Addicted to Fat

Eating The Pain Away

Like many pleasurable behaviors—including sex and drug use—eating can trigger the release of dopamine, a feel-good chemical in the brain. This chemical reward, in turn, increases the likelihood that the action will eventually become habitual through positive reinforcement conditioning. If this reward is activated by overeating, these neurochemical patterns can make the behavior tough to shake—a result seen in many human cases.

Paul Kenny, an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Therapeutics at The Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla., says, “Most people who are overweight would say, ‘I would like to control my weight and my eating,’ but they find it very hard to control their feeding behavior.”

Many studies have drawn the connection between excessive food intake and addiction in both animal models and humans. Many scientists have observed a similar map of dopamine receptors in the brains of many obese people as in those hooked on cocaine or alcohol. This new type research adds a more accepted understanding of just how food can modify the brain—and shows that differences in the brain from the outset can predispose an individual for overeating.  It is widely accepted that after someone dependent on a substance stops using it, however, it often takes time for depleted dopamine receptors to return to baseline levels. For example, in mice addicted to cocaine, it can take two days to regain normalized levels however, obese rats in the overeating studies took two weeks to regain their baseline density of receptors.  This research goes to show that overeating is a very difficult addiction to break because the withdrawl timeline is far longer and more ingrained than even that of a drug addict.

The sticky part about studying food addiction is that, unlike cocaine or alcohol, humans can’t exactly drop it—cold turkey or not.  You can’t really quit food . And humans are hardwired, thanks to eons of evolutionary selection, to seek high-calorie foods to keep us going through lean times. But with subsistence hunting, gathering and farming now little more than a niche lifestyle choice in wealthy nations, a brain set up to reward super-rich calorie snacks is more of a hazard than a help.  It is not easy to eat healthy in modern times.  ”Real food” is more expensive than processed sadly.  It is almost as though our society has set up drug dealers on every corner and asks those predisposed to have a food addiction to stay away.  It is not hopeless though, if you have an overeating disorder there is help.