Pat Hartman | Childhood Obesity News

Food Addiction and the Foundations of Discussion

Pat Hartman March 16, 2022 No Comments

Childhood Obesity News has mentioned how it is difficult to talk about some topics because the first principles have not been agreed on. One of the basic principles that it seems must be agreed on, is this: When people bring science into their arguments, it seems important to recognize that different things may share similarities, but may also have differences.

Consequently, among various populations, diverse conditions obtain. A woman who gets pregnant after a year of specialized treatment, for instance, is a very different physical specimen from a 13-year-old boy. If somebody wants to draw an academically acceptable conclusion by comparing them, or test a medicine on them, or even sell them a product, their differences need to be taken into account. Different results occur among individuals and groups. A whole field, demographics, exists to apportion populations into meaningful groups.

Those multifactorial blues

In the hope of ending childhood obesity, experts need to agree on some basics — like exactly what is meant by the rather unspecific term food addiction, or FA. Are we talking about actual, measurable effects on the body, that can be charted like a patient’s vital signs in the steps to a fatal overdose? Or should the inquiry move into the area of the psyche, in an effort to discover what brought the person to this situation in the first place?

The class of all obese children includes many subcategories. For instance, as Dr. Pretlow once wrote in “Addiction Model Intervention for Obesity in Young People,”

[N]ot only do obese young people have difficulty resisting “certain” problem foods […] but also have difficulty with snacking/grazing on whatever foods are available and consuming excessive food amounts at meals, again involving whatever foods are available.

In that short passage, three different processes are involved: classic “demon drug” attachment to a problem food or several of them; indiscriminate attachment to anything edible; and eating big meals. How many generalizations can be made that include all of those? And then, how many more eating patterns have been observed, whether widespread or quirky? It is something to think about.

Subfactors

Dr. Pretlow goes on to say, “Our studies have shown that problem foods, snacking, and excessive food amounts all respond to withdrawal and abstinence.” The point of using this for an example is, if different interest groups are to discuss solutions for a problem like food addiction, it helps if they are talking about the same things — or at the very least, are aware and conscious that they are talking about different things. A Town Hall meeting about FA will attract people who have not turned to the same page of the dictionary.

Because we are humans, there are a lot of variables. There are people who see it as a societal problem, and others who see it as an individual problem, and still others who admit to both, along with the possibility that other factors could also intervene, including ones we have not even thought of yet. Also, there are people who do not make a connection at all, between food addiction and childhood obesity.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Image by Tadson Bussey/CC BY-ND 2.0

Lab Rats and Viet Vets — Two Unconventional Teachers

Pat Hartman March 15, 2022 No Comments

We have seen how the Rat Park experiments went against established beliefs concerning substance addiction. Prof. Bruce K. Alexander said about his team’s work regarding psychopharmacology:

In virtually every experiment, the rats in solitary confinement consumed more drug solution, by every measure we could devise. And not just a little more. A lot more.

Childhood Obesity News also looked at how a certain population of returning Vietnam veterans disrupted the standard thinking. This 50-year-old topic was resurrected once again, less than a year ago, by journalist Lauren Aguirre. Three major government departments had combined their efforts to stem a threatened tide of heroin addicts.

When soldiers finished a tour of duty in Vietnam, their urine was tested for opioids. A positive test led to being held for a week to detox, which is in itself rather shocking. In civilian life, patients go away for weeks or months to lose a habit.

The Lee Robins study showed that while about 20% of the military personnel had been addicted in Vietnam, after a year back in the States, only 5% had relapsed. Even after three years, the relapse rate was a mere 12%, and the rest had recovered spontaneously without any treatment. (In fact, according to Aguirre, most of the 20 million Americans alive today in long-term recovery did not receive formal treatment.) The writer also remarked,

The unexpected results shed light on the nature of addiction and the position of opioids in an array of other widely misused legal and illegal drugs.

Nor did her team’s analysis show that heroin use was a response to intolerable circumstances, like the stress of war… Veterans who became addicted to heroin began to use it early in their tours of duty in Vietnam, typically before they were in combat.

[M]ore time at the frontline didn’t correlate with a greater likelihood of using heroin — which would be expected if the stress of war was to blame. Robins also found that even though some veterans returned to occasional use once they were back home, they did not become addicted again.

The received wisdom, back in the day, was that addiction is pretty much a life sentence, or a death sentence because the demon drugs were so powerful, no one could escape. But this Viet vet research reached conclusions that were against the prevailing narrative.

Robins was not an opium alarmist and did not perceive heroin as especially dangerous. In her view, it was, in part, a question of personal vulnerability which, whether it is physically based on genetic heritage, or psychologically founded in individual experience, still exists. When people have a twist in their chromosomes or in their minds, either way, their reactions to potentially addictive substances are involved.

In Aguirre’s view, “It’s too bad this research has been largely forgotten because its lessons can be useful today.” How? For one thing, in figuring out what FA is all about. Every angle from which researchers have viewed substance addiction and/or behavioral addiction should be useful in some way to solve the mysteries of food addiction.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Addiction: The View from Rat Park,”‘ BruceKAlexander.com, undated
Source: “Lessons learned — and lost — from a Vietnam-era study of addiction,” StatNews.com, 07/19/21
Image by Paulann Egelhoff/CC BY-ND 2.0

Lessons From Viet Vets

Pat Hartman March 14, 2022 No Comments

In the immediate postwar period, a subset of Vietnam veterans blew some people’s minds. This was half a century ago, and every few years the story gets recycled. Here is how it started. While the war was still going on, two American officials went over there and came back distraught about the number of active duty heroin users and addicts. What would happen when they returned to the States and to civilian life?

This anxiety seemed justified. At home, among standard American addicts who had received treatment, the relapse rate was around 90%. And this did not include the hard cases who had never even gone into any kind of treatment. With an expected tsunami of junkie vets, the future looked very dark.

In 2012, Alix Spiegel covered it retrospectively for NPR, relating how the government had hired psychiatric researcher Lee Robins to figure out what was going on. As personnel was scheduled for return to America, the military started testing everybody for heroin, and about one in five identified themselves as addicts. They were kept in-country to detox, but fears were great about what would happen once they were back on American soil. Robins kept track of them, and Spiegel wrote:

According to her research, the number of soldiers who continued their heroin addiction once they returned to the U.S. was shockingly low… [O]ne big theory about why the rates of heroin relapse were so low on return to the U.S. has to do with the fact that the soldiers, after being treated for their physical addiction in Vietnam, returned to a place radically different from the environment where their addiction took hold of them.

The writer also consulted psychologist David Neal, who shared with others the view that veteran addicts were different, because they had not become users in their own familiar environments. The fact that American troops in Southeast Asia caught a habit was a combination of crazy availability, and the unfamiliar, uncongenial environment. Neal said,

People, when they perform a behavior a lot — especially in the same environment, same sort of physical setting — outsource the control of the behavior to the environment.

To sum up, there are two kinds of risks, both having to do with geography:

— People who get hooked in their own environment, go somewhere else to recover, and then return home, are in danger of sliding back into addiction. They will probably do better in a new environment with none of the old associations.

— People who get hooked in a strange environment, recover, and then return home, are in danger of sliding back into addiction if they go to the strange place again. They will probably do better by not returning there, or anywhere like it.

The whole point here is to think about all these matters in the light of food addiction (FA), and what exactly that is agreed upon to mean, and by whom. So, here is the interesting part. Those two categories of people both can and do exist, under any definition of FA, and indeed any other addiction. It seems that the desire to fit into a scene can be universally dangerous. This may be what David Neal meant by saying that people “outsource the control of the behavior to the environment.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “What Vietnam Taught Us About Breaking Bad Habits,” NPR.org, 01/02/12
Image by Claudia Liebram/CC BY 2.0

Is Food the New Demon Drug?

Pat Hartman March 11, 2022 No Comments

In a paper titled “Is food addiction a valid and useful concept?“, H. Ziauddeen and P.C. Fletcher posed the query, “Will the food addiction model help treat obesity?” The basic question is still being asked. It is obvious that experts in the substance addiction field don’t have it nailed yet, either. There are still plenty of people hooked on both legal and illicit substances, and still plenty of alcoholics. The authors say,

[I]f FA is to have any clinical value it must add something to the treatment of sufferers either in terms of developing/selecting the appropriate psychological therapy or the right pharmacological treatment.

That’s a fancy way of asking, what good is it? How much time and willingness can be spent on analyzing and understanding substance addiction, if it turns out to not really have much to do with how or why obesity happens? No disrespect intended to the valiant efforts of those in recovery and their allies, but… does the rather fuzzy concept of food addiction. or FA. belong in the same category?

This is why the Rat Park is worthy of attention. Previous experimentation had shown that rodents would compulsively self-administer dangerous substances at every opportunity. But, in the creation of junkie rats, the demon drugs are not totally at fault. Prof. Bruce K. Alexander and his Simon Fraser University associates made it clear that when little animals shoot up to escape their existential pain, part of the responsibility lies with the harsh conditions of confinement. Alexander’s team proved that in a more normal, less stressful environment, the critters do not so readily, as the saying goes, “turn to drugs.”

The proverbial lead balloon

Other researchers created rat parks and replicated the Alexander team’s findings. But to their surprise and disappointment, none of it made a dent in conventional thinking. They had done all the right things — repeated their experiments, and inspired others to try the same methods — but made no impression on the academic zeitgeist.

Prof. Alexander did remark that more psychologists and psychiatrists were noticing how patients tended to use addiction as a substitute for a missing aspect of life. Many people need to always be absorbed in some central matter, whether it is a love affair, the mastery of a musical instrument, dedication to a charitable cause, or an addiction. Being passionate about something is what lends meaning to life. Generally, the addict’s daily need to scramble for the next fix makes for a complex existence filled with significant moments.

And there was another thing, as Prof. Alexander pointed out at the time:

[M]ore recent research with different methods has shown other fatal deficiencies in the original Skinner box research which once appeared to show that all rats and people who use addictive drugs become addicted. The Rat Park experiments can draw a thoughtful person into asking a truly important question: If drugs are not the cause of addiction, what is?

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Is food addiction a valid and useful concept? — NCBI,” NIH.gov, January 2013
Source: “Addiction: The View from Rat Park,” BruceKAlexander.com, undated
Image by S.J. Pyrotechnic/Some rights reserved.

The Renowned Rat Park

Pat Hartman March 10, 2022 No Comments

In the previous post, we looked at the origin story of the “Myth of the Demon Drug” as described by Professor Emeritus Bruce K. Alexander who suggests that, in a series of experiments on lab rodents, the demonic force at work was actually confinement in a solitary metal cell, along with the dosing methodology where the animals had tubes and needles stuck into them, and no alternative activities other than pressing a lever to get drugs.

The reason for looking into all this is to understand what people mean when they talk about FA, or food addiction. “Addiction” is quite the loaded term, and once the discussion turns to addiction in terms of food and in relation to obesity, watch out! A lot of firm opinions, and even stronger feelings, are involved in these debates.

In order to read anything meaningful about addiction into those strictly coercive drug-taking experiments, it seems as though credulity must be stretched pretty far. To emphasize this, Prof. Alexander also wrote,

[T]aking drugs in a Skinner box where almost no effort is required and there is nothing else to do is nothing like human addiction which always involves making choices between many possible alternatives.

But how did Prof. Alexander catch on to this discrepancy in the first place? He and a small group of Simon Fraser University colleagues wondered how the drug-seeking behavior of rodents might look if they lived under a more lenient, reasonable regime. As scientists will do, this group came up with a plan and proceeded to run experiments comparing the behavior of two populations:

This required building a great big plywood box on the floor of our laboratory, filling it with things that rats like, such as platforms for climbing, tin cans for hiding in, wood chips for strewing around, and running wheels for exercise. Naturally we included lots of rats of both sexes, and naturally the place soon was teeming with babies. The rats loved it and we loved it too, so we called it “Rat Park”.

The researchers observed the delightful antics and well-socialized behavior of the Rat Park residents. These creatures of course possessed great autonomy, and had been supplied with lifestyle alternatives, like the opportunity to play with toys, run on exercise wheels, and experience unlimited interaction with other individuals. They even had scenery! The team painted murals on the walls, depicting the silhouettes of trees against a green background. It was a brave effort to create a simulacrum of a normal environment, inside a laboratory, with enhanced security and no weather.

And there also, on the other hand, with cruelly limited options, were the solitary confinement rats, in standard barren cages, equipped with the means to consume downers or uppers on demand. Were they miserable because they constantly self-administered drugs? Or did they shoot up all day because they were miserable? Prof. Alexander wrote,

It soon became absolutely clear to us that the earlier Skinner box experiments did not prove that morphine was irresistible to rats. Rather, most of the consumption of rats isolated in a Skinner box was likely to be a response to isolation itself.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “ Rat Park versus The New York Time,” BruceKAlexander.com, undated
Source: “Addiction: The View from Rat Park,” BruceKAlexander.com, undated
Image by Zinnia Jones/CC BY 2.0

The Genesis of Some Beliefs About Addiction

Pat Hartman March 9, 2022 No Comments

In reviewing the history of beliefs and research about food addiction, familiarly known as FA, it can be seen how the significance of an animal experiment might be misconstrued. One of the most fascinating stories to come from science in recent years is that of the Rat Park.

This is the introduction to it, with quotations from one of the participants, Professor Emeritus Bruce K. Alexander who described the background and climate of thought at the time:

In the 1960s, some experimental psychologists began to think that the Skinner Box was a good place to study drug addiction. They perfected techniques that allowed the rats to inject small doses of a drug into themselves by pressing the lever…

Under appropriate conditions, rats would press the lever often enough to consume large amounts of heroin, morphine, amphetamine, cocaine, and other drugs in this situation…

The results seemed to prove that these drugs were irresistibly addicting, even to rodents, and by extension, to human beings.

This fits right in with the narratives being spun to promote the War on Drugs, so officialdom was happy to accept every implication suggested by the behavior of the rodent dope fiends.

The bedrock

In the previous post, we learned that before any theory is posited, certain basic things are acknowledged, whether consciously or subliminally, to be true. Certainly, most studies in Dr. Pretlow’s field take for granted that childhood obesity is undesirable, and should be avoided. Most, not all — but that subject is for another day.

As a basic premise, Prof. Alexander points out that rats are rats, and goes on to ask,

How can we possibly reach conclusions about complex, perhaps spiritual experiences like human addiction and recovery by studying rats?

Fair enough! Regarding the specially bred lab rats, he also notes that, in nature, members of the same species are gregarious, industrious, and community-oriented. A life sentence in a locked metal box is probably as traumatic for them as it is for us. If human prisoners in solitary confinement could pull a lever and receive doses of heroin, they would. In order to derive information from these kinds of observations at all, it is necessary for the scientists and their audiences to share a core belief that any of this is normal.

Rodent experiments somehow gave rise to another core belief, that…

[…] the great appetite for morphine, heroin, and cocaine that earlier experiments had demonstrated in rats housed in the tiny solitary confinement cages proved that these drugs were irresistible to all mammals, including human beings.

Alexander called this the “Myth of the Demon Drug,” which went on to become “the backbone of mainstream theories of addiction in those days.” It generated a sub-theory:

[A]lthough many rats and people are not permanently transformed into addicts by exposure to a demon drug, those who have a “genetic predisposition” are. The ones that are transformed are still said to have been robbed of their will power, as if the drug had “flipped a switch in their brain.” The result is that these transformed rats and people have a “chronic relapsing brain disease” called addiction.

There is nothing inherently wrong with looking for a genetic component to FA and/or obesity. But a genetic predisposition might have been more zealously sought by factions that needed to explain why addiction does not befall every creature exposed to substances. Genetic predisposition may be needed to patch up holes in some other theories. Or at least, a dubious researcher could not be blamed for suspecting as much.

(To be continued…)

Source: “Addiction: The View from Rat Park,” BruceKAlexander.com, undated
Source: “Rat Park versus The New York Times,” BruceKAlexander.com, undated
Image by Sarah Laval/CC BY 2.0

Roots of Food Addiction Objections

Pat Hartman March 8, 2022 No Comments

For decades, the debate has persisted over the validity of “food addiction” as a thing that medical science should deal with or even acknowledge. It seems acceptable to refer to the overall concept as FA, without necessarily agreeing on all the details or indeed, whether it exists at all.

Is FA a legit clinical entity? Many different arguments have been offered. A decade-old paper laid a lot of groundwork for understanding why the controversy is ongoing. Titled, “Is food addiction a valid and useful concept?“, it was written by University of Cambridge scholars H. Ziauddeen and P. C. Fletcher. They said,

While the idea has intuitive clinical and scientific appeal, and may provide an explanatory narrative for individuals struggling with weight and diet control, it has acquired much currency with relatively little supporting evidence.

Others interested in this matter may admit that some evidence exists, but it is the wrong kind, or there is not enough of it, however much there is. As with any multifactorial problem, there are dimensions. People might be talking about neuroscientific evidence, behavioral evidence, or clinical evidence.

The authors sorted the matter into two broad categories, starting with fundamental theoretical difficulties. The first of those originates at the neurobiological level. They believed that any discussion of addiction “necessitates the presence of a clearly identifiable addictive agent.” (Of course, that was 10 years ago, and more research has been done in this area.)

Does food contain substances that act like cocaine, heroin, or meth? Lab rodents fed on fat and sugar would behave like little junkies, complete with binge-eating, compulsive food-seeking, neural changes, and withdrawal symptoms. It is possible, the researchers found…

[…] to produce an addiction-like syndrome, one that leads to obesity, with certain nutrient combinations and particular access regimes… However, the findings, while they tell us that hyperpalatable foods, administered in particular, often highly constrained regimens, produce an addiction-like syndrome, they do not afford easy translation to humans who are not subject to such constraints.

And there it is. Does it really make sense to extrapolate from the behavior of caged rodents, all the way out to the behavior of human beings in their glorious variety, and their vastly different environments? How many conclusions can be drawn, exactly? Another quotation from the work:

[A]s we know from substance addictions, drugs vary in their potency and addictive potential (even within a class of substance)… When we speak of FA, are we talking about many addictive substances or one common substance (fat? sugar?) that drives the addiction across many foods?

The authors also note that distinctions need to be made between the natural substances that are inherent to foods, some of which might prove to be addictive in some cases, and products of chemical reactions that wind up in highly processed foods, which also might very well be addictive. We are not just talking about nutrients, but other stuff that gets dumped in there. What if it turns out that millions of people are addicted to Red Dye #2?

(Next, a look at how animal experiments can be misconstrued, leading to conclusions that might not be all-encompassing or definitive.)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Is food addiction a valid and useful concept?,” Wiley.com, 10/12/12
Image by kphotographer/CC BY-ND 2.0

Outspoken Addicts

Pat Hartman March 7, 2022 No Comments

We have mentioned a recovering food addict and author of several books, Phil, or Philip Werdell. Last October he hosted the Food Junkies Summit, along with Mary Foushi, an individual who lost 195 pounds and kept it off for 30 years. Since 1995, Werdell has run SHIFT, described as “a workshop-based program for those middle- and late-stage food addicts who did not need hospitalization or direct medical supervision.”

He is also the author of several books, one of them being The Disease Concept of Food Addiction: A Story for People Interested in Recovery, described as “built upon a highly successful introductory lecture he has presented to clients interesting in finding out whether they are food addicted.” It seems to be suitable both for laypeople and for professionals who want to know better how to talk to their patients and clients.

His work has affected people like Jana, who commented online about her personal experience of inspiration:

[T]here’s a certain category of junk food that I know I just can’t start on because if I do, the switch gets flipped back immediately and in a big way. Those boundaries are setting me free!

If you think you may have a sugar or food addiction — or your everyday emotional eating is feeling out of control — I encourage you to consider multiple kinds of help.

Werdell seems to post excerpts or passages of commentary online, and then remove them when the book comes out. This quotation from an expired page is an example:

Their secondary chemical dependency on alcoholism has universally been classified as a cross-addiction. Unfortunately, even this has had little effect in calling for the diagnosis and treatment of possible food addiction prior to making the decision to undergo bariatric surgery.

He’s talking about how many patients, post bariatric surgery, develop alcoholism “serious enough to warrant in-patient treatment.” He puts this number at between 6% and 8%, which is very disheartening because the preparation and the surgery itself are so expensive in terms of effort, emotional investment, and actual money. When it does not work out for any reason, that is bad enough, but a lapse into alcoholism is an outcome to be truly dreaded.

This is only one of many reasons for the urgent need to get this food addiction thing figured out. Werdell also seems to be saying that, while trauma-based eating disorders do exist, food addiction is not one of them. And yet, the world contains many people who learned as children that putting on weight could protect them from criminal abuse. The author appears to grant that they have another type of eating disorder, but not food addiction.

He frequently mentions denial, and places a lot of emphasis on learning to recognize and avoid it. Denial can ruin everything, which is why the traditional AA move was to proclaim, “I’m Jane Doe, and I’m an alcoholic.” It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but the fact that a person is able to say the words in front of witnesses goes a long way toward enabling them to do something about it.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Disease Concept of Food Addiction: A Story for People Interested in Recovery,” Scribd.com, undated
Source: “How emotional eating keeps you stuck,” OhThatstasty.com, undated
Source: “Science of Food Addiction” (page expired, website still active)
Image by Pat Hartman

The Return of the Thousand-Pound Sisters

Pat Hartman March 4, 2022 No Comments

About a year ago, Childhood Obesity News discussed Amy and Tammy Slaton, morbidly obese adult sisters who won an eating contest and a TV reality show contract. In contemporary society, it would be illegal to haul an obese person around in a horse-drawn wagon, for exhibition in carnivals as a sideshow freak. But if a camera and a worldwide distribution system are involved, anything goes.

Amy had bariatric surgery, and then a baby (some say too soon). Tammy developed a “fat socket” on her forehead, a phenomenon that apparently occurs when the body simply cannot find anywhere else to store the fat. She got up to 665 pounds and contracted COVID-19. Apparently, fans love to practice their armchair psychology skills on the sisters as their relationship goes through all kinds of stress, including epic battles with each other.

The update

A piece published mere hours ago as this was written, reports that the TV show is renewed for another year. At the end of the third season, Tammy was in food addiction rehab and had lost 115 pounds in her first month, so her story is currently a cliffhanger. But, whenever rehab ends, she has no home to return to. Amy and her husband are prepared to take Tammy in the short-term, but not permanently. They expect a second child this summer and will have plenty to deal with.

Now, this blends in well with the more recent topic of food addiction. There is a video of Tammy’s visit last year with Dr. Eric Smith, who said,

It’s an addiction that you have of needing that food to fulfill, maybe when you’re down or sad, or something’s missing in your life. Now, are we closer to surgery? No, we’re not, and I think you know that. But are we closer to getting to the root of the problem so we can eventually get to surgery? I think in a small way we are.

This gives an idea of what an incredibly long and demanding journey can be involved in even the attempt to become eligible for surgery. We are going to look at what more prominent people think about food addiction, when surgery is or is not a consideration. We will also look more closely at the reasons why they hold those particular ideas.

From previous forays into the field, it seems as if there is some confusion in language, with people using different definitions of words and concepts. Once that starts, the door to misunderstanding and disharmony is wide open.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “1000-Lb. Sisters’ Tammy Slaton Is ‘Even More Depressed’ After She Hits 665 Lbs,” People.com, 03/04/21
Source: “‘1000-lb Sisters’: Tammy Slaton Teases Season 4 Amid Weight Loss Update,” Cheatsheet.com, 03/01/22
Image by Midnight Believer/Public Domain

Addiction in the Realm of Food

Pat Hartman March 3, 2022 No Comments

Back in the 1990s, Dr. Phil Werdell created ACORN Food Dependency Recovery Services and has published several books about the subject, including Bariatric Surgery and Food Addiction: Pre-Operative Considerations. Like many other professionals, this writer was very concerned with the question of whether food dependency is a bona fide addiction. Science has been looking at many different angles, including brain activity, genetics, similarity to opioid addiction, cross addiction, and malfunctioning or overactive hormones.

Much information about Werdell’s ideas, incidentally, came from a book excerpt whose web page has expired. Like any spirited thinker, he expressed the same basic ideas many times, not always in exactly the same words.

A holy grail

In the past, there was thought to be such a thing as the obesity gene, and it was fervently sought. In the early Nineties, a good candidate was identified, but the lead researcher was careful to clarify. The genetic marker he was talking about had to do with an underlying internal chemical dependency on food, but not necessarily a state of observable obesity.

At any rate, no such luck. Of course, it is not just a single gene. Some researchers had always suspected that, like so many other things, the genetic tendency to be obese is multifactorial, and they were not wrong. There are so many possibilities in genetic combination. At this stage, in its predictability, it is not much more useful than pure chaos. Indeed, many genes take part in how digestion works. Some even control sphincter tone and fecal continence. There are a lot of “known unknowns.”

Cross addiction

Several universities and other institutions have produced studies showing that too much sugar can cause “endogenous opioid dependency,” where the brain produces its own dope. This would come under the heading of food being addictive, at least when combined with some cooperation from the brain.

Recovering alcoholics have traditionally tended to develop eating problems, especially around sweets. Beer is replaced by doughnuts. These substitution tactics accomplish nothing but self-deception. It isn’t simply that people get fat. There is pretty good evidence that sugar can actively prevent recovery from alcoholism. In recent years, there has been a lot of cross-pollination between programs that alleviate alcoholism, and hardcore nutritionists.

Typical of the warnings about all this was a 2017 piece called “Bariatric Surgery Stands No Chance against an Untreated Food Addiction.” Among other things, the uncredited writer said,

Like other addictions, food addiction can be triggered by depression, an individual’s desire to fill some type of emotional void, or the need to be able to have control over some part of his or her life. These patients understand that they can no longer turn to food after gastric bypass or other weight loss surgery, but they may be unaware that they have an addictive personality and unconsciously develop another addiction.

Werdell and others have pointed out that alcoholics, drug addicts, and problem eaters all share certain traits. In service of their addictions, they will obsess, binge, isolate, and lie. All the various 12-step groups have membership overlap. The precepts and the successful ways of coping are pretty much the same, which makes the skills transferable to a large extent. Still, when a person gets serious about recovery, sometimes one group is not enough.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Science of Food Addiction,” print only
Source: “Bariatric Surgery Stands No Chance against an Untreated Food Addiction,” DocShop.com, 09/06/17
Image by Everjean/CC BY 2.0

Food Addiction and the Foundations of Discussion

Those multifactorial blues

Subfactors

Lab Rats and Viet Vets — Two Unconventional Teachers

Lessons From Viet Vets

Is Food the New Demon Drug?

The proverbial lead balloon

The Renowned Rat Park

The Genesis of Some Beliefs About Addiction

The bedrock

Roots of Food Addiction Objections

Outspoken Addicts

The Return of the Thousand-Pound Sisters

The update

Addiction in the Realm of Food

A holy grail

Cross addiction

Profiles: Kids Struggling with Weight

The Book

About Dr. Robert A. Pretlow

Presentations

Food & Health Resources