Displacement Questions

In a paper titled “The displacement mechanism: a new explanation and treatment for obesity,” Dr. Pretlow described the traditional notion of displacement, which seems to include such concepts as textbook explanations of how displacement behavior can occur in connection with feeding. For instance,

Both male turkeys and cocks when fighting, will suddenly stop and go eat, if food is available, even though they are not hungry, and then go back to fighting again.

One can see why a novice might wonder if there is more to this than meets the eye. Hunger is a very subjective sensation. When scientists observe this stop-and-start fighting behavior, how do they know whether a bird is hungry or not? It seems like a large assumption to make.

What seems like another possibly unwarranted assumption, is that fight and flight are the only two “appropriate” responses. Maybe doing nothing at all should be designated as an acceptable reply; as part of nature. Sometimes, a bird does stand still.

But even in that case, the scientists seem to think there are only three correct natural responses when a bird is challenged to fight: either fly away, jump in there and mix it up, or stand frozen. But to eat, or straighten its feathers, or pick at a nearby stalk of grass, these activities are deemed “inappropriate” in what seems like quite an arbitrary and judgmental way.

A missing dimension?

Traditionally, displacement activity is defined as normal behavior that happens out of context and is irrepressible. Again, one might ask, “How do the observers know for sure that the bird is trying hard to repress its urge to pick at a grass stalk, but then does it anyway under an irresistible compulsion?” This too seems like a large assumption. These assumptions turn “context” into a rather fuzzy and inchoate notion.

Dr. Pretlow notes that…

[…] addictive behavior doesn’t make sense to the person involved nor to others around them. For example, why binge eat or get drunk when the boss yells at you? It is out-of-context behavior; the behavior doesn’t fit with the situation at hand.

There might be a footnote to the idea that addictive behavior does not make sense to the person involved. The person might feel differently about it at a later time, like when they’re at a 12-step meeting, confessing how they stole their little sister’s birthday money. But it probably did make ultimate sense when they were doing it, because nothing makes more sense to an addict than getting the next fix — no matter what kind of objectively atrocious behavior that might involve.

Whose job is it to decree whether behavior fits with the situation at hand? If a person in a particular “set and setting” is doing that behavior, then it is in context.

At a fancy church wedding with 200 guests, changing one’s mind at the altar is certainly not deemed to be “in-context” behavior. And yet, human beings have done it. And if saying “no” even at that late moment saved the bride, the groom, and their potential children from lives of misery, it was the right move. To say that behavior does not fit or is out of context — that’s a judgment call.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Image by Mark Freeth/CC BY 2.0

Training the Treacherous Mouth

In an essay on mindful eating, Cheryl Harris, MPH, R.D., gives detailed instructions on how to experience food with expanded consciousness:

Observe the appearance and texture. Is there an aroma? What kind of changes do you notice in your body as you observe this food? (Answers may include salivation, impatience, anticipation, and nothing.)

Place a small amount of the food in your mouth, and do not chew it. After 30 seconds (wait 1 minute for chocolate), start chewing.

This is the kind of thing that psychedelic adventurers would do. For a baby, it’s like that all the time. Everything hits with seismic impact. It’s no wonder they make faces.

A dangerous proclivity

Childhood Obesity News has mentioned the branch of science devoted to the promotion of eating addiction; a mission accomplished through the manufacture and promotion of junk food. Legions of dedicated scientists perform meticulous research on big topics like flavor and satiety, and more specific traits like mouth feel, dryness, gumminess, and moisture release.

In Overweight: What Kids Say, Dr. Pretlow wrote about general principles and about chocolate, the most craved food, specifically:

Sensory-specific satiety also became a guiding principle for the processed-food industry. The biggest hits […] owe their success to complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating.

Chocolate may be licked, sucked, or chewed with a great deal of tongue and jaw action, in other words displacement activity, which relieves stress, even more so if crunchy nuts are present. In addition, chocolate is sweet, creamy, and soothing — hence comfort food.

Tame the mouth

Melissa Santos, Clinical Director of the Obesity Center at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, suggests a trick to subdue the mouth’s power in children:

Set up times during the day they go to brush their teeth. Nothing tastes good with a minty fresh mouth. So the best way to not give into snacking is doing something like brushing your teeth often throughout the day.

If the mouth can be tamed, there is still plenty of potential for overeating inspired by other factors: for example, the colonies of tiny organisms that we host. For Scientific American, Claudia Wallis wrote:

Rapid gene-sequencing techniques have revealed that the biggest and most diverse metropolises of “microbiota” reside in the large intestine and mouth, although impressive communities also flourish in the genital tract and on our skin.

Apparently, percentage-wise, they are slightly more populous in the digestive system than in the mouth, with the other named areas having not nearly so many.

The brain is in on it, too. A brain region called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), along with some others, exerts inhibitory control — or is supposed to, anyway. But if this brain area is under-active, which it is in many obese people, the inhibitory signaling might be muffled or missing. The result will be more like the brains of our distant ancestors, who directly equated eating with raw, basic survival.

In an article titled, “I Didn’t Sin — It Was My Brain,” Christopher Buzelli and Kat McGowan disclosed that in obese individuals’ brains, “the regions that regulate sensory information from the mouth and tongue are more active, suggesting that they may experience the sensations of eating differently.” The trouble is, while their sensory processing is at a high pitch, research has shown their reward sensitivity to be lower.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “COVID-19 and childhood obesity: When two pandemics collide,” FOX61.com, 02/10/21
Source: “How Gut Bacteria Help Make Us Fat and Thin,” ScientificAmerican.com, 06/01/14
Source: “I Didn’t Sin — It Was My Brain,” DiscoverMagazine.com, 10/05/09
Image by Brewbooks/CC BY-SA 2.0

The Treacherous Mouth, Again

Researchers Adam Drewnowski and Eva Almiron-Roig wrote about the palatability, or hedonic quality of food:

Sensory processes begin with the placement of food in the mouth, the fracturing of the food by the teeth and its dilution with saliva, oral perception of temperature and texture, and the binding of taste and flavor molecules to receptors in the oral and nasal cavities… A particular hedonic synergy is obtained by pairing sugar and fat.

The authors go into great detail about how fat, in particular, is received and perceived by the body. It is the source of the smooth creaminess and moist tenderness that make some comfort foods so irresistible. But fat is multi-talented. A different cooking method can make it crispy, crunchy, and delicious in a whole different way.

There is a point where sweetness becomes too sweet, especially for adults, though children don’t seem to mind. The point where sweetness turns to “yuck” is called the hedonic breakpoint. Fat does not seem to have a hedonic breakpoint, so combining it with sugar promotes overeating very effectively.

Look at yourself

A famous comedic character on Saturday Night Live was a therapist whose advice in every case was, “Look at yourself.” In other words, observe your behavior and your attitudes about it, from an impartial distance. Raise your own consciousness.

It is good to be cognizant of what nourishes us, and to be thankful for it. During holiday gatherings, many religious traditions consist of ritualistic eating. It’s a method of teaching the expected behaviors in society, without singling out any individual for blame. Some recite a food blessing before every meal, every day. The goal is to foster mental and emotional responses to food that will promote a sane and healthy society. There are other mechanisms for it too, that are not spiritually based.

Dr. Josh Axe is a certified doctor of natural medicine and chiropractic, as well as a clinical nutritionist who works with professional athletes, among others. Exodus Health Center, which he started some years ago, “grew to become one of the largest functional medicine clinics in the world.” His advice is, “Observe the way you eat”:

This includes your speed, level of tension, thoughts, and mannerisms. See yourself from a distance, as if watching yourself in a movie. Do you eat very fast and like you’re rushed? Do you feel guilty even while eating a food? Are you picking up one bite while another is still in your mouth?

There are certain “home truths” we need to realize. For instance, the mouth does not have good judgment about when it is done with the current task. It will cheerfully swallow half-chewed food to make room for the next load. If we don’t want to become obese, one of our jobs is to keep an eye on that mouth and make it behave reasonably.

A mixed blessing?

Is it positive or negative to have a keen, impressionable sense of taste? To be capable of savoring flavors may or may not be a good thing. For some people, better-tasting food leads them to keep on eating it whenever possible, so if it’s possible all the time, that could spell trouble.

On the other hand, even with a pile of not-very-tasty food, an optimist will persist in eating their way through it, hoping that they will eventually land on something delicious. Then, we have the special cases, like chemotherapy patients who have no appetite. They really need the nourishment, but hypersensitivity to the smell, taste, or even the thought of food can make everything revolting.

Hooked on foods

Dr. Pretlow speaks of conditions that do not apply to drugs. For instance, judging by the number of people who enjoy sucking on lollipops and popsicles, and later on straws, toothpicks, cigars, and other objects, a lot of people seem to never outgrow the pacifier effect. Aside from sucking, the actions of biting, chewing, and swallowing are also very satisfactory with food, as well as the immediate taste and texture factors experienced in the mouth. Unlike a drug, there is not as much of a central chemical response.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Chapter 11 Human Perceptions and Preferences for Fat-Rich Foods,” NIH.gov, undated
Source: “Mindful Eating — Maintain a Healthy Weight & Appetite,” Draxe.com, undated
Image by DFID/CC BY 2.0

The Treacherous Mouth, Continued

If any single body part is most responsible for obesity, surely it is the mouth. Could an ear or an elbow absorb even a single nutrient? Not likely. Could feeding through a nasogastric tube or an IV make someone morbidly obese? Maybe, but it would be quite a project. Whereas, mouths do it all the time.

The aperture of our face is all too ready to betray us, and Big Food knows it. “Make mouths happy,” they say, and “It’s like a mouth full of joy,” and, of course, the world’s most favorite advertising slogan, “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand.”

The previous post mentioned tastebuds, and as it turns out, other things are in the mouth too. This is Dr. Sarah J. Carnahan Craig, Ph.D., of Penn State University, who took part in a broad study that sought to understand “social/behavioral contributors to childhood obesity, how a responsive parenting intervention can prevent childhood overweight/obesity, and the biological factors that contribute to the disease.” She wrote,

The main finding from this paper is that the oral microbiota (the collection of bacteria that live in the mouth) are significantly related to young child growth patterns. The surprising part of this finding was that we observed this result with the oral microbiota and not the gut microbiota. The oral microbiota (in comparison to the gut microbiota, which has been associated with obesity in many previous studies) are largely understudied, especially in young children.

As Dr. Pretlow has noted, in food or eating addiction there are taste-centered components like flavor, mouth feel, aroma, texture, sliminess, inclusion of particles, temperature, and other traits belonging to the food itself.

Specific foods, like cheese, also are definitely a problem for the vast majority of obese individuals. Nevertheless, bliss point research still may be optimizing just the sensory effect — taste and texture (mouth feel) — rather than food ingredients that act directly on the brain.

The various agreeable sensations and the flavor molecules and all the other factors rarely work alone, but gang up to achieve the greatest possible impact. For instance, to the pleasures of eating, it would be fair to also add contrast. What could be more delightful than a half hour spent savoring the alternate sensations of salty, crunchy potato chips, with swallows of a chilled, fizzy drink? Or switching from cold ice cream to delicious, crumbly bites of cake, over and over again? Or playing off spicy, chewy mouthfuls of fried chicken against swigs of cold beer?

When the mouth likes something, it automatically summons up the tendency to develop other bad habits. So, there will also be the motor addiction factor, which involves physical actions including biting, chewing, sucking, gnawing, crunching, licking, swallowing, and hand-to-mouth motion. These are more involved in the category of “nervous eating.” But beyond that, these ways of acting slide over into the territory of Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors, which are recognized as behavioral addictions.

Dr. Pretlow says, “Any overeaten food represents a mixture of the sensory and behavioral addiction components, although the ratio varies. The combination comprises eating addiction.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Mouth Microbiome Linked to Childhood Obesity,” MedicalResearch.com, 09/19/18
Image by ToeneX/CC BY 2.0

Our Own Mouths Betray Us

In the previous post, we saw how babies arrive with an innate love of sweetness, which generally does not fade with age, but all too often grows more extreme. As the author Michael Moss points out, along with sweetness we also crave variety, so it is no surprise that a grocery store’s cereal aisle contains a couple of hundred permutations of grain-based, air-expanded, hyper-sweetened products with which to start our days.

The thing is, sugar is packed with calories, and evolution has taught us to associate calories with staving off death — even if, in truth, the individual already weighs 300 pounds. Our oldest impulses are based on very simple principles, like “fuel equals life.” Moss says,

We have sensors in the gut and possibly in the mouth that tell us how many calories we’re eating, and the more calories there are, the more excited the brain gets, which makes us vulnerable to the processed-food industry’s snacks, jam-packed as they are with a day’s worth of calories we can eat in one sitting.

We previously mentioned another work by Moss, The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food, wherein the author revealed that one fast-food company alone employed 500 chemists, technicians, and psychologists devoted to studying the crunchiness, mouth feel, and the perfect snapping point of a chip in order to get us to consume more of their hyper-processed pseudo-foods.

More dark magic

Moss also explained how we are hypnotized by a factor called vanishing caloric density, where if something melts quickly in the mouth, the brain does not register that it is actually fuel. Since, like the body, the brain needs fuel, it gives the okay to just keep eating that stuff all day long.

The book Salt Sugar Fat, which Moss published in 2013, spilled all the secrets about how clever chemists conspire to render us helpless before their products. The public became familiar with such erudite terms as “mouth feel” and “bliss point.” In another context, Moss wrote about the sneaky allure of a fat/sugar combination, saying,

I couldn’t resist drawing an analogy to the realm of narcotics. If sugar is the amphetamine of processed food ingredients, with its high-speed blunt assault on our brains, then fat is the opiate, a smooth operator whose effects are less obvious but no less powerful.

Fat, sugar, and salt all can influence the brain’s chemistry in the direction of overeating, says epidemiologist Dr. Adam Drewnowski, who directs the University of Washington’s Center for Obesity Research. To a recent textbook, Dr. Drewnowski contributed a chapter titled “Human Perceptions and Preferences for Fat-Rich Foods.” Jed Diamond says,

He found that eating foods that are high in fat content, particularly those that also were sweet and salty, stimulated the same brain centers as drugs like heroin. In fact, the same drugs that block the desire for heroin block the desire for fatty foods.

As Dr. Drewnowski noted, the generic drug naloxone, typically used to reverse an opiate overdose, can also suppress a person’s desire for opiates. In the same way, it can even reverse or suppress a person’s taste preference for sugar/fat mixtures.

This is interesting in light of the fact that just this week, the Food and Drug Administration okayed its sale (brand name Narcan) without a prescription. Will we now see droves of overweight people crowding the pharmacies in search of naloxone in hopes of squelching their food cravings?

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Op-Ed: Big Food wants us addicted to junk food,” LATimes.com, 06/06/21
Source: “Are Fat, Sugar, and Salt the New Heroin, Meth, and Cocaine?” Medium.com, 09/22/20
Image by mroach/CC BY-SA 2.0

Babies With Bad Taste

That’s a pun of course — because can anyone who refuses to eat perfectly good vegetables be said to have good taste? Unfortunately, taste (in the oral sense) is entirely subjective. When it comes to addiction to food, or addiction to the act of eating, in many cases taste has a lot to do with it, and a certain amount of the problem is simply inborn.

Here are some words from Lisa Bodnar of the University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences:

I remember a decade ago sitting in front of my 9-month-old daughter […] trying to spoon-feed her a pureed green vegetable. It didn’t matter if it was peas, green beans or something else, because the outcome was the same: I spooned it into her mouth, and it came right back out.

Compare this with feeding her applesauce, for which she would open her mouth after each bite and almost bounce in her chair with pleasure. I nearly danced along with her. This was easier! Let’s just keep doing this!

But of course, for the conscientious adult, “Let’s just keep doing this” is not an option. While the sentiment is counterintuitive to us totally logical elders, some babies just don’t like the taste of fresh, pure, health-giving foods. No matter how devotedly a grownup mashes peas into a pulp, they are still peas.

And you can’t fool a kid by making a clownie face and going, “Mmmmmmmm, yum yum!” They know you are lying, and are insulted by your insistence that they deny the evidence of their own senses. After this, how can they ever trust you again?

A mystery

Unfortunately, some mean things are done to newborn babies in hospitals. A baby gets stuck in the heel to obtain blood for testing, and long ago a staff member noticed that the baby would cry less if some sugar water was dribbled into its mouth at the same time. Twenty years ago, Dr. Neal D. Barnard wrote,

As sugar touches the tongue, the taste buds send a nerve impulse to the brain, causing opiates to be released. In turn, these opiates trigger the release of dopamine, the brain’s ultimate pleasure chemical.

One might logically wonder, why does the child not then associate the sweet taste with being needle-pierced, and proceed into infancy adamantly opposed to sweetness? Why doesn’t the child hate sugar, instead of peas? And that is the insidious power of the substance. Desire for sugar can even overcome its association with the trauma of being stabbed. Or, later in life, can defeat sugar’s connection with weighing 300 pounds.

Knowledge has two faces

In Melbourne, the Deakin’s Center for Advanced Sensory Science did research to discover why about 50% of babies are so darn picky. Lead researcher Dr. Georgie Russell told the press about oral sensitivity, that “food texture, mouthfeel and fussiness are still quite unexplored.” Dr. Russell went on to say,

Depending on how a food is prepared, this can affect the texture. Children might like raw crunchy carrots, but not like them if they’re cooked until they’re soggy… We can also see this with preferences for processed foods with simple textures, compared with whole foods with more complex textures…

The sense of touch is an important one. It is our oldest, most primitive and pervasive sense yet we know little about the sense of touch in the mouth — as opposed to other parts of the body — and how this relates to our food choices and intakes.

The team’s mission was to help the frustrated parents of fussy eaters and to figure out how to raise kids who like healthful foods — but of course, anything learned in this field will inevitably also benefit the evil geniuses who invent junk food.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Why kids shouldn’t eat added sugar before they turn 2,” TheConversation.com, 01/07/22
Source: “The Food Fix Is In,” OrlandoSentinel.com, 07/13/03
Source: “Deakin research to determine if fussy kids are touch sensitive,” MirageNews.com, 01/16/20
Image by James Willcox/CC BY-SA 2.0