Food Addiction: Fact Or Fiction?

Some may question if there is such an addiction, but how many of us can completely resist junk foods, candy and soda? Some researchers are even characterizing sugar as a potential toxin.

Bingeing on high-calorie foods may be as addictive as cocaine or nicotine. As a result, it may cause compulsive eating and produce chronic obesity, some researchers say.

Food addiction is the result of findings in studies of animals and cannot be directly related to humans. But the research may help in understanding this condition and subsequent therapies to treat it.

One such study, highlighted in a Nature Neuroscience article, used rats as subjects and found that over-consumption of high-calorie food can trigger addiction-like responses in the brain. High-calorie foods can make rats compulsive eaters.

Researchers also found decreased levels of a specific dopamine receptor, a chemical which allows a feeling of reward. The same phenomenon has been reported in humans addicted to drugs.

“Obesity may be a form of compulsive eating,” says Paul Kenny of the Scripps Research Institute in Florida. “Other treatments in development for other forms of compulsion, for example drug addiction, may be useful for the treatment of obesity.”

Obesity-related diseases cost America an estimated $150 billion each year, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. About two-thirds of adults and one-third of children are obese or overweight.

Study Group Dynamics

The rat study consisted of three groups.

One group ate a balanced healthy diet. Another group received healthy food, but had access to high-caloric foods for one hour each day. Rats in the third group were fed healthy foods but had unlimited access to high-calorie foods.

Not surprisingly, rats in the third group quickly became obese.

Further, rats in the experiment had been trained to expect a minor shock when exposed to a light.

But when the rats were exposed to high-calorie foods and shown the light, they did not respond to the potential danger. They continued to eat their junk foods, according to Kenny.

Excess Belly Fat

In another example, this one relating to humans, an ER doctor asks patients who have excess belly fat what they eat.

He blogs that most of them depend on sodas, fruit juice, candy and other sweets. He asks if they could stop, and the patients say it's very difficult and they do not feel good.

The ER physician says 40 years of research points to fructose molecules adversely affecting normal weight control systems. As the Kenny study suggests, it's the same with laboratory animals.

When you add dietary fructose you have problems. People who avoid most dietary fructose and galactose maintain a stable weight without counting calories or exercising all the time.

WMB believes this is the answer to many of our health ills. It’s simple and costs us nothing. But it would be devastating for companies with products rendered unnecessary.

Dietary Fructose Faulted

WMB agrees dietary fructose causes obesity problems. When fructose is needed to make genetic material for cell division, our cells make it just in time from glucose. Normally, fructose is not sitting around the cells.

You may ask why?

Fructose is at least seven times more reactive than glucose (glucose fuels our brains and muscles).

In this context, reactive means it is able to turn amino acids into junk called advanced glycation end-products (essentially a form of diabetes).

When fructose is sitting around the cells, some of it changes into a super reactive sugar called glyceraldhyde.

Further, this can affect protein production and move out of our cells and react with lycine causing inflammation.

As a result, high blood glucose does its damage by producing high levels of fructose in cells that normally have none.

WMB believes that to be healthy it is essential to avoid dietary fructose, galactose, and elevated blood glucose.

TechMan

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