Many of us have had the experience of not being able to stop eating potato chips or something else that is the right combination of salty, sweet, and flavor-carrying fat. If potato chips are our particular poison, we promise ourselves only one. Or maybe only one handful. Later when we are crumpling the empty bag, we wonder why we did not stop. We are such failures when it comes to our nutrition, we think.
The Lays potato chip company knew this back in the 1960s, when their advertising tagline was, “Bet you can’t just eat one.” No kidding.
The experts battle about whether food addiction is real in the same way as substance addictions involving alcohol, cocaine, or heroin and behaviors such as gambling. These addictions are taken as the paradigm against which other substances and behaviors are judged. But the experiences and understanding of many people—including or especially those with other addictions—is that food addiction is as real as any other.
Food addiction is especially interesting because it involves both substances and the behavior of eating. What many would call food addiction is characterized as binge eating disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5 of the American Psychiatric Association. Binge eating disorder is characterized by recurrent binging where a person eats much more than what most people would eat in the same amount of time. Binge eating often happens when a person is not hungry and even already feels full. Such regular overeating is often accompanied by guilt, shame, and embarrassment. There must be a pattern of such overeating with attendant emotional distress to warrant a diagnosis; a person must do this at least once a week for three months. Binge eating disorder is on a scale from mild to severe.
Clearly eating is a behavior that can be engaged in disordered ways. Eating becomes both compulsive and impulsive. Plans and promises not to eat a food or only have a certain amount of it are often broken in ways that feel out of control. Of course there are important therapeutic concerns about binge eating, but this is not the best way to understand food addiction. Part of my concern about understanding food addiction as binge eating is that it becomes too easy to focus solely on people’s eating behaviors and then pathologize them.
What room is left for investigating the substances that people are consuming?
Shifting the focus from disordered eating to the addictive qualities of the food consumed is important. Not all foods are created equal in this regard. The emphasis on “created” is crucial. In general, people are not binging or unable to stop consuming apples, pears, lettuce, and tuna. No, the foods that people are craving are the highly processed foods manufactured by the giants of the food industry.
What’s so appealing about highly processed foods? What makes us crave and consume them to the point of being unable to stop? Certain foods are “hyperpalatable.” These foods are loaded with the unholy and unhealthy trifecta of fat, sodium, and sugar with plenty of extra ingredients that function to preserve and improve appearance (Gearhardt et al 2011). These foods are carefully engineered to achieve the perfect balance to produce pleasure so that people keep eating them. People who consume these foods to high degrees may begin to experience their eating as out of control.
These hyperpalatable foods produce a far more pleasurable response in people than less processed foods. Humans produce opiods when digesting certain amounts of fat and sugar. Opiods provide the pleasure. Recent studies have shown that laboratory animals prefer intense sweetness over cocaine (Lenoir et al). Lab rats addicted to sugar water demonstrated significant withdrawal symptoms with shakes and anxious behavior when researchers were able to block the high (Avena et al 2008).
In eating these hyperpalatable foods—many of which people would both describe as comfort and junk food—people are looking for a certain sensation of pleasure or relief that is not unlike what people who use and abuse alcohol, nicotine, or cocaine seek.
If people are eating these hyperpalatable foods in ways that are compulsive and involve a high degree of impulsivity, is it appropriate to begin to speak of “using food” instead of “eating food?” Here the substance and process dimensions of addiction intertwine, revealing the inadequacy of understanding food addiction as a binge eating disorder.
Furthermore, what place is there for making moral assessments about the food industry creating and selling foods the consumption of which produces similar addictive effects as alcohol, cocaine, and other drugs? I am stopping short of calling the food industry pushers. But I am not stopping short of saying that such corporations are contributing to and greatly profiting off the creation of a public health nightmare. It is legitimate to scrutinize the food industry in the same ways we have the tobacco industry.
Am I claiming food addiction is all the fault of food industry? Most certainly not. But I am claiming that we need to broaden the scope of the questions we ask about food addiction to also include the food industry.
Sources:
Avena, N.M., Rada, P., Hoebel, B.B. (2008). Evidence for sugar addiction: behavioral and neurochemical effects of intermittent, excessive sugar intake. Neuroscience and Behavioral Reviews, 32, 20-39.
Gearhardt, A., Grilo, C., DiLeone, R., Brownell, K., Potenza, M. (2011). Can food be addictive? Public health and policy implications. Addiction 106 (7), 1208-1212.
Lenoir, M., Serre, F., Cantin, L., Ahmed S.H. (2007) Intense Sweetness Surpasses Cocaine Reward. PLoS ONE 2(8): e698. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000698