© www.ifood.tvBinging on junk food like burgers, hotdogs and chips can be addictive, and it might be as bad as drug addiction.
The study, published Monday in the Archives of General Psychiatry, found that addictions to food and drugs result in similar activity in the brain.
"This past year we got interested in the idea of food addiction and the neural process," said lead researcher Ashley Gearhardt, a clinical psychology doctoral student at Yale University. "We just wanted to get down and deep into whether people really experience food addiction."
The study included 48 women with an average age of 21 who ranged from lean to obese. They took a test developed at the Rudd Center to measure food addiction, based on an established test for measuring drug addiction. The test includes statements such as, "I find that when I start eating certain foods, I end up eating much more than I had planned," and respondents rate how closely the statements match their own experiences.
With functional magnetic resonant imaging (fMRI), a brain imaging procedure, the researchers examined brain activity when the subjects were shown, and then drank, a chocolate milkshake. The results were compared with the subjects' brain's response to the anticipation and consumption of a tasteless solution.
What they found was that the brains of subjects who scored higher on the food addiction scale exhibited neural activity similar to that seen in drug addicts, with greater activity in brain regions responsible for cravings and less activity in the regions that curb urges. The researchers also found that the brain activity indicative of addiction was found in both lean and obese subjects who scored high in the test for food addiction.
Gearhardt says the findings suggest that certain triggers, such as advertisements for food, have not just a psychological, but a physiological, effect on certain people.
"We found that the high food addiction group showed low inhibition: They have less control in their consumption, and that's something we've seen also in addicts," she said.
That's especially significant, she said, when so many processed foods trigger strong reward responses in our brains.
Our response to high-sugar, high-fat foods once helped us survive as a species, she said, "but today, foods are so much more rewarding than anything our brains have evolved to handle." Although there are very few natural foods that are high in both fat and sugar, she said, many processed foods offer both. She compared these foods to strong drugs like cocaine.
"These are foods that really can sort of hijack our brains."Although the study highlights the physiological nature of food addiction, Gearhardt said it's still unknown whether people are born with a predilection for food addiction or develop it through their behavior.
Comment: For more information about how junk food can 'hijack our brains' read the following articles:
Junk food triggers our 'bliss point'
Junk Food Found to Deteriorate Pleasure Center of Brain
Fast Food Culture: Is It Speeding Up Our Minds?
Big Fat Lies
Babies Learn To Like Junk Food In The Womb
Junk Food-Addicted Rats Chose to Starve Themselves Rather than Eat Healthy Food
How We Became a Society of Gluttonous Junk Food Addicts
The entire food industry, perhaps best described as "eatertainment," has refined the science of taking the cheap commodities pumped out by agribusiness and processing them into foodstuffs that are downright addictive. But food is far more than mere fuel. It is marketed as a salve for our emotional and psychological ills, as a social activity, a cultural outlet and entertainment.
...One anonymous food-industry executive told Kessler, "Higher sugar, fat and salt make you want to eat more." The executive admitted food is designed to be "highly hedonic," and that the food industry is "the manipulator of the consumers' minds and desires."
...Referencing studies with either humans or lab animals, Kessler shows how varying concentrations and combinations of fat and sugar intensify neurochemicals, much the same way cocaine does. One professor of psychiatry explains that people self-administer food in search of "different stimulating and sedating effects," just as is done with a "speedball" - which combines cocaine and heroin.
I've spoken with a number of highly obese people in the past who claim that they eat the way that they do as "comfort" because they're obese and are ashamed of it. So in a way, it's an endless cycle that can only be fixed with intense therapy and addressing whatever may be the root of the problem. Addiction to drugs and alcohol is no different. [Link]
There are some cases in which individuals enter rehab and fully recover, only to be ashamed of the things they did to themselves or others when they were addicts. Extreme guilt is what they feel and end up relapsing because of these feelings of guilt. As with food addiction, drug addiction can also become an endless cycle. This is why therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy are so important.