Sure, we all need food to survive. But is food addiction legit? Is it a real disorder?
It’s too soon to say for sure, but yeah, probably—at least according to two doctors we spoke to.
“Drugs of abuse vary in potency and their effects on brain. A smoker has mild euphoria compared to someone who is a cocaine addict,” says Nicole M. Avena, Ph.D., research neuroscientist in the fields of nutrition and addiction at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and coauthor of Why Diets Fail. “Drawing food into the mix, I see it as sitting along the drug spectrum. The effects of food are more along the lines of addiction to alcohol and nicotine.”
"In the brain, food has the potential to act a lot like drugs. It spurs a release of feel-good dopamine in the brain, the nucleus accumbens, which regulates motivation and reward, lights up, and over time the brain’s neurons down-regulate so that you need more and more of the good stuff (be it pot or pizza) to feel better", explains Brad Lander, Ph.D., clinical director of addiction psychiatry at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. “For some people, food is kind of a drug of choice. Thank goodness those people haven’t discovered cocaine,” Lander says. (He notes that when people get off of drugs, they often switch their addictions to food.)
Research published in the International Journal of Obesity shows that the ‘come-downs’ from high-sugar and fatty foods are chemically similar to those from drugs. “People who are addicted to food need to eat to feel better, but the more they eat, the worse they will feel,” Lander says. “It’s essentially what happens with drug addiction.”
(via Yahoo)
