Food Addictions Are Real Addictions —And More And More People Are Getting Hooked

This article is excerpted from TIME: The Science of Addiction—What We Know. What We’re Learning. In some ways, of course, food is more insidious than drugs, because there’s no such thing as abstinence, no such thing as never starting in the first place, no such thing as being able to say, “Food? Never touch the stuff.” You eat because you’ll die if you don’t, so you spend your life in a sort of nutritional two-step—a little but not too much; go overboard today, cut back tomorrow; eat the good stuff but never the junk. Sometimes you succeed at all of that, and other times you fail terribly; we all do. The more we learn about how the brain and palate and metabolism process food, the more we’re realizing that a lot of this is not our fault. “In all my years as a physician, I have never ever met a person who chose to be an addict, nor have I ever met someone who chose to be obese,” said Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in her celebrated 2015 TedMed talk. “So, imagine what it must be like to be unable to stop doing something when you want to.” That inability is at the heart of addiction—and when it comes to food, we’re all at risk. Pleasure gets processed in many parts of the brain, but if you’re looking for the spot where good feelings can turn into bad outcomes, you’ll find it in the striatum. Buried deep in the midbrain, the striatum is rich ...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Addiction Diet/Nutrition Obesity Source Type: news