Food addiction?

The University of California hosts public lectures by various researchers and professors on a wide range of subjects. The recordings are available through iTunes U for free, just download iTunes to your computer and search for UCTV. I love the ones about health and medicine in general and the whole series on obesity.

One about food and addiction asks, Can food cause addictive behavior? The short answer seems to be: Yes, it can. Link here.

This is the blurb: What environmental factors contribute to obesity? Kelly Brownell of Yale University is the Public Health Director at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. He explores causes and prevention of obesity and other nutrition problems. He integrates information from many disciplines and specialties ranging from the basic physiology of body weight regulation to world politics and legislation affecting issues such as agriculture subsidies and international trade policies.

Dr. Brownell mentions that Coke and Pepsi’s trade association, the American Beverage Association, raised their lobbying from $1 million/year to $20 million/year to defeat the sugared-beverage tax. I’m becoming convinced that soft drink companies are in the same moral swamp as tobacco companies. If consumed as directed, harm is done to the consumer. I was in Atlanta, GA recently and ended up touring the Coke facility there – they really are masters of marketing. (Evil, evil marketing. Somehow they've convinced us to equate carbonated sugar water with love, family, and happiness.)

I’m really interested in what people think of the lecture on food addiction. It made me think of this post by Brad Pilon, which points out that there’s no conspiracy to make us fat. The conspiracy is for food companies to make money by selling us more food. They actually don’t care one way or another if we get fat, as long as we keep buying. We are collateral damage in their campaign to improve their bottom line.

This also relates to other musings about willpower. I think we need to re-think willpower; if we swear we won’t eat something, then eat it, it’s not just that we’re weak. We’re obeying our bodies. The problem is that our bodies sometimes don’t know what’s best for us. Realizing that overeating may have an element of food addiction, with all the crazy dynamics of addiction, may give us another tool to tame our eating habits.

Dr. Brownell says that at a meeting that included nutritionists and addiction specialists, the addiction researchers were much more open to the idea of food addiction than the nutritionists. There seems to be a collective mental block about recognizing that food affects us in a million ways beyond simply giving energy. This NYTimes article about a ketogenic diet to treat pediatric epilepsy also mentions the difficulty the medical community has with accepting food as therapy. As Hippocrates said, “Let your food be your medicine, and your medicine be your food.” Medicine is powerful, and so is food.

This post is already a bit all over the place so I'll go ahead and repost a great lecture by Dr. Robert Lustig about why sugar (especially fructose) is bad for us – basically, it’s metabolized like a poison, just like alcohol. I really recommend it to anyone trying to cut down on processed carbs; it’s great motivation.

To sum up: current research indicates food can cause addictive behaviors. Use that knowledge as a tool when examining your own relationship with food!