Currently browsing posts about: Addiction

Ashley N. Gearhardt, Kelly D. Brownell, Mark S. Gold, and Marc N. Potenza, editors.  Food & Addiction: A Comprehensive Handbook, Second Edition.  Oxford University Press, 2024.  570 pages.

This is the second edition of a book I wrote about in 2012.

At the time, I said:

Brownell and Gold have produced an instant classic.  Food and Addiction presents a comprehensive, authoritative, and compelling case for considering whether food is addictive.  Its chapters raise serious questions about our current laissez-faire attitude toward food marketing, especially to children.  This book is a must read for everyone who cares about the causes and consequences of obesity and the need for food policies that better promote health.  It is a game changer.  Readers will never look at food the same way again.

Much has happened since then to focus greater attention on the ways food triggers addictive-like eating behavior.

• Michael Moss’s books, Salt, Sugar, Fat, and Hooked.  These document how food companies deliberately formulate products to make them irresistible (“you can’t eat just one”).
• The emergence of the concept of ultra-processed foods as a researchable category.
• Kevin Hall et al’s demonstration that ultra-processed foods encourage people to eat more calories but not realize it.
• The increase in research using the Yale Food Addiction Scale, and
• The research described and reviewed in this book.

All of this makes an increasingly convincing case that the word “addiction” applies to food as well as to other addictive substances, and that similar proportions of people (10% to 15%) meet criteria for addiction; everyone eats, but not everyone meets those criteria.

The editors’ introductory and concluding chapters lay out the diagnostic and policy issues.

The short chapters address biological, behavioral, clinical, and legal correlates of food addiction.

They are written by a authors who address these issues from enormously different , but highly critical, perspectives ranging from the exceedingly personal to the big-picture political.

Is anything missing here?  As with any multi-authored book, this one undoubtedly took years to produce.  That makes it a few years out of date in fast-moving areas.  It does not cover recent research on ultra-processed foods, Kevin Hall’s experiment, the concept of food “noise,” or the way the new GLP-1 drugs might interact with addictive behavior.

But, this is the resource of food addiction, a great gift to the addiction-perplexed and an enormous public service at a time when it is badly needed.

Michael Moss.  Hooked: Food, Free Will,and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions.  Random House, 2021.

This follows Michael Moss’s Salt Sugar Fat which was about how food companies used these ingredients to hook us on junk food.  The new book focuses on the “addictive” qualities of junk foods—what we are now calling “ultra-processed.”  I put addictive in quotes because his definition is looser than others I’ve seen: habits that are hard to quit.

By this definition, his book provides convincing evidence for what food companies do to make their products irresistible—remember Frito Lay’s “You can’t eat just one?”

The book starts by going into the physiology of addiction:

When we taste sugar, the taste buds on our tongue send the signal.  By contrast, the signal for fat gets transmitted by the trigeminal nerve that extends from the roof of the mouth to the brain.  Food that has both sugar and fat will activate these two different paths, sending to separate alerts, and thus doubling the arousal of a brain that appears to place a high value on information for information’s sake [62].

No wonder we like ice cream so much.

In speaking about how the food environment sets us up for overeating, he says:

…we simply haven’t had anywhere near the time we would need, vis-à-vis evolution, to catch up with the dramatic changes in food and our eating habits of the past forty years.  As a result, we are fundamentally mismatched to the food of today.  Small [Dana Small, an expert Moss interviewed] puts it this way: “It’s not so much that food is addictive, but rather that we by nature are drawn to eating, and the companies have changed the food [p. 99].

Moss is a terrific writer and tells a compelling story.  Even if you don’t have a problem resisting fast food, sodas, or chocolate, this book has a lot to say about why so many people have put on pounds during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Tobacco, alcohol, and opioids are not enough; now we have cookie addiction to contend with?

For this I am indebted to Rija, whom I do not know, but who emailed me this message:

To celebrate National Cookie Day, TOP Data conducted a study and found that American cookie consumption has increased by over 25% during COIVD.  So much so that now 1 in 5 Americans are considered cookie addicts, consuming over 3 cookies per day.

Cookie Day Insights:

1.  Cookie Consumption across the country has risen 20% during COVID
2.  1 in 5 Americans consume 3+ cookies on an average day
3.  Utah leads the nation in cookie consumption
4.  The 7 states that love cookies the least are all in the south

To see where your state ranks check out the full report and infographic.

Who knew that someone was keeping these kinds of statistics.

More than 16 percent of Americans consume 96 or more cookies a month?

One third of Americans has a cookie a day?

How big are those cookies?

Recall: big ones have more sugar and more calories.

I’m all for cookies, but small ones please.

No wonder some people are at high risk for bad outcomes from Covid-19.

Two new books out on the same day, both looking at similar topics but from different angles, both well worth reading.  I did blurbs for both.

Melanie Warner, Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal, Scribner, 2013.

Warner used to cover the food business beat for the New York Times.  She knows what she’s talking about.

My blurb:

In Pandora’s Lunchbox, Melanie Warner has produced an engaging account of how today’s “food processing industrial complex” replaced real foods with the inventions of food science.  Her history of how this happened and who benefits from these inventions should be enough to inspire everyone to get back into the kitchen and start cooking.

And here is Warner in the weekend’s Wall Street Journal on the liquification of chicken nuggets (white slime, anyone?).

Michael Moss, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.  Random House, 2013.

Moss wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning article for the New York Times on failures in our food safety system.  His article based on his new book appeared in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.

My blurb:

Salt Sugar Fat is a breathtaking feat of reporting.  Michael Moss was able to get executives of the world’s largest food companies to admit that they have only one job—to maximize sales and profits—and to reveal how they deliberately entice customers by stuffing their products with salt, sugar, and fat.  Anyone reading this truly important book will understand why food corporations cannot be trusted to value health over profits and why all of us need to recognize and resist food marketing every time we grocery shop or vote.

And here’s the Wall Street Journal’s review of both (which is what happens when books on the same topic are published on the same day).

Kelly Brownell and Mark Gold.  Food and Addiction: A Comprehensive Handbook.  Oxford, 2012

I blurbed this one:

Brownell and Gold have produced an instant classic.  Food and Addiction presents a comprehensive, authoritative, and compelling case for considering whether food is addictive.  Its chapters raise serious questions about our current laissez-faire attitude toward food marketing, especially to children.  This book is a must read for everyone who cares about the causes and consequences of obesity and the need for food policies that better promote health.  It is a game changer.  Readers will never look at food the same way again.

The book is a collection of edited pieces by a variety of authors with distinctly different approaches and viewpoints, ranging from the seriously scientific (“is food addiction real?” to to the thoroughly anecdotal (“I am a food addict”).  The editors deserve much praise for casting so wide a net and for their cautious interpretation of the available science.  Is food addictive in ways similar to alcohol or cocaine?  In some ways yes, maybe, and no.  Read it and decide for yourself.

Martha Rosenberg.  Born with a Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks, and Hacks Pimp the Public Health.  Prometheus, 2012.

This book is better than it’s flashy, misleading title would suggest.  It doesn’t seem to be at all about McDonald’s or soft drinks.  Instead, the first half is about Big Pharma and the marketing of drugs that don’t do much good but cause plenty of harm.  The second half is devoted to the same kind of analysis of Big Food, but mostly focuses on animal agriculture: bovine growth hormone, antibiotic resistance, salmon farming, mad cow, and the safety of animal foods.  I liked the cartoon illustrations by the author.

I feel like this will open a pandora’s box but I’m hearing more and more about food as a problem of addiction.  I have a hard time seeing it that way.  We have to eat to live and in that sense I suppose you could consider food addictive.  And food does stimulate the same pleasure centers that addictive drugs do, although not to the same extent.  But does that make food, and especially sugar, addictive?

Two studies take on the question.  The first, from Canadian researchers, equivocates.  In some ways yes, in other ways no.

The second study, from Wales professor David Benton, looks at what you would have to prove to prove sugar addiction and concludes that current observations just don’t support it.  He says:

If sugar addiction exists…addicts would experience increased food cravings, predominantly for sweet items; cravings would be especially strong in the morning, after an overnight fast; obese people would find sweet foods particularly attractive; and high sugar consumption would predispose people to obesity…There is no support from the human literature for the hypothesis that sucrose may be physically addictive or that addiction to sugar plays a role in eating disorders.  [Here’s the abstract of his paper]

Really?  I’m curious to know what’s out there on this.