How to Control Your Food Cravings
When you understand the chemistry, you understand the solution
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Is it possible to be addicted to certain foods? I think most of us would agree that it is. Who hasn’t got their own, edible narco?
Despite what we instinctively feel to be true, food addiction is not classified as a “substance use disorder” by the World Health Organization. That may not be the case for much longer, now that health chiefs in the UK are pushing for change as part of an effort to manage “out of control” obesity levels.
The situation is dire: experts writing in Frontiers in Psychiatry in September 2022 estimated that 20% of adults have a food addiction and meet the following criteria established for substance use disorder.
Source: Unwin et al 2022
Not all foods are habit-forming. Some we love just because they are so delicious. That’s not the same as an unhealthy craving. The foods that have the greatest addictive quality tend to be the cheap, ultra-processed products that also make us fat and sick.
The marriage of obesity with junk food is a very convenient one for food manufacturers. But before anyone launches into a blame game here, it’s important to understand that addiction is a normal, biological response to consumption of these products: that’s the whole point of them. Obesity is just the fall-out.
Ultra-processed foods are specifically engineered to trigger cravings for more of the same. Food scientists have discovered the sweet spot of insatiable snacking: 65% carbohydrate and 35% fat. Foods that feature this winning combo are described in the business as “highly palatable”.
Foods that fall into this category tend to be in the form of sweet and savoury snacks, usually made from a permutation of corn, potato, wheat, sugar, salt, and vegetable oils. Take your pick.
As luck would have it, these are the very types of foods that rank the highest in the latest US dietary guidelines, issued by Tufts University and called the “Food Compass”. It’s probably a coincidence that the companies that produce these foods also provide funding to Tufts. “Follow the science” is now synonymous with “follow the money”.
Source: Nina Teicholz
(For more information on corporate influence over dietary guidelines, I urge you to follow the formidable Nina Teicholz on Substack.)
“A recent behavioural study revealed that fats and carbohydrates are the major molecular determinants of the palatability of snack food”.
This magic formula - 65% carb, 35% fat - targets specific areas of the brain, the same areas involved in cravings for drugs and alcohol. There’s a fine line between a craving and an addiction, with the former morphing all too seamlessly into the latter, if not checked. These “highly palatable” snacks activate the same neural pathway, or “reward system” of the brain. Pivotal to this system is dopamine: when it comes to food, cravings have little to do with hunger and everything to do with this neurotransmitter.
What you are actually craving, when responding to the siren call of your favourite fix, is not satiety, it is dopamine. Dopamine is all about pleasure and reward. It is the messenger, sent from the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of the brain, to another area called the nucleus accumbens, in anticipation or expectation of a reward. Dopamine rises in the nucleus accumbens, giving you that surge of pleasure, or hit.
“..the power of the reward system over feeding behaviour should not be underestimated.”
Dopamine also projects to other regions of the brain: the hypothalamus, the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex. These regions are concerned with memory of a particular reward, the emotional associations you make with that reward and the choices you subsequently make. In other words, the effect that dopamine has in these regions is to remind you of how much you like something, of how good it makes you feel, and why you should have it again.
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Your brain is responding the way it is programmed to respond. The trick is to short-circuit the system — the brain’s reward system. Here are some of the most effective ways to do that.
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