Food addiction

thumb|right| A food addiction (or eating addiction) is any behavioural addiction characterized primarily by the compulsive consumption of palatable and hyperpalatable food items, and potentially also sugar-sweetened beverages. Such foods often have high sugar, fat, and salt contents, and markedly activate the reward system in humans and other animals. Those with eating addictions often overconsume such foods despite the adverse consequences (such as excess weight gain, diabetes, and heart disease) associated with their overconsumption. Quotes __NOTOC__ A Peter Attia, Bill Gifford Ketogenic diet means restricting carbohydrates to such an extent that the body begins metabolizing fat into "ketone bodies" that the muscles and brain can utilize as fuel. Peter Attia and Bill Gifford, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity (2023) Evolution wants us to get fat when nutrients are abundant: the more energy we could store, in our ancestral past, the greater our chances of survival and successful reproduction. We needed to be able to endure periods of time without much food, and natural selection obliged, endowing us with genes that helped us conserve and store energy in the form of fat. That enabled our distant ancestors to survive periods of famine, cold climates, and physiologic stressors such as illness and pregnancy. But these genes have proved less advantageous in our present environment, where many people in the developed world have access to almost unlimited calories. Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity In the late 1970s, the average American adult male weighed 173 pounds. Now the average American man tips the scale at nearly 200 pounds. Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity Nicole Avena Heavy consumption of highly processed foods can alter dopamine and opioid neurotransmission, creating a cycle of bingeing and withdrawal. Nicole M. Avena, Pedro Rada, and Bartley G. Hoebel. Evidence for sugar addiction: Behavioral and neurochemical effects of intermittent, excessive sugar intake. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews (2008) thumb|right|We are not addicted to all foods. The addiction is specifically aimed at highly processed foods that contain unnatural concentrations of sugar and refined carbohydrates. The modern food environment acts as a constant cue, activating the reward center of the brain before the food even touches your tongue. Nicole M. Avena and John Talbott, Why Diets Fail: Because You're Addicted to Sugar (2014) ISBN 978-1451699708 Our research shows that sugar can stimulate the brain's reward system in a manner similar to drugs of abuse, leading to chemical changes that mirror addiction. Nicole M. Avena, What to Eat When You're Pregnant (2015) ISBN 978-1607746737 Food addiction is not a metaphor; it is a clinical reality driven by biological changes in the brain's survival circuitry. Nicole M. Avena, Sugarless: A 7-Step Plan to Uncover Hidden Sugars, Curb Your Cravings, and Conquer Your Addiction (2023) ISBN 978-1401972172 We are not addicted to all foods. The addiction is specifically aimed at highly processed foods that contain unnatural concentrations of sugar and refined carbohydrates. Nicole M. Avena, Sugarless (2023) B thumb|right|My impression is, that any starchy or saccharine matter tends to the disease of corpulence in advanced life, [...] that all things tending to these elements should be avoided, of course always under sound medical authority.~ William Banting (1796-1878) William Banting The great charm and comfort of the system is, that its effects are palpable within a week of trial, which creates a natural stimulus to persevere for a few weeks more, when the fact becomes established beyond question. William Banting (1796-1878), Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public (1864), plus later Addenda.An early historical example (1864) of successfully following a low-carbohydrate diet by changing what he ate, after much earlier frustration clarifying the underlying (previously medically unrecognised) problem in his particular case; thereby reducing his weight from 202 pounds to 150 pounds. Then recommending this remedial course of action to other "sufferers of corpulence". My impression is, that any starchy or saccharine matter tends to the disease of corpulence in advanced life, and whether it be swallowed in that form or generated in the stomach, that all things tending to these elements should be avoided, of course always under sound medical authority. William Banting. From the First Addendum to his (public) 1864 letter. I shall always observe a careful watch upon myself to discover the effect, and act accordingly, so that, if I choose to spend a day or two with Dives, so to speak, I must not forget to devote the next to Lazarus. William Banting. From the Second Addendum to his 1864 letter. [i.e., that partaking of a "fattening dietary [item] occasionally" needs ideally to be tempered by a subsequent bout of compensatorily restrictive eating.] My impression from the experiments I have tried on myself of late is, that saccharine matter is the great moving cause of fatty corpulence. I know that it produces in my individual case increased weight and a large amount of flatulence, and believe, that not only sugar, but all elements tending to create saccharine matter in the process of digestion, should be avoided. From the Second Addendum. One material point I should be glad to impress on my corpulent readers—it is, to get accurately weighed at starting upon the fresh system, and continue to do so weekly or monthly, for the change will be so truly palpable by this course of examination, that it will arm them with perfect confidence in the merit and ultimate success of the plan. From the Second Addendum. Neal Barnard What I have found over and over is that, once we have made short-term changes, they tend to change our long-term habits. Neal D. Barnard, 21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart: Boost Metabolism, Lower Cholesterol, and Dramatically Improve Your Health (2011). Here is the most important thing to understand about cravings: They are not caused by weak will or gluttony. Cravings are triggered by biological properties of the foods themselves. That is, certain foods have chemical makeups that cause us to crave them in very much the same way that drugs, alcohol, and tobacco have addictive components. Neal D. Barnard, Dr. Neal Barnard's Program for Reversing Diabetes: The Scientifically Proven System for Reversing Diabetes without Drugs (2018 Edition). The road to diabetes is in fact a two-way street. Neal D. Barnard, Dr. Neal Barnard's Program for Reversing Diabetes (2018 Edition). Benjamin Bikman If your [fasting] insulin levels are on the low end (lower than around 6 microunits/milliliter or 41 picomoles/liter), it's a safe assumption that you're doing quite well and your insulin sensitivity is strong. You are either already adhering to smart lifestyle choices or you are young enough to get away with bad choices for now. If your insulin levels are moderately elevated (7-17 microunits/milliliter or 48 to 118 picomoles/liter), you should start making changes, particularly with the food you eat and how frequently you're eating. In the event your insulin is high (greater than 18 microunits/milliliter or 125 per picomoles/liter), you need to make changes today. Benjamin Bikman, Why We Get Sick: The Hidden Epidemic at the Root of Most Chronic Disease―and How to Fight It (2020) Kelly D. Brownell thumb|right|We live in a culture that targets the poor and children as a market for high-calorie, low-nutrition junk food and manipulates children into poor eating habits. We live in a culture that targets the poor and children as a market for high-calorie, low-nutrition junk food and manipulates children into poor eating habits with toy giveaways and in-school promotions.. Kelly D. Brownell, Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About It (2004) ISBN 978-0071438728 Certain constituents of food products, added sugar in particular, may hijack the brain and override human will, judgement and personal responsibility, and in so doing create a public health menace. Kelly D. Brownell and Mark Gold, Food Addiction: A Comprehensive Handbook. (2012) ISBN 978-0199738168 As a culture, we've become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing. And we could make a claim that the toll taken on the public health by a poor diet rivals that taken by tobacco. Kelly D. Brownell. Cited in The New York Times Magazine, 2013. "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food." Portion sizes and the availability of highly processed, highly caloric food have grown dramatically... How far are you from a doughnut? Kelly D. Brownell. Center for Science in the Public Interest, interview, 2022. "Why our toxic food environment matters." C T. Colin Campbell, and Thomas M. Campbell II For quotes from 'The China Study' (2005) (2016 Revised and Expanded Edition), see HERE. Allen Carr Our real problem is our eating habits. What we need to change is our eating habits. The real problem is that we've been brainwashed into adopting stupid eating habits. Allen Carr, Easyweigh to Lose Weight (1997) - at p.20, 21. You aren't going on a diet. You are merely changing your eating habits. Easyweigh to Lose Weight - at p.67. Although avoiding starvation is the ultimate purpose of eating, isn't it true that each meal is prompted by a more immediate reason, such as 'I'm in the habit of eating three meals a day,' or 'I enjoy eating,' or 'Because I feel hungry, bored, nervous or miserable,' or 'Because I got the whiff of something that smelt good,' or, simply, 'The food was there and I couldn't resist it.'We might eat for any one of these reasons or all of them. It's rather confusing, isn't it? And not surprising that we become overweight. Easyweigh to Lose Weight - at p.72. Mother Nature's only purpose in making us want to eat is that we survive. [...] The sole purpose of eating is to provide fuel and maintenance materials.[But] aren't most of us in the habit of having a certain volume of food served up on our plates three times a day and then attempting to eat that volume regardless of the energy we propose to burn?The point is: our bodies aren't designed to handle that surplus. [... ] Instead, we are obliged to store it in the form of unsightly bulges around our midriffs and elsewhere, and that's why we become overweight and obese.We can now concentrate all of our attention on one aspect and one aspect alone: Our intake. [...] Provided the intake is correct the rest takes care of itself. [...] [So] tamper with... the type and quantity of food that you eat. Easyweigh to Lose Weight - at p.73, 74, 75, 76 [104] If you stick to the principle of eating when you are hungry and stopping when you have satisfied that hunger, you will not only enjoy every meal, but you will have no weight problems. However, I would emphasize that I said stop eating when you have satisfied your hunger, and not your gluttony. Easyweigh to Lose Weight - at p.104 How to lose weight and keep it off+ The most important thing is to change your mentality and approach rather than simply changing what you eat.+ Correcting the misconceptions that keep you trapped eating the wrong foods that cause you to not only gain weight but also feel tired, miserable and unfit is essential.+ Get your head right and it’s easy to lose weight (and keep it off).As long as you change your thinking and see the food that has made you overweight for what it is; poisonous, toxic, and addictive junk that’s made you ill, you’ll find it easy. Some points from the allencarr.com website Daniel Chidiac If you do not respect your body, it will not respect you on your journey through life. Our body is the ship that carries us through this journey, yet we will continue to wreck this beautiful piece of artwork called the human body.What does your health mean to you? What is it worth? Daniel Chidiac, Who Says You Can't? You Do. (2012.) From Chapter 19, "Start That Engine", at pages 278, 279, 286. (Page numbers per the DC Group Global 2012 paperback edition.) thumb|right|The answer is simple to obtaining and maintaining a balanced life: eat right and exercise regularly! There has never been, and never will be, another way to a healthy lifestyle. Through my experience of giving nutrition advice, I have found that when people came to me and said 'I don't know what to eat', it was merely an excuse to avoid responsibility. I would then make them write down what they believed was healthy to eat. Most of them wrote down great answers and listed fruits and vegetables, nuts, herbal teas, beans, and even brown rice. They proved they well and truly knew what was going on.Of course you know, so just do it!As we discussed earlier, it is imperative that you direct your focus and emotions intelligently. Your food is no exception.The answer is simple to obtaining and maintaining a balanced life: eat right and exercise regularly! There has never been, and never will be, another way to a healthy lifestyle.Once you continually focus on what you are doing to your life through your choice of food, your willingness to comply with a healthy lifestyle will happily skyrocket. The obesity issue in western countries is absolutely ridiculous, so don't be part of the epidemic. It is not a complicated problem as most try to make out, it is simply a choice. Food is for sufficient energy, not to pig out on.We must feed our high performance machine with the essentials it requires in order for it to function at its peak. Daniel Chidiac, Who Says You Can't? You Do. (2012.) From Chapter 21, "Intelligent Eating", at pages 294, 295, 297. Luigi Cornaro Those men are most truly happy who keep their appetites in subjection. Luigi Cornaro (a.k.a., Alvise Cornaro) (1464-1566), How to Live 100 Years, or Discourse on the Sober Life (1562). From the First Discourse. thumb|right|Those men are most truly happy who keep their appetites in subjection.~ Luigi Cornaro (1464-1566), 'How to Live 100 Years' By a regular life I mean, that a man shall ascertain for himself, how small a quantity of food and drink is sufficient to supply the daily wants of his nature and then having done this, and found out the kinds of food and drink best suited for his constitution, he shall, having formed his plans, strictly adhere to his resolutions and principles, not being careful at one time, and self-indulgent at others, for by so doing, he would gain but little benefit; but taking care always to avoid excess, which any man can certainly do at all times, and under all circumstances, if he is determined. [...] By regular living, he destroys every seed of sickness, and thus, by removing the cause, prevents the effect. Luigi Cornaro - How to Live 100 Years. From the First Discourse. The safest way to attain a long and healthful life, is to embrace sobriety, and to diet oneself strictly as to quantity. And this is no very difficult affair. [...] We are all human beings, endowed with reason, and consequently we ought to be master of all our actions.This sobriety is reduced to two things, quality and quantity.[...] Let a fair, honest trial of some few weeks be given, and the result would, in all cases, be most pleasing.[...] Others pretend that it is better to live a short and self-indulgent life, than a long and self-denying one; but surely, longevity ought to be valued, and is, by men of good understanding. [...] They resolve to eat but once, heartily, in the twenty-four hours. But this course is useless; for the stomach is still overburdened, and thus a man kills himself long before his time.O, what a difference between a regular and temperate life, and an irregular and intemperate life! One gives health and longevity, the other produces disease and untimely death. [...] I am thus more than ever determined to use my utmost endeavors to make known the benefit of my kind of life.[...] Gratifying the appetite and palate, is not, as many affirm, natural and right, but is the cause of disease and premature death. Were this pleasure of the palate lasting, it would be some excuse; but it is momentary, compared with the duration of the disease which its excess engenders. Luigi Cornaro - How to Live 100 Years. From the Second Discourse. F Dr Jason Fung The basics of good nutrition can be summarized in these simple rules. Eat whole, unprocessed foods. Avoid sugar. Avoid refined grains. Eat a diet high in natural fats. Balance feeding with fasting. Jason Fung, The Complete Guide to Fasting: Heal Your Body Through Intermittent, Alternate-Day, and Extended Fasting (2016) thumb|right|Balance feeding with fasting.We are wired for feast and famine, not feast, feast, feast. We are wired for feast and famine, not feast, feast, feast. The Complete Guide to Fasting [In cases where] too much insulin causes obesity, then it becomes clear we need to lower insulin levels. The Complete Guide to Fasting Caloric reduction and portion-control strategies only make you tired and hungry. Worst of all...you regain all the weight you have lost. I know it. You know it.[...] Losing weight triggers two important responses. First, total energy expenditure is immediately and indefinitely reduced in order to conserve the available energy. Second, hormonal hunger signaling is immediately and indefinitely amplified in an effort to acquire more food. Weight loss results in increased hunger and decreased metabolism. This evolutionary survival strategy has a single purpose: to make us regain the lost weight.[...] Eating less does not result in lasting weight loss. It. Just. Does. Not. Work. Jason Fung, The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss (2016) - Part 2, at Chapter 3, p.41, 45, 47. Obesity is a hormonal disorder of fat regulation. Insulin is the major hormone that drives weight gain, so the rational therapy is to lower insulin levels. Jason Fung, The Obesity Code - Part 6, at Chapter 19, p.219. Reduce your consumption of added sugars. The Obesity Code - Ch.19, at p.219. Just don't snack The healthy snack is one of the greatest weight-loss deceptions. The myth that ‘grazing is healthy’ has attained legendary status. If we were meant to ‘graze’, we would be cows. Grazing is the direct opposite of virtually all food traditions. Even as recently as the 1960s, most people still ate just three meals per day. Constant stimulation of insulin eventually leads to insulin resistance.[...] Stop eating all the time.[...] Are snacks necessary? No.[...] There's a simple answer to the question of what to eat at snack time. Nothing. Don't eat snacks. Period. The Obesity Code - Ch.19, at p.222, 223. Eat whole, unprocessed foods at all meals. The Obesity Code - Ch.19, at p.225. Reduce your consumption of refined grains. The Obesity Code - Ch.19, at p.228. thumb|right|There is one more piece to the puzzle - a solution found many centuries ago.The answer we are looking for is, in a word, fasting. The last piece of the puzzleAll diets work in the short term. But we've been ignoring the long-term problem of insulin resistance. There is one more piece of the puzzle - a solution found many centuries ago. A practice that has been enshrined in the nutritional lore of virtually every population on earth. A tradition rapidly becoming extinct.Two major factors maintain our insulin at a high level. The first is the foods that we eat - which are what we usually change when we go on a diet. But we fail to address the other factor: the long-term problem of insulin resistance. This problem is one of meal timing.To succeed, we must break the insulin-resistance cycle. But how?The answer we are looking for is, in a word, fasting.When we talk about fasting to break insulin resistance and lose weight, we are talking about intermittent fasts of twenty-four to thirty-six hours.The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to addressing the health concerns around fasting - which, the research shows us, is a beneficial practice. The Obesity Code - Ch.19 at p.233, 234. Ch.20 at p.235, 236. On YouTube: Dr. Jason Fung - YouTube Channel On YouTube: Dr. Jason Fung: Beginner's Guide to Intermittent Fasting (2020) (10 mins) On YouTube: "Dr. Jason Fung: The Best Fasting Method for Visceral Fat and Insulin Resistance has Been Discovered" (2026) (2h 12 mins) G Ashley Gearhardt Right now, we're kind of like, 'just eat these foods in moderation.' And for the people for whom consumption of these foods has become compulsive, it's like telling people with alcohol use disorder to just find a way to drink in moderation. Ashley Gearhardt, National Institutes of Health (NIH) interview, 2024. "Dr. Ashley Gearhardt on Addiction and Ultra-Processed Foods." “People aren’t becoming addicted to apples or brown rice,” said lead author University of Michigan professor of psychology Ashley Gearhardt, Ph.D. “They’re struggling with industrial products specifically engineered to hit the brain like a drug—rapidly, intensely, and repeatedly.” Quoted on the Psychology Today website. These foods are so wildly different than those foods [real fruits, vegetables, legumes] that some people have suggested that food is the wrong term for it, and we should instead call them chemical substances. Ashley Gearhardt, American Psychological Association (APA) podcast, 2022. "Speaking of Psychology: Can you be addicted to food?" The younger you are when you're exposed to an addictive substance, the more likely you are to have problems... Kids are being exposed to this and aggressively marketed to... it's setting them up where this is one of the major sources of reward, sources of ways to cope. ** Ashley Gearhardt, American Psychological Association (APA) podcast, 2022. "Speaking of Psychology: Can you be addicted to food?" What has happened in modern times is that previously healthy whole foods have been largely replaced by ultra-processed foods, which are high in pure sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, salt, and the wrong types of fats.The reasons that our bodies crave these foods is because they are loaded with ingredients that tap into the pleasure centers in our brain, the so-called dopamine reward pathway, which is the same pathway that street drugs like cocaine tap into. The Harvard Gazette. "Why we crave junk food—and how to cultivate healthier eating habits." Mills: "What's the difference between being addicted to food and just liking to indulge in treats more than you should? How can you tell if someone meets the threshold for addiction?"Gearhardt: "...I took our diagnostic criteria that we have in the DSM to try and dissociate between social drinkers and somebody who's actually addicted to alcohol. And I've applied that to the intake of these really highly processed foods with unnatural levels of refined carbohydrates and fats. And so, the hallmarks of addiction that I'm looking for are a loss of control over intake.[...] Having more of a sense of your cues and your reactions can start to give you some of your power back.[...] Right now, we're at where I see we've been with a lot of addictions in the past, which is that it's just a focus on willpower: 'You just have to try a little harder, calories in calories out.' And what it's ignoring is that there's a trillion dollar industry that is using its research and development budget to specifically design these highly processed foods to trigger unnaturally intense levels of reward in your brain in a way that makes it hard to manage. And that if this is triggering this addictive compulsive pull, it's not just an adult choice, but really the result of a toxic environment really pushing a risky food substance that we're not well informed about. And so, that seems to actually be somewhat helpful in reducing stigma and reducing the belief that people just aren't trying hard enough and it's just a matter of willpower.[...] It's clearly not all foods. It's clearly this subset of highly processed foods that are unnatural, highly refined, highly rewarding products. And that's what people get hooked on. [...] People are really struggling to get a handle on their relationship with these foods, even in the face of really stark consequences." American Psychological Association. "Speaking of Psychology: Can you be addicted to food? With Ashley Gearhardt, PhD." "And some of the behaviors that we see that people report is that they really struggle to maintain their control once they start eating some of these foods. [...] There's a tendency that even if you have some pretty significant negative consequences, health consequences, emotional consequences-you keep returning to that same dietary pattern. [...] Because the foods themselves seem to have kind of taken an oversized view in their world. They really start kind [of] driving their eating behavior and sometimes driving their entire life.[...] From a public health perspective, the biggest concern is if these foods have enough of an addictive pull, they trigger enough of a response that you really struggle to eat in moderation. That says, on a broad scale, people are struggling with their relationship with these foods in a way that increases health-related problems." Duke University, World Food Policy Center "Ashley Gearhardt on Food Addiction and You… Yes, You." We just blame it on the individual for a while and say 'oh, you know, just smoke in moderation, drink in moderation' – and eventually we get to a point where we understand the levers that the industry can pull to create products that can really hook people. Ashley Gearhardt, University of Michigan clinical commentary, 2026. "Ultra-processed foods should be treated more like cigarettes than food."Roger Gould If you haven't learned how to cope with your life and your emotions in a way that doesn't include food, you will not be able to adhere to any diet plan for very long. Roger Gould, Shrink Yourself: Break Free from Emotional Eating Forever (2007). From Chapter 1, at page 19. [Page numbers are from the 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Inc edition.] Food grants you a little time-out from your life, but the time-out ends and the problems are still there. Wanting a time-out when feelings become too intense is actually normal and healthy. It's using food too often to get that time-out that becomes problematic. Shrink Yourself (2007) - Part 1 (The Learning Sessions), Chapter 2 (Food, the Over-the-Counter Tranquilizer), at p.35. To interrupt the immediate need to eat, you'll learn to slow down long enough to look at what's going on in your inner reality and what's going on in the external reality, and then reinterpret things in such a way that you'll be able to own your power and become the author and agent of your life. Shrink Yourself (2007) - Part 1, Chapter 3 (The Costs of Powerlessness), at p.43. thumb|right|If you know what triggers you, you can intervene before you react by overeating. If food has become your major mood-regulating system, you'll find yourself overeating every time your mood slips; every time you feel you don't measure up; every time you think you or your life aren't good enough.If you are an emotional eater, you'll quickly want a food fix after you get your feelings hurt.We need an escape, any one we can find, and food is generally the most accessible option.Each of us has particular vulnerabilities that trigger our worst thoughts about ourselves. The trick is to know what makes you "crazy insecure". If you know what triggers you, you can intervene before you react by overeating.As soon as you experience hurt feelings and accompanying self-doubt, you grab food to appease yourself. What would happen if, instead of eating, you could freeze-frame your feelings and put them under the microscope at the moment the tension occurs? Shrink Yourself (2007) - Part 1, Chapter 4 (Your Self-Doubt Layer), at p.49, 50, 51, 52. Michael Greger For quotes from Michael Greger, "How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease" (2015), see HERE. Stephan J. Guyenet In 1980, the US Department of Health and Human Services and the US Department of Agriculture released a document titled Dietary Guidelines for Americans.[...] If you followed the Guidelines faithfully, you would end up eating a diet that's not very different from what most nutrition professionals recommend today: primarily whole grains, beans, potatoes, vegetables, fruits, nuts, lean meat, seafood, and dairy, with little added fat, sugar, or highly processed foods.[...] Seems pretty reasonable. Yet you know what happened next: We got fatter. Between 1980 and today, the US obesity rate more than doubled.[...] Against the advice of the Guidelines, our intake of soda, refined sugar, refined starch, added fats, and highly processed food skyrocketed, along with our calorie intake. Stephan J. Guyenet, The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts That Make Us Overeat (2017) ISBN 1-250-08119-X - Introduction, at p.1, 2, 3. [Page numbers are from the 2017 Vermilion edition.] Information alone isn't always an effective way to change behavior.[...] If our everyday eating behavior is primarily guided by brain systems that aren't so rational, information alone shouldn't be a very effective way to change it, no matter how accurate, clear, and compelling it is. The Hungry Brain, Introduction, at p.3. The conflict between the conscious and nonconscious brain explains why we overeat even though we don't want to. Although we try to control our behavior using the conscious parts of our brains, the nonconscious parts work to undermine our good intentions.[...] What circuits are actually in charge of our everyday eating behavior, and how do they work? If we can answer these questions, we can understand why we make destructive food choices in the modern world, and how to stop. The Hungry Brain, Introduction, at p.4. While a calorie-seeking brain is an asset when calories are hard to come by, it's a liability when we're drowning in food. The Hungry Brain, Introduction, at p.5. To understand food addiction, we need to examine the types of foods that trigger addiction-like behavior. As it turns out, people don't become addicted to celery and lentils. What foods are they drawn to instead? The following quote by [Ashley] Gearhardt and [Kelly] Brownell sheds light on the question:High concentrations of sugar, refined carbohydrates (bread, white rice, pasta made with white flour), fats (butter, lard, margarine), salt, and caffeine are addictive substances and the foods containing these ingredients may be consumed in a manner consistent with addictive behavior. Just like drugs of abuse, these food substances may not be addictive until they are processed, extracted, highly refined and concentrated by modern industrial processes; meanwhile, combinations of these look-like-food substances may greatly enhance their addictive qualities.Although it's controversial to call these foods addictive, it is fair to say that they provoke dopamine release in the ventral striatum. And the more concentrated they are, the more dopamine they release. The more dopamine they release, the more they reinforce behavior, and the more they reinforce behavior, the closer they bring us to addiction. The Hungry Brain, Chapter 3 ("The Chemistry of Seduction"), at p.54-55. thumb|right|"If you find something really rewarding and you have really poor impulse control, you're in a lot of trouble."~ Leonard Epstein Drug abuse research suggests that a person's susceptibility to addiction depends not only on how reinforcing the drug is for him but also on his ability to control his behavior in response to a craving—in other words, his impulsivity. Impulsivity describes a person's ability—or lack thereof—to suppress or ignore basic urges that are beyond conscious control. It's the opposite of what we commonly call self-control.[...] As [Leonard] Epstein puts it, "If you find something really rewarding and you have really poor impulse control, you're in a lot of trouble." Epstein coined the term reinforcement pathology to describe the dangerous combination of high reinforcement sensitivity and high impulsivity. [...] This may identify why some people are more susceptible to food addiction than others, despite the fact that we're all exposed to potentially addictive foods. [...] On the other hand, people who have a high [relative reinforcing value of food] but who aren't impulsive ... aren't at an increased risk of overeating or weight gain. "If you have really good self-control," explains Epstein, you can overcome the reward value, and you can be a foodie: someone who loves food, who's a gourmet cook, but who is lean because they can regulate the amount of food."[...] The same principles of reinforcement and impulsivity should still apply to nonaddicted people. Even if you aren't actually addicted to potato chips, you may still be drawn to eat them when you aren't hungry, and your ability to suppress that urge when they're available will influence how much of them you eat. The Hungry Brain, Chapter 3 ("The Chemistry of Seduction"), at p.67, 68. [Leonard] Epstein is quick to point out that there's a third important factor in addition to [relative reinforcing value of food] and impulsivity: the presence of highly rewarding food in your personal environment. [...] The deadliest combination occurs when an impulsive person with a high food reward sensivity lives in an environment that's bursting at the seams with highly rewarding foods. And as we will soon see, the United States qualifies as such an environment. The Hungry Brain, Chapter 3 ("The Chemistry of Seduction"), at p.68. H Food is not just calories, it is information; it talks to your DNA and tells it what to do. And junk food speaks a language of disease, inflammation, and addiction. Mark Hyman, The Blood Sugar Solution: The UltraHealthy Program for Losing Weight, Preventing Disease, and Feeling Great Now (2012) ISBN 978-0-316-12737-0 thumb|right|The food industry has intentionally created 'hyper-palatable' foods—scientific combinations of fat, sugar, and salt designed to bypass your body's natural fullness cues and keep you hooked. Sugar is eight times more addictive than cocaine. It hijacks your brain chemistry and your taste buds, driving you to eat more and more, even when you know it's killing you. Mark Hyman, The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet: Activate Your Body's Natural Ability to Burn Fat and Lose Weight Fast (2014) ISBN 978-0-316-23002-5 The food industry has intentionally created 'hyper-palatable' foods—scientific combinations of fat, sugar, and salt designed to bypass your body's natural fullness cues and keep you hooked. Mark Hyman, Food: What the Heck Should I Eat? The No-nonsense Guide to Achieving Optimal Weight and Lifelong Health. (2018) ISBN 978-0-316-33886-8 Willpower is a myth. You cannot use willpower to override a biological addiction. If your hormones and brain chemistry are hijacked by sugar, biology will win every single time. Mark Hyman, Food Fix: How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities, and Our Planet—One Bite at a Time (2020) ISBN 978-0-316-45317-2 K "Once you understand you are being stimulated, then you can begin to fight back to prevent being manipulated." David Kessler. National Public Radio (NPR) interview, 2009. "Why do we overeat? Author blames fat, sugar, salt." The reasons for obesity are much the same around the world, and the food industry is a major culprit. The modern global food corporation exists to grow its revenues and increase its profit, and it can only do that by selling more product, even when communities are already saturated with food.[...] The industry dials fat, sugar and salt into just about everything it sells, makes food available on every corner through widening distribution networks, and uses marketing to persuade us that eating any time, day or night, is a socially acceptable form of entertainment.[...] Multinational food corporations may not understand the neuroscience, but they know that certain inputs—namely, sugar, fat and salt—achieve their sought-after output—people come back for more. Industry executives are not concerned about our personal struggle to control what we eat. They are more interested in trying to foster the habit of "more". David Kessler, The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite (2009) ISBN 1-60529-785-2. Introduction to the UK Edition, at p.xii-xiii. (Page numbers per the Penguin Books 2010 paperback edition.) America, Andrew said, has become "a food fun house... a carnival of delicious, fatty, salty, sugary, and, more to the point, accessible and cheap delights. How could you expect to go to the carnival and not want to go on the rides? [...] Of course you want to spend your money on this stimulation." The End of Overeating. Introduction: You are the target. At p.xx. There's no shortage of people who lack control in the face of highly palatable food. The End of Overeating. Introduction. At p.xx. thumb|right|What's been driving us to overeat? What's been driving us to overeat?[...] Few medical personnel or nutritionists, few psychological experts or public health advocates, have recognised the distinctive pattern of overeating that has become widespread in the population. No one has seen loss of control as its most defining characteristic.[...] We have not understood why eating certain foods only makes us want to eat more of them. No one has recognised what's really happening. The End of Overeating. Part 1 (Sugar, Fat, Salt), Chapter 1 ("Something Changed...America and Britain Gained Weight.") At p.6. When the mix is right, food becomes more stimulating. Eating foods high in sugar, fat, and salt makes us eat more foods high in sugar, fat, and salt.[...] Variety and ready availability further amplify overeating.[...] When offered a varied selection and large portions of high-sugar, high-fat, high-salt foods, many of us will eat them in excessive amounts. The End of Overeating. Part 1, Chapter 3 ("Sugar, Fat, and Salt Make Us Eat More Sugar, Fat, and Salt.") At p.14, 15, 17. Food loaded with fat and sugar asserts its hold—its capture—on each of us with varying intensity. Some respond with indifference; others are able to eat just a little and then stop. But for the millions of people whose attention it grabs, the drive for reward aggressively asserts dominance over the drive for balance. [...]That reward drive can become an obsession, although it's one that many people keep private.[...] They feel powerless in the face of certain foods. This may be the primary characteristic of what is sometimes referred to as emotional or compulsive eating, although there are no formal definitions of these terms. Their behaviour is best understood as a reward-driven response to the sensory stimuli associated with food.This response isn't exclusive to overweight people. Many thin people have the same impulse—it's just that [...] they have found ways to maintain control. The End of Overeating. Part 1, Chapter 5 ("Pushing Up Our Settling Points.") At p.23, 24, 27-28. Putting together the various lines of study, we gain a fuller picture of the cycle: A cue triggers a dopamine-fueled urge ... dopamine leads us to food ... eating food leads to opioid release ... and the production of both dopamine and opioids stimulates further eating.The cue stimulates arousal, we pursue the reward and we experience release, and the arousal eases.Cues ensure that we will work hard to obtain the reward. That concept is well known in the food industry, where the most important goal of food design is to create anticipation. The End of Overeating. Part 1, Chapter 10 ("Cues Activate Brain Circuits That Guide Behaviour.") At p.53-54. thumb|right|"Food is escape, more and more," the consultant said. In a world where people often feel under stress, "Food is escape, more and more," the consultant said.I turned to a venture capitalist who knows the food business intimately. He, too, talked about stress in contemporary society.Another industry report. "Growing levels of stress create a need for indulgence and relaxation," declare the authors.Similar themes were sounded at a Chicago conference on restaurant trends. Here, too, the discussion focused on catering to consumers whose lives are increasingly harried. Consumers are working longer hours and feeling more stress, and almost half of them say "their personal responsibilities can be overwhelming." The End of Overeating. Part 2 (The Food Industry), in Chapter 16 ("That's Entertainment.") At p.80, 81. Now the average American chews only ten times. Food is easier to eat when it breaks down more quickly in the mouth.Processing, he said, creates a sort of "adult baby food". What results is food that doesn't require much effort to eat. "It goes down very easy; you don't even think much about eating it.""We've gone through some kind of a metamorphosis over the years. We've made food very easy to get calories from. It's easy to get a lot of calories without a lot of chewing."Because this kind of food disappears down our throats so quickly after the first bite, it readily overrides the body's signals that should tell us "I'm full."Foods that go "whoosh" don't leave us with a sense of being well fed. By stripping food of its fiber, we also strip it of its capacity to satisfy. In making food disappear so swiftly, fat and sugar only leave us wanting more.Instead of paying attention to what goes into our mouths, we're engaged in a "shovelling process," said Nancy Rodriguez. "We eat to be belly filled." The End of Overeating, Chapter 18 ("No Satisfaction"), at p.95, 96. The goal is not to vilify all food and those who serve it, but to change our thinking about big food, those huge portions of layered and loaded food with little nutritional value. We need to look differently at the people and the places that serve it. When their power to manipulate our behaviour becomes fully transparent, cues will lose their capacity to entice.You'll have to set your own rules for eating in a controlled manner and maintaining a healthy weight. To live within a framework of planned eating, you'll have to understand your own behavior around food and pay attention to everything you eat. You'll need to bear in mind how the brain processes stimuli and how that drives your behavior in the presence of food and food cues. And you'll always need to remember what the food industry is trying to sell you and why. The End of Overeating, Part Six ("The End of Overeating"), Chapter 48 ("Fighting Back"), at p.249. We live in a world of foods designed to be addictive, driving biological instincts that provoke overeating and the food noise of daily existence. ** David Kessler, Diet, Drugs, and Dopamine: The New Science of Achieving a Healthy Weight (2025) ISBN 1250381274 L Food is beyond a necessity; it's also a commodity, and it has been reformulated to be an addictive substance. Robert Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease. New York: Hudson Street Press. (2012) thumb|right|If we don't understand what's actually happening to our brains, we become prey to industries that capitalize on our addictions in the name of selling happiness. If we don't understand what's actually happening to our brains, we become prey to industries that capitalize on our addictions in the name of selling happiness. Robert Lustig, The Hacking of the American Mind. Avery (2017) - ISBN 978-1-101-98258-7 Overeating doesn't make us fat. The process of becoming fat makes us overeat. David Ludwig, Always Hungry?: Conquer Cravings, Retrain Your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently. (2016) Hunger isn't a passing feeling. It's a primal biological signal that the body needs fuel. Very hard to ignore over the long term. Always Hungry? In the battle between mind and metabolism, you are destined to lose the battle with your body. Always Hungry? [On the illusion of the "calorie"] Forget calories. Focus on quality. Let your body do the rest. Always Hungry? For breakfast, you could have a bowl of cornflakes with no added sugar, or a bowl of sugar with no added cornflakes. They would taste different but, below the neck, act more or less the same. Always Hungry? M Michael Moss The tongue map is wrong. In truth, the entire mouth goes crazy for sugar. There are special receptors for sweetness in every one of the mouth's ten thousand taste buds, and they are all hooked up, one way or another, to the parts of the brain known as the pleasure zones, where we get rewarded for stoking our bodies with energy. But our zeal doesn't stop there. Scientists are now finding taste receptors that light up for sugar all the way down our esophagus to our stomach and pancreas, and they appear to be intricately tied to our appetites.Sugar makes the taste of food and drink irresistible.All of this has made sugar a go-to ingredient in processed foods. Michael Moss, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. Random House (2013) ISBN 978-0-8129-8219-0. Part One, "Sugar", Chapter 1, at p.3-4. (Page numbers per the 2013 Random House Trade Paperbacks edition.) A whole body of research has been undertaken to link sugar to compulsive overeating. Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (2013) - Ch.1, at p.6. thumb|right|"I'm still shocked at what goes on in this country," she told me. "Where every single food has some sweetened component that wasn't normally supposed to be sweetened." The bliss point is the precise amount of sweetness—no more, no less—that makes food and drink most enjoyable. In relation to sugar, the term appears to have been coined in the 1970s by a Hungarian-born mathematician named Joseph L. Balintfy, who used computer modeling to predict eating behaviour. The concept has obsessed the food industry ever since.The only real challenge for companies when it comes to the bliss point is ensuring that their products hit this sweet spot dead on. Companies are not going to sell as much ketchup, Go-Gurt, or loaves of bread if they're not sweet enough. Or, put a different way, they will sell a lot more ketchup, Go-Gurt, and loaves of bread if they can determine the precise bliss point for sugar in each of those items. Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (2013) - Ch.1, at p.10, 11. A biopsychologist agreed to show me how the bliss point in calculated. "We're going to ask the child which one they like better. The one they like better, they are going to give to Big Bird [not Oscar the Grouch] because they know he likes things that taste good."Tatyana's bliss point for the pudding was 24 percent sugar, twice the level of sweetness that most adults can handle in pudding. As far as children go, she was on the lower side; some go as high as 36 percent."They are manipulating or exploiting the biology of the child. They're impacting the health of that child." Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (2013) - at Ch.1, at p.12, 15, 16. "I'm still shocked at what goes on in this country," she told me. "Where every single food has some sweetened component that wasn't normally supposed to be sweetened." Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (2013) - Ch.1, at p.21. Our brains are hardwired to remember where we found calorie-dense foods, and the modern grocery store exploits this evolutionary survival mechanism every single day. Michael Moss, Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions. W. H. Allen & Co. (2021) ISBN 978-0753556344, ISBN 0753556340 When it comes to the speed at which it hits the brain, processed food makes tobacco look slow. The reward signal is instantaneous, reinforcing the addictive loop before you even finish chewing. Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions O Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) (from Pt. 1, Ch. 6.) P Susan Peirce Thompson Food addiction isn't a character flaw or a lack of willpower; it is a predictable biological response to modern engineered foods in a brain that is highly susceptible. Susan Peirce Thompson, Bright Line Eating: The Science of Living Happy, Thin, and Free. (2017) ISBN 978-1401952532 Refined sugar and refined flour are not foods — they are highly purified, fast-acting chemicals that hijack the reward pathways of the brain in the exact same manner as drugs of abuse. Bright Line Eating: The Science of Living Happy, Thin, and Free When the brain is flooded with dopamine from hyper-palatable foods, the resulting insulin spikes block leptin from reaching the hypothalamus, leaving the individual in a state of perpetual, biological starvation. Susan Peirce Thompson, The Official Bright Line Eating Cookbook: Weight Loss Made Simple. (2019) ISBN 978-1401956790 For someone with a highly susceptible food-addict brain, the advice to 'eat everything in moderation' is not just useless; it is biologically impossible and psychologically damaging. Susan Peirce Thompson, ReZolve: The Science of Re-Wiring Your Brain to Resolve Weight and Food Issues. (2025) ISBN 978-1401977719 David Perlmutter If you cannot control your hunger and appetite, good luck managing your blood chemistry, metabolism, waistline, and, in the bigger picture, the prospect of crippling your brain. David Perlmutter, Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth about Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar--Your Brain's Silent Killers (2013) The food we eat goes beyond its macronutrients of carbohydrates, fat and protein. It's information. It interacts with and instructs our genome with every mouthful, changing genetic expression. David Perlmutter, Brain Maker: The Power of Gut Microbes to Heal and Protect Your Brain–for Life (2015) ISBN 978-0316380102 "Shop the periphery of the grocery store. Anything with an ingredient list is suspect... [Ultra-processed foods] aren’t just empty—they’re addictive, designed to light up your brain’s reward system like a slot machine. David_Perlmutter, Clinical Commentary Archive, "Ultra-Processed Foods Threaten Your Brain" (2024) Lulu Hunt Peters A good way to show [your stomach] that you are master is to fast for at least one day—drink nothing but pure water, hot or cold, as you prefer. Lulu Hunt Peters, Diet and Health: With Key to the Calories (1918), at Chapter 8 ("At last. How to Reduce.") Michael Pollan Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.And you're better off eating whole fresh foods rather than processed food products.I contend that most of what we're consuming today is no longer, strictly speaking, food at all. Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (2008) ISBN 978-1594201455. Introduction, at p.1, 7. [Page numbers per the Penguin Books 2009 paperback edition.] The most important thing to know about the campaign to professionalize dietary advice is that it has not made us any healthier. Most of the nutritional advice we've received over the last half century (and in particular the advice to replace fats in our diet with carbohydrates) has actually made us less healthy and considerably fatter. In Defense of Food (2008) - Introduction, at p.7. The chronic diseases that now kill most of us can be traced directly to the industrialization of our food.We can escape the Western diet and its consequences. In Defense of Food (2008) - Introduction, at p.10, 12. Nutritionism tends to foster a great deal of anxiety around the experience of shopping for food and eating it. To do it right, you've got to be up on the latest scientific research, study ever-longer and more confusing ingredient labels, sift through increasingly dubious health claims, and then attempt to enjoy foods that have been engineered with many other objectives in view than simply tasting good. In Defense of Food (2008) - Part 1 (The Age of Nutritionism), Chapter 7 (Beyond the Pleasure Principle), at p.53. Thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished. Which is why we find ourselves in the predicament we do: in need of a whole new way of thinking about eating. In Defense of Food (2008) - Part 1, Chapter 10 (Nutritionism's Children), at p.81. [Weston A.] Price concluded that modern civilisation had sacrificed much of the quality of its food in the interests of quantity and shelf life.Price was inching toward an ecological understanding of diet and health that was well ahead of his time. He understood that, ultimately, eating linked us to the earth and its elements as well as to the energy of the sun. In Defense of Food (2008) - Part 2, Chapter 2 (The Elephant in the Room), at p.97, 99. David R. Jacobs and Lyn M. Steffen concluded, somewhat vaguely but suggestively, that "the various grains and their parts act synergistically" and suggested that their colleagues begin paying attention to the concept of "food synergy". Here, then, is support for an idea revolutionary by the standards of nutritionism: A whole food might be more than the sum of its nutrient parts. In Defense of Food (2008) - Part 2, Chapter 3 (The Industrialization of Eating: What We Do Know), at p.110-111. As we've seen, processing whole foods - refining, chemically preserving, and canning them - depletes them of many nutrients, a few of which are then added back. What is it overlooking? Science doesn't know nearly enough to compensate for everything that processing does to whole foods.Gains in food quantity have come at a cost to its quality.The overwhelming majority of the calories Americans have added to their diets since 1985 supply lots of energy but very little of anything else. A diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished. In Defense of Food (2008) - Part 2, Chapter 3, at p.115-116, 118, 122. An American born in 2000 has a 1 in 3 chance of developing diabetes in his lifetime. A diagnosis of diabetes subtracts roughly twelve years from one's life. An estimated 80 percent of cases of type 2 diabetes could be prevented by a change of diet, and exercise. In Defense of Food (2008) - Part 2, Chapter 3, at p.136. We find ourselves lost amid the crosscurrents of conflicting science. People eating a Western diet are prone to a complex of chronic diseases that seldom strike people eating more traditional diets. Scientists can argue all they want about the biological mechanisms behind this phenomenon, but whichever it is, the solution to the problem would appear to remain very much the same: Stop eating a Western diet.Denis Burkitt, the English doctor stationed in Africa during World War II who gave the Western diseases their name: "The only way we're going to reduce disease," he said, "is to go backwards to the diet and lifestyle of our ancestors."The challenge we face today is figuring out how to escape the worst elements of the Western diet and lifestyle.This is harder to do in practice, given the treacherous food environment we now inhabit and the loss of cultural tools to guide us through it.Plotting our way out of the Western diet is not going to be simple. Yet I am convinced that it can be done. In Defense of Food (2008) - Part 3 (Escape from the Western Diet), Chapter 1, at p.140, 141, 142, 143. What you will find [at the farmers' market ] are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of their taste and nutritional quality—precisely the kind your great-grandmother, or even your Neolithic ancestors, would easily have recognized as food.Indeed, the surest way to escape the Western diet is simply to depart the realms it rules: the supermarket, the convenience store, and the fast-food outlet. It is hard to eat badly from the farmers' market.Depending on how we spend them, our food dollars can either go to support a food industry devoted to quantity and convenience and "value" or they can nourish a food chain organized around values—values like quality and health. In Defense of Food (2008) - Part 3, Chapter 2 (Eat Food: Food Defined), at p.157, 158, 161. There are literally scores of studies demonstrating that a diet rich in vegetables and fruits reduces the risk of dying from all the Western diseases. In countries where people eat a pound or more of fruits and vegetables a day, the rate of cancer is half what it is in the United States. We also know that vegetarians are less susceptible to most of the Western diseases, and as a consequence live longer than the rest of us. In Defense of Food (2008) - Part 3, Chapter 3 (Mostly Plants: What To Eat), at p.164. The American food system has for more than a century devoted its energies to quantity and price rather than to quality. Turning out vast quantities of so-so food sold in tremendous packages at a terrific price is what we do well. Historically the guiding principle has been to "pile it high and sell it cheap".Better food costs more. Not everyone can afford to eat high-quality food in America; however, those of us who can, should. In Defense of Food (2008) - Part 3, Chapter 4 (Not Too Much: How to Eat), at p.183, 184. You're better off eating the real thing in moderation than binging on 'lite' food products that pack less flavor but more chemical additives. Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual (2009) ISBN 978-0143116387 If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't. Food Rules: An Eater's Manual The most important thing about your diet is who cooks it, a human or a corporation. Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (2013) ISBN 978-1594204210 Barry Popkin Over the last half-century, we've experienced rapid and widespread changes in how we eat, drink, and move. We live in a fat world because the human body—a product of many millenia of evolution—can't keep up with these changes. Barry Popkin, The World Is Fat: The Fads, Trends, Policies, And Products That Are Fattening The Human Race (2009). From Chapter 1, A Brief History of the Modern Diet, at page 17. (Page numbers are from the Penguin Group (USA) Inc 2009 hardback edition.) We know that more than 60 percent of us have a very high preference for sweetness. The food industry intuitively—or perhaps more systematically—understands this as well. Thousands of foods in our supermarkets are sweetened. Does this create a dependency or craving that increases our consumption of sweetened foods? Do we habituate to sweetness and ultimately require greater and greater levels of sweetness to satisfy our cravings? [...] We're beginning to understand more about our predilection for sweet foods. The World Is Fat (2009) - Chapter 1, at p.32. We have greatly increased the energy density of our snacks, as well as the size and number of snacks per day.[...] A second major difference in eating patterns since the 1950s is the large amount of extra eating and drinking we do on weekends. [...] Something profound has changed in the way we eat between Friday to Sunday.[...] So, we snack every day, and eat more on the weekend, but we've also been supersizing much of what we eat. [...] We get a larger portion and thus we eat more.[...] It is clear that the entire fast-food industry changed during the 1980s and 1990s. Meanwhile, the packaged-food industry was doing the same: larger portions for junk food and soft drinks became the mode of sales promotion.Increased portion sizes, particularly for energy-dense dishes, has been an important force behind our increased food intake over the past decade. The World Is Fat (2009) - Chapter 1, at p.34, 35, 36. S thumb|right|What we eat has changed more in the last forty years than in the previous forty thousand. Eric Schlosser A fast food kitchen is merely the final stage in a vast and highly complex system of mass production. Foods that may look familiar have in fact been completely reformulated. What we eat has changed more in the last forty years than in the previous forty thousand. Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side Of The All-American Meal, (2001). Introduction, at p.7. (Page numbers per the 2002 Penguin Books edition.) The United States now has the highest obesity rate of any industrialized nation in the world. No other nation in history has gotten so fat so fast. What has changed is the nation's way of eating and living. In simple terms: when people eat more and move less, they get fat. In the United States, people have become increasingly sedentary. And the growth of the fast food industry has made an abundance of high-fat, inexpensive meals widely available.As people eat more meals outside the home, they consume more calories, less fiber, and more fat. Commodity prices have fallen so low that the fast food industry has greatly increased its portion sizes, without reducing profits, in order to attract customers. Obesity is now second only to smoking as a cause of mortality in the United States. The CDC estimates that about 280,000 Americans die every year as a direct result of being overweight. Obesity has been linked to heart disease, colon cancer, stomach cancer, breast cancer, diabetes, arthritis, high blood pressure, infertility, and strokes.Obesity is extremely difficult to cure. During thousands of years marked by food scarcity, human beings developed efficient physiological mechanisms to store energy as fat. As a result, our bodies are far more efficient at gaining weight than at losing it. Health officials have concluded that prevention, not treatment, offers the best hope of halting the worldwide obesity epidemic. Fast Food Nation, (2001) - Chapter 10, "Global Realisation", at pages 240, 241, 242, 243. Nobody in the United States is forced to buy fast food. The first step toward meaningful change is by far the easiest: stop buying it. The usefulness of the market, its effectiveness as a tool, cuts both ways. The real power of the American consumer has not yet been unleashed. There are almost three hundred million of you. A good boycott, a refusal to buy, can speak much louder than words.Pull open the glass door, feel the rush of cool air, walk inside, get in line, and look around you. Then place your order. Or turn and walk out the door. Even in this fast food nation, you can still have it your way. Fast Food Nation, (2001) - Epilogue, "Have It Your Way", at pages 269, 270. Eric Schlosser, with Charles Wilson The point of this book is to take that strong impulse we all feel - our hunger for sweet, salty, fatty fast foods - and make you think about it. Chew On This will tell you where fast food comes from, who makes it, what's in it and what happens when you eat it. This is a book about fast food and the world it has made. Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson, Chew on This: Everything You Don't Want to Know about Fast Food. (2006), ISBN 13: 978-0-618-59394-1 (Houghton Miffin Harcourt). ISBN-10: 0-141-31844-9 (Penguin Books). Introduction, at page 2. (Page numbers from the 2006 Penguin edition.)The book is an adaptation of the earlier Eric Schlosser book, Fast Food Nation (2001) referred to above, aimed at younger readers. thumb|right|By adding the right chemicals, processed foods can be made to taste like just about anything. Fast food may look like the sort of food people have always eaten, but it's different. It's not the kind of food you can make in your kitchen from scratch. Fast food is something radically new. Indeed, the food we eat has changed more during the past thirty years than during the previous 30,000 years.[...] For the most part, fast food tastes pretty good. That's one of the main reasons people like to eat it. Fast food has been carefully designed to taste good.[...] Chew on this: people should know what lies beneath the shiny happy surface of every fast food restaurant. They should know what really lurks between those sesame seed buns. As the old saying goes: you are what you eat. Chew on This - Introduction, at pages 4, 5. At first, man-made flavour additives were mainly used in baked goods, candies and soft drinks. And then, during the mid-fifties, sales of processed food began to soar. By the mid-1960s, the American flavour industry was churning out compounds to supply the taste of Pop Tarts, Hamburger Helper, Bac-O-Bits, Tab, Tango, Filet-O-Fish burgers and literally thousands of other products.[...] By adding the right chemicals, processed foods can be made to taste like just about anything.[...] Flavours are created by blending many chemicals in tiny amounts. [...] The taste of a food can be changed enormously by tiny changes in the flavouring mix.In order to give a processed food the right taste, a flavourist must always consider the food's 'mouthfeel' - the combination of textures that you notice as you eat it. The mouthfeel can be adjusted through the use of different fats, gums and starches. Chew on This - Chapter 4, at pages 84, 86, 87-88. thumb|right|The fast food industry would like people to believe the problem isn't the food, it's the customer's behaviour. 'There are no good foods or bad foods,' the industry argues, implying that if you're overweight it's your own fault. During the past two decades the flavour industry's role in food production has become so influential that many children now like man-made flavours more than the real thing. [...] When flavourists create additives for kids' foods, they usually get rid of the bitterness and increase the sweetness. Children's flavours are often twice as sweet as those made for adults. [...] The use of strong, unusual flavours is now one of the most popular trends in kids' food. Chew on This - Ch.4, at p.90. For years, the US government has argued that the colour and flavour additives widely used in processed foods are safe. That may not always be the case.[...] A number of scientists now worry that eating so many different chemicals in processed foods may not be good for young children. [...] But the safety of eating a large combination of additives at every meal remains unknown. Chew on This - Ch.4, at p.92, 93. Thirty years [on from 1976], about 19,000 government-funded schools - one of every five in the United States - sell branded fast food in the cafeteria.[...] 'I don't think it's healthy,' a fourteen-year-old told a reporter, 'but I eat it because it tastes good.' Chew on This - Ch.5, at p.100. The fast food industry would like people to believe the problem isn't the food, it's the customer's behaviour. 'There are no good foods or bad foods,' the industry argues, implying that if you're overweight it's your own fault. The emphasis is on changing what the customers do, not what the fast food companies do. Chew on This - Ch.8, at p.189. Nobody is forced to buy fast food. The first step towards real change is by far the easiest. Stop buying it. [...] When you buy something from a company you are, in effect, voting for its policies and its behaviour. Chew on This - Ch.8, at p.196, 197. Kay Sheppard Food addiction is a progressive, chronic, and fatal disease, characterized by an inability to control the intake of specific, trigger substances. Kay Sheppard, Food Addiction: The Body Knows (1989) For some people, foods can be as addictive as alcohol. Gummy bears and marshmallow chicks can be vicious killers whose effects can lead to depression, irritability and even suicide. Kay Sheppard, Food Addiction: The Body Knows: Revised & Expanded Edition, (1993) ISBN 978-1558742765 Recovery does not begin with calorie counting; it begins with the total elimination of the chemical triggers — refined sugar, flour, and wheat — that drive the physical craving. Kay Sheppard, From the First Bite: A Complete Guide to Recovery from Food Addiction (2000) For the food addict, a single bite of a trigger food is not a treat — it is a chemical relapse that reawakens the physical obsession. From the First Bite: A Complete Guide to Recovery from Food Addiction Food addiction is characterized by an obsession with food, obsession with weight, and loss of control over the amount eaten. Kay Sheppard, video interview with journalist Michael Prager, 2013. Deborah Steinberg, Windy Dryden Sound nutrition, exercise, and a rational state of mind are essential for long-term weight loss results. Deborah Steinberg, Windy Dryden, How to Stick to a Diet (1996). Introduction, at p.2. Low frustration tolerance. This kind of thinking makes you unwilling to tolerate discomfort. It is irrational because it fails to recognise that we all need to put up with some of the hassles and inconvenience of daily living.Low frustration tolerance is reflected in statements like, 'it's too hard,', 'It shouldn't be this much work', 'I shouldn't have to struggle to get results', 'I can't stand being deprived,' etc.Low frustration tolerance reflects an attitude of being unwilling to tolerate or put up with discomfort. We work to encourage clients to increase their patience and build their tolerance for the headaches of daily existence. Deborah Steinberg, Windy Dryden, How to Stick to a Diet (1996). Ch.1, at p.8. 72. thumb|right|Avoid buying or bringing home any non-nutritional foods.Decide now that these unnecessary temptations are out of bounds. Avoid buying or bringing home any non-nutritional foods.These 'empty' foods can actually make you hungrier! Decide now that these unnecessary temptations are out of bounds. Deborah Steinberg, Windy Dryden, How to Stick to a Diet (1996). Ch.3, at p.20. Your responses to food are largely learned habits. You can learn new ways of responding to food - ways that are more compatible with your long-term goals. Deborah Steinberg, Windy Dryden, How to Stick to a Diet (1996). Ch.4, at p.29. Overcoming emotional eating may be the most important step you can take in developing permanent control over your diet. This means eliminating eating done out of frustration, rage, anxiety, boredom, depression, guilt, and so on. It also means relearning to eat on the basis of hunger, energy requirements, and physiological needs.Keeping a food diary is quite simple. It means you can see exactly what you eat, when, where, and even why. Deborah Steinberg, Windy Dryden, How to Stick to a Diet (1996). Ch.5, at p.30. p.32-33. Now is the time to re-educate yourself. Teach yourself new messages that get you what you want - a healthy body, and self-control! Deborah Steinberg, Windy Dryden, How to Stick to a Diet (1996). Ch.6, at p.40. Walking is an ideal way to enjoy healthy, aerobic exercise without putting too much stress on your body. A serious walker can shed quite a bit of excess weight while toning up muscles. Keep your pace brisk. Deborah Steinberg, Windy Dryden, How to Stick to a Diet (1996). Ch.8, at p.48. 49. Carol agreed to keep a food diary. After two weeks of charting, Carol was amazed to learn just how frequently she was eating. She did eat three sensible meals, but she also ate when she was angry, bored, frustrated, lonely, etc. In other words, Carol was a classic emotional eater. Thanks to the information from the chart, we could begin to teach Carol non-food ways to deal with her emotions. Deborah Steinberg, Windy Dryden, How to Stick to a Diet (1996). Ch.11, at p.70. T The brain chemistry that drives the addict to seek pleasure beyond the point of satiety is similar, whether the user favours Jack Daniels or Jack-in-the-Box. Vera Tarman, Food Junkies: The Truth About Food Addiction (2014) If food addicts could smoke or inject sugar, food addiction would be on the same playing field for researchers as cocaine or heroin. Food Junkies Today I say am an addict. A respectable addict, of course. Not like the desperate addicts who have cashed in their mortgage... After all, my drug is cheap, the cheapest of all drugs, and therefore the most pernicious... And my drug is everywhere I look: in the drive-through gas station's convenience store, in the supermarket, on the lusciously displayed menu of an exclusive restaurant. Food Junkies Sugar, for example, shares the same neurochemistry and neural pathways as cocaine. Sweetened chocolate mimics the effects of alcohol and opiates. Flour modulates moods and anaesthetizes pain just as many drugs do. Food Junkies Obesity, eating disorders, and chemical dependency on food are three distinct and very different diseases -- and demonstrate different behaviors around food. We can categorize the corresponding behaviours of these conditions as problems that occur within the normal eating, emotional eating, and food addiction spectrums.Obesity is entirely a physical problem: a result of eating too many calories while expending too few... Normal eaters simply eat too much... Normal eaters represent a large proportion of the obese. They can regulate their obesity by learning how to change the circumstances that foster poor willpower: better sleep, stress management, improving social skills, and changing a toxic food environment are only a few of the modifications that can be made...Certainly, people suffering from eating disorders and food addiction can also be obese, but their primary condition is not obesity. In their cases, obesity is just another symptom of their emotional disturbance or their food addiction. The underlying emotional trauma that drives the bulimic to stuff himself needs to be addressed first before the physical aspects of obesity can be seriously addressed; likewise, the sugar that is propelling the addictive overeater needs to be removed first before tackling any weight issues. Food Junkies I believe that food addicts need the same type of support offered to alcoholics and drug addicts. They need to detoxify first and then learn about their disease, while dealing with the thoughts and feelings that arise once they are off their drug. Quite often, psychological issues do not become obvious until food addicts have been abstinent for a long period of time. That's why ongoing support is needed to prevent addicts from relapsing in a panicky effort to cope. Food Junkies Withdrawal occurs once a person stops eating any addictive food. Though abstaining from foods is a contentious subject in the scientific literature, there is no question that it will cause a level of discomfort that often drives addicts back to eating...The good news is that detoxification is not a long process; it only lasts for a relatively short period - between one week and four weeks...Cheating by having a bite here or a spoonful there is also an excellent way to suffer withdrawal in perpetuity. Withdrawal will not end if the substance is constantly being reintroduced back into the brain reward pathway. Food Junkies Feelings of deprivation, obsessions about food, and anxiety arising from unresolved trauma that was being “medicated” by the addictive foods may appear like spectres that linger, worsening before they get better. Food Junkies From food addiction to food serenity - freedom tastes great! Food Junkies It's not food. It's an industrially produced edible substance. Chris van Tulleken, Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn't Food… and Why Can't We Stop? (2023) ISBN 978-1529160222[+ An article about this book] The convenience, price and marketing of UPF urge us to eat constantly and without thought. Ultra-Processed People This is the science behind how UPF affects the human body:• The destruction of the food matrix by physical, chemical and thermal processing means that UPF is, in general, soft. This means you eat it fast, which means you eat far more calories per minute and don’t feel full until long after you’ve finished.• UPF typically has a very high calorie density because it’s dry, and high in fat and sugar and low in fibre, so you get more calories per mouthful.• It displaces diverse whole foods from the diet, especially among low-income groups. And UPF itself is often micronutrient-deficient, which may also contribute to excess consumption. • The mismatch between the taste signals from the mouth and the nutrition content in some UPF alters metabolism and appetite in ways that we are only beginning to understand, but that seem to drive excess consumption.• UPF is addictive, meaning that for some people binges are unavoidable.• The emulsifiers, preservatives, modified starches and other additives damage the microbiome, which could allow inflammatory bacteria to flourish and cause the gut to leak.• The convenience, price and marketing of UPF urge us to eat constantly and without thought, which leads to more snacking, less chewing, faster eating, increased consumption, and tooth decay.• The additives and physical processing mean that UPF affects our satiety system directly. Other additives may affect brain and endocrine function, and plastics from the packaging might affect fertility.• The production methods used to make UPF require expensive subsidy and drive environmental destruction, carbon emissions and plastic pollution, which harm us all. Ultra-Processed People The signals that tell you to ‘stop eating’ haven’t evolved to handle food this soft and easily digested, so soft that it’s essentially pre-chewed. Ultra-Processed People “So dominant is soy as industrial animal feed that the average person in the UK or Europe consumes approximately 61kg of soy per year, largely in the form of animal products such as chicken, pork, salmon, cheese, milk and eggs. Only 20–30 per cent of imported soy is ‘certified sustainable’ (and we have already discussed how little that means). So, if you live in the UK, there is a tennis court of land producing soy in the tropics just for you, and most of it comes from places like Brazil and Argentina where ecosystems that affect global climate are being destroyed. Ultra-Processed People It’s soft and typically calorie dense, so you eat it at a rate that your body can’t keep up with when it comes to feeling full. Things like protein isolates, refined oils and modified carbohydrates are absorbed so quickly they may not even reach the part of the gut that sends the fullness signal to the brain. They’re not things you have evolved to eat. Some of the additives are well known to cause harm – be particularly aware of emulsifiers and artificial sweeteners. Emulsifiers can thin the mucus lining of the gut, allowing faecal bacteria to leak into the blood stream and inflaming your whole body. The non-nutritive sweeteners that tell your body sugar is coming but don’t supply any calories seem to cause metabolic stress and changes to the microbiome. Other additives that affect the microbiome are maltodextrins, modified starches and lots of the gums and thickeners. Flavour enhancers (glutamate, guanylate, inosinate and ribonucleotides on ingredient lists) drive excess consumption. Again, they tell your body a lie about the nutritional content of the food you’re eating when they’re added out of context. Ultra-Processed People In 2022, a study published in the journal Neurology looked at data from over 72,000 people. Increasing intake of UPF by 10 per cent was associated with a 25 per cent increase in the risk of dementia and a 14 per cent increase in the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Ultra-Processed People There is an apparently established fact that food isn't addictive... but here's the thing; it's not 'real' food that's addictive, it's UPF, otherwise known as these 'industrially produced edible substances'..." Chris van Tulleken, interviewed in i News, 2023. "How I reprogrammed my brain to quit ultra-processed food." Food addiction isn't a recognised disorder by the World Health Organisation or in the manual of psychiatric illness... But many clinicians report they have patients who experience symptoms of food addiction [where people] continue to eat [certain] foods despite trying to stop. Chris van Tulleken, BBC Food commentary, 2023, "There's a reason we crave ultra-processed food." V Animals feel pleasure in performing all the functions for which they are destined... There is great pleasure in eating and drinking... but it is clear that if man were always eating... his organs could not sustain it. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, (1764).("Les animaux ressentent du plaisir à faire toutes les fonctions auxquelles ils sont destinés... Il y a un grand plaisir à manger et à boire... mais il est clair que si l'homme mangeait toujours... ses organes n'y pourraient suffire.") W According to David Kessler, the former FDA commissioner, the food industry is not just aiming to satisfy its customers. ... The industry, including the growers, concocters, testers, packagers, marketers, distributors, and retailers, is investing in hyperstimulating foods—creations with the power to keep us eating. There are scientists hard at work right now devising ways to get you to eat more than you naturally desire. Wendy Wood, https://www.google.com/books?id=YmOMDwAAQBAJ 9781250159083 Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick October 2019 Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1st sentence 2nd sentence 3rd sentence For food addicts, 'abstinence first, absolutely,' is the key to living and a good life. Philip Werdell, cited in clinical interview by Michael Prager, "Phil Werdell: 'Abstinence first, absolutely.'" (2010) This is the key to those who are dually diagnosed with anorexia and food addiction: they need to surrender control of both their obsession with not 'getting fat' and their specific food drugs. They need to learn to not restrict and to not overeat. Philip Werdell, SHiFT Recovery Clinical Paper, "Eating Disorders & Food Addiction" (2014) Food addiction begins with physical craving. Physical craving distorts the hunger instinct for some people, making these people want more food than they need. This physical craving is a biochemical brain change caused by extra sugar or other hyper-processed foods. Philip Werdell, Food Addiction Denial: False Information and Irrational Thinking, (2022) ISBN 978-1667853529 Y John Yudkin Right at the outset I can make two key statements that no one can refute:First, there is no physiological requirement for sugar; all human nutritional needs can be met in full without having to take a single spoon of white or brown or raw sugar, on its own or in any food or drink.Secondly, if only a small fraction of what is already known about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food additive, that material would promptly be banned. John Yudkin, Pure, White, and Deadly (1972. Revised and expanded edition 1986.) (Page numbers per the Penguin Books 1988 edition.) From Ch.1 ("What's so different about sugar?"), at p.2.(Wikipedia page for the book is here.) It does matter that your diet is now very likely to be different from that which has been evolved over millions of years as the diet most suitable for you as a member of the species Homo sapiens. Pure, White, and Deadly - Ch.2 ("I eat it because I like it"), at p.5. thumb|right|Sugar is a material for which people rapidly develop a craving, and for which there is nevertheless no physiological need. In the affluent countries a large proportion of the populations has a very wide choice of foods, irrespective of season or geography. The effect has been that these people are able more and more to choose foods that please their palates, and not simply foods that fill their stomachs.[...] The advances in agricultural techniques and general technology [...] have had a tremendous effect on the way foods can deliberately be changed by extractions and additions, so that quite new foods can be made that do not exist in anything like these forms in nature. [...] We can do all these things largely because nutritional value and palatability are two different qualities. [...] For some time industry has been able to isolate an essence of sweetness, which has the property of imparting a very desirable palatability to a wide range of foods and drinks.[...] It was chiefly the development of the sugar plantations in the Caribbean, based on the slave trade, that set the pattern of the sugar industry in the form known today. [...] Price fell, demand grew, and consumption rose to exceedingly high levels.[...] Sugar is a material for which people rapidly develop a craving, and for which there is nevertheless no physiological need.[...] It is the dissociation of palatability and nutritional value that is the major cause of the 'malnutrition of affluence'. [...] Satisfying our palates is no longer a guarantee that we are satisfying our nutritional needs. Pure, White, and Deadly - Ch.2 ("I eat it because I like it"), at p.11, 12, 13, 14. thumb|right|The fact is that, given the choice, people eat foods that they like, and the more they like them the more they are likely to eat them. You may think this so obvious that it is unnecessary to say it, but this simple fact accounts for most obesity. People take sweet foods and drinks because they like them. And just as you will eat less than you need if your food is unpalatable and unappetizing, so you will eat more than you need if it is especially appetizing.[...] Most often, people eat chocolate or cake because they are tempted by their appearance and taste, and not because they really need those extra calories. [...] People often eat and drink to satisfy appetite — for pleasure, rather than to satisfy hunger.It is worth spending a moment or two more on this distinction between appetite and hunger. What are the foods that make overweight people overeat? Mostly, people don't become overweight because they eat too much meat or fish, or too many eggs, or too much fruit or vegetables. It is almost always that they eat too much bread, or sweets and chocolates, or cakes and biscuits, or because they drink too many sugary cups of tea or soft drinks. Or, of course, it may be because they drink too much beer or other alcoholic drink.[...] In general, people take sugar or sugary foods or drinks or alcohol for pleasure.[...] When you come to think of it, almost all of the tempting foods that are taken to satisfy appetite rather than hunger contain carbohydrate that is either sugar or starch, or they contain alcohol. [...] These carbohydrate-rich foods, by the way, have another characteristic: they are all artificial foods that do not exist in nature in the form in which we eat them. As I have said elsewhere, people are not likely to get fat if they make up their diet mostly from the foods that were available to our prehistoric ancestors, like meat, fish, eggs, fruit and vegetables, while as far as possible avoiding manufactured foods, most of which are carbohydrate-rich.The fact is that, given the choice, people eat foods that they like, and the more they like them the more they are likely to eat them. You may think this so obvious that it is unnecessary to say it, but this simple fact accounts for most obesity.[...] When you come to think of it, the fact that a low-carbohydrate diet is an effective way of losing excessive weight also suggests that obesity is caused by eating the irresistible high-carbohydrate foods. The low-carbohydrate diet severely limits just those foods that, as we saw, people find most tempting, while allowing you to eat as much as you like of foods such as meat and fish and vegetables. You lose weight because these last are foods the body needs to satisfy hunger, and not just to satisfy appetite, so you stop eating when you have had enough. This is not to say that these foods are in the slightest degree unappetizing; they do not, however, encourage overeating. It should also be remembered that low-carbohydrate foods are the ones that happen to contain a high concentration of the nutrients that the body needs.[...] Let us just say that you cannot help getting fat if you are taking in more calories than you can dispose of — and a very obvious and potent source of excessive calories is the consumption of foods and drinks that contain sugar, largely because people find them so delicious.[...] What with the high prevalence of obesity, there is no acceptable reason for recommending that sugar intake should not be reduced, or that it should be reduced only as part of a general reduction of food. It is after all the only food that supplies nothing whatever in the way of nutrients. It supplies nothing whatever other than calories, and calories are all that matter in weight reduction.[...] The proof of the pudding is in the eating — or in this case in the not eating. Many people lose excessive weight very successfully simply by giving up sugar, or by severely restricting it.[...] Sometimes, in order to reduce their weight to acceptable levels, people also need to restrict starchy foods, and so adopt a strict low-carbohydrate diet. [...] And this kind of diet gives a far better supply of nutrients than is made available under the orthodox regime that involves eating the same foods as before, only less. Pure, White, and Deadly - Ch.10 ("Sugar's calories make you thin - they say."), at p.56, 57, 58, 59, 61. On food noise (a.k.a. food-related intrusive thoughts ("FRITs")) Food noise [is] 'persistent, intrusive thoughts about food that are disruptive to daily life and make healthy behaviors difficult.' Dr. Hanim Diktas, PhD, in Appetite (2025) [Bruce] Ames also believes, though he hasn't yet proven it, that micronutrient deficiencies may contribute to obesity. His hypothesis is that a body starved of critical nutrients will keep eating in the hope of obtaining them. Unrelenting hunger "may be a biological strategy for obtaining missing nutrients." Such that the more low-quality food one eats, the more one wants to eat, in a futile quest for the absent nutrients. Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, (2008) - Part 2, Chapter 3, at p.123, 124. thumb|right| In plain language, our brains are experts at making us desire the foods and beverages we see, smell, and hear (e.g., the sound of bacon sizzling in a skillet). These motivational responses that arise from reactivity to food cues are consciously experienced as food-related cognitions and food cravings, defined as intense desires or urges to consume food. These responses can manifest regardless of physiological hunger levels and ultimately lead to increased food-seeking and consumption behaviors.[...] Individual differences in reactivity to food cues might help to partially explain why some people are more susceptible than others to overeating and developing obesity when living in similar environments. For example, heightened cue reactivity, which is often assessed as self-reported preoccupation with food or measured using changes in brain response to food cues, has been observed in overweight individuals and those living with a binge-eating disorder. These data seem to indicate that similar levels of exposure to food cues might lead to different levels of food noise experienced by individuals, which manifest as rumination and obsessive preoccupation with food (i.e., FRITs) and can lead to overeating and maladaptive eating behaviors.[...] our conceptual model considers two categories of potential cues: external food cues, which arise from the physical and social environment (e.g., seeing and smelling palatable foods), and internal food cues, such as those that might arise from homeostatic hunger signals (e.g., noticing that your stomach is growling) and thoughts about food and eating. 2023 paper by Daisuke Hayashe and others - What Is Food Noise? A Conceptual Model of Food Cue Reactivitythumb|right| This study aimed to examine the top videos on TikTok under the hashtag “FoodNoise” and explore what content creators discuss around food noise. Article published 29 April 2026 by Daisuke Hayashe and others - “And just like that, quiet”: a content analysis of TikTok videos on food noise The struggle with obesity is not simple as a battle of willpower. The disease of obesity is complex and has a much deeper brain-gut relation than thought. The hypothalamus regulates adipocyte mass by integrating hormonal and neural signals from the gut and adipose tissue to maintain energy homeostasis. In obesity, this homeostasis becomes dysregulated, leading to persistent hunger and intrusive thoughts about eating that reflect the brain's defended higher adipocyte mass. These thoughts tend to be persistent, undesirable, or distressing in a noisy pattern patients call “food noise”. Abdulhameed Alhamzi, Carel W. le Roux, February 2026 - The Voice of a Disease: Why Food Noise Can No Longer Be Ignored! The basic premise of this book is that some foods are "intense" while others are "xtense.""Xtense" foods are natural foods that our bodies are able to have a reasonable and sane relationship with. We eat them until we are full and then we lose interest in them. We don't long for them or fantasise about them or try to give them up or try to limit our intake only to crack and eat them till we feel sick. Did you ever binge out on a head of cabbage followed by some beetroots and turnip mash? Nope. Thought not. Xtense foods just don't have that kind of effect. thumb|right|"Intense" foods however are the "crack cocaine" of the food world. Our bodies cannot deal with them. They affect our metabolism and our brain functioning so badly that we cannot apply the mealy-mouthed logic of the food pyramid and only have them in moderation. If you've ever eaten a family bar of chocolate, or a whole packet of biscuits, or six doughnuts that were on special offer in the supermarket, all by yourself, then this is you. You have a problem with "intense" foods. I actually don't think every human being gets caught in this "intense" food trap, but if you're one of the affected, you'll know who you are.Way back when I first realised I had a problem with food I longed to instead have a problem with cigarettes or even drugs or bad company because I could give them up completely, which, I told myself, would be far easier than having a food problem, as food could never be given up completely. This book, by categorising foods into "xtense" and "intense" allows you to do exactly that. If it's "intense", give it up. Forever.The author doesn't have an easy index of "intense" and "xtense" foods at the back but rudimentary intelligence will allow you to figure them out yourself. Plus, I do think you have to apply your own life experience to her story and know what works for you. [...] From a review filed on Amazon by "Northness" dated 31 March 2012, about Judy Corstjens' 2010 book, "Xtensity: Why 5% of Dieters Succeed". I read Xtensity in one sitting and found it both fun and an eye opener. Disguised as a light novel à la Bridget Jones (if Bridget had graduated from Oxford...), it is actually a serious reflection on the causes of the current obesity epidemic and the futility of restricted calorie diets. The premise is as follows: evolution has conditioned us to prefer what the author calls "intense" foods, (basically sugar, salt and fat) and the food industry has exploited this evolutionary trait by incessantly peddling an ever increasing variety of attractive, cheap and readily available foods that make us fat. At the same time, our modern day obsession with thinness drives us towards the most absurd diets. However, low calorie diets do not work because evolution has also conditioned us to react to lower food intake as if fighting an impending famine: Feeling hungry triggers survival mechanisms in our body that automatically lower our energy output and produce even more fat cells. The solution is to avoid "intense" foods as much as possible and replace them with "Xtense" healthy nutritious foods. It's not easy to do, but it works. Goodbye Bridget Jones and Hello Art de Vany! From a review filed on Amazon by "MCR" dated 2 April 2014, about Judy Corstjens' 2010 book, "Xtensity: Why 5% of Dieters Succeed". See also Addiction Binge eating Food Overeating External links Some salt/sugar/fat quotes from Michael Moss, "Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us"'', on goodreads.com Discussion of "The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains" by Dr Robert H. Lustig Category:Psychology Category:Eating disorders