14 DAY TRIAL // Food action displays similar symptoms and neural activation patterns as drug addiction, researchers show in a new study. The paper proves conclusively that certain substances in specific food can indeed “hook” eaters in the same way that drugs do.
The work shows that eating, in some case, produces activation patterns in the same areas of the brain that light up when people use addictive drugs. In other words, some are more predisposed to experiencing these addictive effects than others.
Addictive-like eating behaviors can therefore inferred from by brain imaging scans performed on areas of the brain that are usually investigated in drug addicts. The study was conducted by a team of experts at the Yale University, who were led by expert Ashley Gerhardt, MS, Mphil.
Details of the work will appear in the upcoming August print issue of esteemed medical journal Archives of General Psychiatry. Forty-eight young women were tracked in the research, and experts monitored their neural activation patterns closely.
“Based on numerous parallels in neural functioning associated with substance abuse and obesity, theorists have proposed that addictive processes may be involved in the etiology of obesity,” the Yale team writes in the new journal entry.
“As predicted, elevated [food addiction] scores were associated with greater activation of [brain] regions that play a role in encoding the motivational value of stimuli in response to food cues,” they go on to say, quoted by Science Blog.
Scientists say that chiefly responsible for this tendency of becoming addicted to foods is the way in which the things we eat are made. Refined foods are combined into unnatural combinations of flavors, and sealed in modern packages, that steal the eye.
“We have no doubt that certain foods are addictive. The real question is, ‘What is it that makes these foods so addictive'?” explains Dian Griesel, PhD, a researcher who spent 15 years working with drug development companies.
“The rise of obesity and other modern diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, high triglycerides and hypoglycemia, to name a few, are all the end result of consuming too many of these ‘engineered’ modern foods in our daily diets,” he goes on to say.
“Processed food manufacturers know this and create their formulas and recipes with this in mind. They hope you will become addicted to their product,” he concludes.