. That comes from brain imaging and other studies of the effects of compulsive overeating on pleasure centers in the brain.

Experiments in animals and humans show that, for some people, the same reward and pleasure centers of the brain that are triggered by addictive drugs like cocaine and heroin are also activated by food, especially highly palatable foods rich in:

Sugar
Fat
Salt

Like addictive drugs, highly palatable foods trigger feel-good brain chemicals including dopamine. Once you experience pleasure associated with increased dopamine transmission in your brain’s reward pathway from eating certain foods, you may quickly feel the need to eat again.

Reward signals from highly palatable foods may override your signals of fullness and satisfaction. As a result, you may keep eating, even when you’re not hungry. Compulsive overeating is a type of behavioral addiction, meaning that you can become preoccupied with a behavior (such as eating, gambling, or shopping) that triggers intense pleasure. When you have food addiction, you lose control over your eating behavior and spend excessive amounts of time involved with food and overeating, or anticipating the emotional effects of compulsive overeating.

You also may develop a kind of tolerance to food. That means that the more you eat, the less you’re satisfied.

Scientists believe that food addiction may play an important role in obesity. But you can still have food addiction if you don’t have obesity. Your body may be genetically programmed to better handle the extra calories you take in. Or maybe you increase your physical activity to compensate for overeating.

When you’re addicted to food, you continue to eat despite negative consequences, such as weight gain or damaged relationships. And like people addicted to drugs or gambling, you have trouble stopping your behavior.

Signs of Food Addiction

Researchers at Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Science & Policy have developed a questionnaire that can help identify food addictions.

To see if these apply to you, ask yourself if you:

Keep eating certain foods even if you’re no longer hungry
Eat to the point of feeling ill
Worry about not eating certain types of foods or worry about cutting down on certain types of foods
When certain foods aren’t available, go out of your way to obtain them

How sugar and fat affect your brain

We often think of smoking and drinking when it comes to addiction—but there’s another compulsion affecting as many as 14 percent of adults and even 12 percent of kids: food addiction.

Indulgent dishes enticing us with fat and sugar can feel impossible to avoid, especially during the holidays. Experts confirm it’s more than a feeling: Half a century of food trends has created an environment where more than half the food consumed by American adults is ultra-processed, often optimized to hit the body’s fat and sugar sensors to release dopamine.

These processed food products capitalize on our biology to keep us reaching for more. “We don’t realize that these are really killing people on par with what we’re seeing with things like alcohol and tobacco, leading to preventable deaths,” says Ashley Gearhardt, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and a member of a research team that assessed the latest figures for the prevalence of food addiction in March 2022.

Experts are rewriting what we know about food addiction and asking new questions about what we can do to curb it—and save lives.

What food does to our brains

Food affects our brains in many complex ways, and one particularly important response is the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter. Like addictive drugs, eating food releases dopamine. Contrary to popular belief, dopamine doesn’t increase pleasure. It encourages us to repeat behaviors that help us survive—like eating nutritious food and reproducing. The more dopamine that’s released, the more likely we’ll repeat that behavior.

When we eat fat and sugar, sensors in the mouth send a message to release dopamine in the striatum, a section of the brain associated with movement and rewarding behavior. But that oral sensory process is only part of the story, says Alexandra DiFeliceantonio, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech’s Fralin Biomedical Research Institute. There’s also a secondary sensor in the gut that registers fat and sugar, signaling the brain to release dopamine in the same region.

Although researchers are still mapping out how exactly the presence of sugar is signaled from the gut to the brain, the way that fat is signaled from the gut to the brain has been well documented. When fat is detected in the upper intestine, the message is carried up the vagus nerve (which controls several unconscious functions like digestion and breathing) through the hindbrain to the striatum.

Addiction affects tens of millions of people across the planet. But where does it come from? This animated video breaks down how the brain’s dopamine-based reward system works and how different drugs hijack this system.

Foods rich in fat and sugar can increase dopamine in the striatum as much as 200 percent above normal levels—a similar bump to what’s observed with nicotine and alcohol, the two most common addictions in the U.S. Specifically, one study found sugar increased dopamine levels by 135 to 140 percent, and fat increased them by 160 percent in another study, although it takes longer to kick in. Other drugs work very differently—cocaine can triple normal dopamine levels while methamphetamine can multiply normal dopamine levels 10-fold.

How the food we eat has changed

As we learn more about how food affects our brains, it has become increasingly manufactured to be irresistible to us. Our bodies are inundated with foods that have higher concentrations of certain nutrients, like fat and sugar, and more combinations of nutrients than ever before. These are combined with sensory properties—like a pleasingly smooth and velvety ice cream—that make eating more enjoyable than ever.

Traditionally, humans made food with whole foods: for example, pie crusts were made from flour and butter. In contrast, industrially processed foods are composed of substances extracted from foods, like starches and hydrogenated fats. Additives like artificial flavors, emulsifiers (which keep oil and water mixed together), and stabilizers (which preserve the structure or texture of food) make food more appealing—but ultimately to our own detriment.

Experts like DiFeliceantonio believe we should make the distinction between highly processed foods and those made from scratch. Being aware of those differences is the first step in avoiding a long list of diet-related health issues.

“We’ve been eating homemade versions of cakes, cookies, and pizzas for a very long time. But, it wasn’t until the rise in production of ultra-processed foods in the 1980s that we’ve seen this increase in diet-related mortality and disease,” DiFeliceantonio says.

Highly processed foods can qualify as clinically addictive, both Gearhardt and DiFeliceantonio argue. According to what’s known as the rate hypothesis, the faster something affects your brain, the more addictive that substance will be. Many processed foods are essentially pre-digested to maximize the speed of dopamine release.

Finally, it’d be impossible to extricate social and psychological forces from the equation. Processed foods have been accessible, affordable, and aggressively advertised for generations. That perfect storm has created generations of people who know processed foods aren’t healthy but are still compulsively drawn to them.

“The cues that surround these foods start to take on a life of their own,” says Gearhardt. “When you see a fast food sign or a vending machine, that has such power and drive for us that even if you’re not hungry, or even if your doctor just told you have diabetes, you might want to have these processed foods you know aren’t good for you. They’re everywhere; we’re constantly on the defensive against doughnuts at the morning meeting, and the late-night advertisement for pizza.”

How are perspectives changing? What are the questions left unanswered?

In recent years, experts have begun to ask new questions about food addiction as some of their early assumptions have proven false.

Take tolerance and withdrawal for example. These were once considered major elements of addiction. It was once believed people with food addiction continued to eat compulsively in order to avoid withdrawal, the unpleasant physical and mental repercussions (like anxiety, nausea, and headaches) that appear when a person decreases or stops using a substance.

“That’s actually not true,” DiFeliceantonio says. “Most theories of drug addiction have a lot more to do with habitual use, or with an intense craving. That’s what’s sustaining drug use.”

Tolerance is almost the opposite of withdrawal—the consequences of continuing to use a substance. As a person’s tolerance of a substance grows, they need to consume increasing amounts to get the same effect. In the case of food, the dopamine deficit hypothesis posits that if we eat something and don’t get enough pleasure from it, we’ll eat more until we feel good.

“I have some trouble with that hypothesis, because everything we do releases dopamine. So eating broccoli, because it is delivering nutrients to the gut, releases dopamine,” DiFeliceantonio says. “People don’t do things that they only kind of like, such as eating broccoli, a lot just to get more dopamine.” She adds there’s also no indication there’s a threshold to reach to earn that dopamine reward.

As research progresses, scientists are left with more questions than answers about how our bodies become addicted to food. We know that dopamine doesn’t tell the full story, because it’s not what makes eating food pleasurable. Researchers have found evidence that might actually have a different cause: A 2012 study showed that eating food stimulates our opioid receptors, which increase feelings of pleasure. But scientists know very little about how the process works, because it’s difficult to measure opioid levels in a living organism.

Some experts suspect a sensor in the upper intestine may play a role in our food likes and dislikes. Others wonder whether there may be something at play in the hypothalamus, a critical part of the brain that regulates everything from your body temperature to your sense of hunger.

Researchers also want to learn which combinations of nutrients trigger different levels of dopamine release. Studying humans, unfortunately, requires expensive scans and a dose of radiation. “You can’t scan the same person 20 times with all different tastes and combinations and things, so we’re really more limited in what we can do,” DiFeliceantonio says.

As for a solution, Gearhardt says the answer is clear—but far from easy. We can look to the major societal changes that were imposed to limit smoking—making cigarettes less affordable and less widely marketed—and do the same with addictive food, she says.

There are other ways to fight food addiction, too.

“Don’t hate yourself for not being able to avoid addictive foods because it isn’t easy. It’s using our biology against us,” she says. Learn what makes you turn to these foods, whether it’s certain emotions, places or even a time of day. “Just try to be aware of that so you can prepare yourself to have alternative ways of coping or strategizing in those moments of temptation.”

Ultra-Processed Foods Are as Addictive as Alcohol and Cigarettes, New Study Says

Craving your favorite junk food could be a sign of addiction, a new study suggests.

According to a study conducted by researchers in the United States, Spain and Brazil, and published in a special edition of the British Medical Journal, signs of ultra-processed food addiction were found in 14% of adults and 12% of children, as determined by the Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS).

Researchers pulled statistics from 281 studies across 36 countries and found that these numbers are “similar to the levels of addiction seen for other legal substances in adults,” including 14% in alcohol and 18% in tobacco, and that the level of implied addiction is “unprecedented” for children.

Ultra-processed foods, which include staple junk food items like chips, candy and sugary breakfast cereals, are high in ingredients like fats and carbohydrates. Researchers stated that the speed at which ultra-processed foods deliver ingredients to the gut may be crucial to their “addictive potential,” as they work faster than minimally-processed foods, and can also affect the brain quicker. Additives like flavor and texture may also be contributing factors.

Researchers determined that “behaviours around ultra-processed food may meet the criteria for diagnosis of substance use disorder in some people.”

Ultra-Processed Foods Linked to Colorectal Cancer, According to New Study

According to Heathline, food addiction symptoms can include craving food when full and eating more than intended, among other signs. Food addiction is not currently classified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR), which is used by health care professionals to diagnose mental disorders.

Other experts say that declaring certain foods as addictive is not a simple process. Erin Palinski-Wade, a registered dietitian nutritionist, told Fox Digital News that “food cravings are complex and tied into not just the nutrition profile of a food, but also the emotions and learned behaviors around eating.”

Palinski-Wade also noted that foods with high amounts of added sugars and fats are typically associated with high levels of cravings, which can lead to “addictive-like eating behaviors.” She was not involved in the original study.

Other factors may lead to choosing ultra-processed foods over minimally-processed foods. Speaking with Medical News Today, registered dietitian nutritionist Kelsey Costa, who was also not involved in the original study, suggested that making healthier food options more affordable through policy reforms may help with the issue.

“The social, economic, and structural factors contributing to the pervasive consumption of [ultra-processed foods] and their addictive potential remain significant challenges to public health,” she said. The BMJ study also noted that ultra-processed foods are a vital source of calories for people in various countries and that the food environments are not always equal within the same country.

Though addiction to ultra-processed foods is not “an official diagnosis,” as the study reiterates, researchers write that classifying it as such could ultimately benefit and “lead to novel approaches” across realms like social justice and clinical care.

“There is converging and consistent support for the validity and clinical relevance of ultra-processed food addiction,” Ashley Gearhardt, a University of Michigan professor who led the study’s research, said in a news release. “By acknowledging that certain types of processed foods have the properties of addictive substances, we may be able to help improve global health.”

Resources

nationalgeographic.com, “How sugar and fat affect your brain.” By Allie Yang; http://www.people.com, “Ultra-Processed Foods Are as Addictive as Alcohol and Cigarettes, New Study Says.” By Carly Tagen-Dye; webmd.com, “Food Addiction.” By Brenda Goodman;

Signs of Food Addiction

What food does to our brains

How the food we eat has changed

How are perspectives changing? What are the questions left unanswered?

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