Food Addiction

[ysabetwordsmith]

I was intrigued by this article suggesting that fatty foods can create brain changes in rats, similar to those caused by drug addiction.  I wonder if extremely sweet or excessively modified foods could do that too.  Also, I think it would be interesting to study whether some individuals are resistant to food addiction, as is the case with most addictions -- and look for factors that clue one way or the other.  However, this really just fits a general trend, that too much of any one thing in any part of life tends to have bad effects.

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[ditenebre.livejournal.com]

You may be interested in the writings of Neal Barnard, MD, and David A. Kessler, MD.

Neal Barnard is the President of the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine. Dr. Barnard has two articles in the PCRM's Good Health e-magazine on food addiction: Food Addiction: Hi, I'm John, and I'm a Cholesterolic and Breaking the Food Seduction. A description of Dr. Barnard's book by the same name can be found here.

David Kessler was the Commissioner of the FDA under Bush v 1.0 and Clinton, as well as past Dean of the medical schools at Yale and UCSF. In his book, The End of Overeating (as described here in a related blog), Dr. Kessler examines the fat/sugar/salt relationship to our desire to eat.