Food addiction has become a hot topic in the media, but is food addiction real? In a seminar entitled “Food addiction: fact or fiction?”, doctoral student Carolina Cawthorn questioned if food addiction can be considered a true addiction. She explained that true addiction is when a person compulsively used a substance despite harmful consequences to health, behavior, and relationships.
In regular substance abuse, pleasure is the main motivator for initial drug use. Increased dopamine secretion from drug use becomes a positive reinforcement that drives drug use. At this stage, a person can stop drug use if they want. Prolonged drug use, though, can remodel the brain so it becomes accustomed to the elevated dopamine levels. When the “high” wears off, dopamine levels end up dipping below baseline, causing withdrawal symptoms. The person now takes the drug, not for pleasure, but to avoid distress. The person is now dependent upon the drug and cannot easily stop. Dependency must occur for addiction to occur, however, dependency is not addiction. This seminar tried to discover if not only a person can become dependent on food, but if they can become addicted.
Rat models can be used to simulate human addiction, as they mimic human addiction models and have relatively the same rate of addiction as humans (17% compared to 20%). In an addicted state, as demonstrated by rats self-administered cocaine, they will do more to get the cocaine (bumping their nose to a button upwards off 400 times) and will disregard harmful consequences to get the drug (stepping on a lever and receiving a shock). When repeated with food, only rats who had high-impulsivity and given high-palatability food ate more and did more for the food. Actual analysis of these rat’s brains showed high indication of remodeling. This indicates that rats can become addicted to food, but they have to be susceptible to begin with. Another study showed that rats fed a high-sugar, high-fat diet had significantly less dopamine secretion when switched to a low-fat, low-sugar diet and it stayed down until the high-sugar, high-fat food was reintroduced. However, their dopamine bump from reintroduction was still lower than rats who had only ever eaten the low-sugar, low-fat food getting their regular meal. This indicated a dependency on food. Looking at food-dependency in rat models, it can be assumed that humans can develop similar food dependency.
The Yale food addiction scale (YFAS) is a questionnaire based on the Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders’ codes for substance dependence. It’s used to assess food addiction in humans. It was found there was a 19.9% prevalence of food addiction, the same prevalence as regular substance addiction. But is this true addiction, and not just a dependency? In a German version of the YFAS, the top two symptoms were the “persistent desire or unsuccessful effort to cut down on eating” and “eating anyway – regardless of anything.” This demonstrates a loss of control, but true addiction includes prolonged use regardless of consequences. So how can food addiction be determined? We don’t know. No full conclusions have been made and there is no official diagnosis for food addiction. More research is needed to say if food addiction is on par with drug addiction.
I do believe that food addiction is a thing. I agree that it i still hard to conclude how someone can become addicted to food, but I am a believer that any action can become an addiction. I am sure that there are some people in the world who just eat, eat, and eat because it makes them feel good and they cannot stop until they achieve those “highs” just as with other more common addictions. They do this even if it has harmful consequences.
Using mice is also okay here. There may be some slight variations, but humans and mice may very significantly in some levels of cognition, which may elicit addiction in one and not the other. Perhaps in order to learn more in depth about this, we can observe self-proclaimed food addicts. Even the Yale food addiction scale may have limitations as well, as it may not include the totality of what addiction consists of. Just like with many things in life, the more we know, the less we know.