Is Junk Food as Addictive as Cocaine?

Also read: obesity, healthcare, nutrition

The highly addictive nature of nicotine has been long known. But now a growing body of research is showing that fatty, sweet and salty processed foods are as addictive as cocaine and heroin.

“Florida scientists looking into the causes of obesity let lab rats gorge round-the-clock on cake frosting and sweet treats, as well as bacon and sausage, and discovered that it triggered addiction-like responses in their brains,” the report says. “To maintain their food-induced highs, the rats consumed more and more fatty treats—and got obese in the process.”

Writing in the journal “Nature Neuroscience,” researcher Paul Kenny of the Scripps Research Institute believes the same chemical changes that happen to rats that eat these types of foods may also be happening to people.

In his new book, “The End of Overeating,” Dr. David Kessler, former chief of the Food and Drug Administration under presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, writes that the $2.1-trillion food industry has done a masterful job “designing foods to be optimally stimulating—layering and loading with fat, sugar and salt, making them as addictive and self-reinforcing as drugs.”

The three bogeymen Kessler identifies are sugar, fat and salt.

“Sugar, fat and salt make a food compelling,” according to Kessler, who helped Clinton take on the tobacco industry. “They stimulate neurons, cells that trigger the brain’s reward system and release dopamine, a chemical that motivates our behavior and makes us want to eat more. Many of us have what’s called a ‘bliss point,’ at which we get the greatest pleasure from sugar, fat or salt. Combined in the right way, they make a product indulgent, high in ‘hedonic value.’”

This strategy of manipulating ingredients in products to control and increase customer use is also similar to the one employed by the tobacco industry.

“Studies show that people crave fat and salt. With this knowledge, McDonald’s lowered the frying temperature of its French fries so that the fries would absorb more fat and people would crave them more,’” says Attorney Jonathan Scott Goldman in a paper published in the Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review, comparing the tobacco and fast-food industries. “This practice is similar to the way the tobacco industry manipulated nicotine in cigarettes to control and increase consumer use of cigarettes.”

Kelly Brownell, a psychology professor at Yale University, and Kenneth E. Warner, who recently published a report comparing the legal, political and business strategies employed by the food and beverage industry, say it is too early to know how the food industry will react to issues pertaining to food and addiction.

“Many scientific issues have yet to be addressed, and the press, public and elected leaders have not yet challenged the industry on this matter,” the Yale researchers say. “But for such a sensitive issue, and one with potentially important legal implications, one can imagine how threatening even the implication of addiction would be to the industry, as it was with tobacco.”