Kim Mills: Have you ever said, “I’m addicted to chocolate,” or, “I just can’t stop eating these chips”? You might have meant it jokingly, but what if there’s more than a kernel of truth to the idea that food can be addictive? We live in a nation awash with cheap, easy-to-get calories, mostly from highly processed convenience foods. One recent study found that two thirds of the calories that kids and teens in the US consume now come from ultra-processed foods, like industrial breads and cereals, frozen meals, and packaged snacks.
In recent years, some researchers have begun to argue that these foods are more than just tempting and tasty. In fact, they argue some types of food may actually be addictive, hijacking the reward pathways in our brain in a way similar to alcohol or cigarettes. So, what’s the scientific evidence that food addiction is real? And how can some foods trigger addiction? How does food addiction compare with other addictions, such as to cigarettes and alcohol? Are some people more likely to struggle with food addiction? And if so, what are the risk factors?
Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.
My guest today is Dr. Ashley Gearhardt, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, where she runs the Food and Addiction Science and Treatment lab. Dr. Gearhardt studies the similarities between addictive and eating behaviors and how some foods may trigger addiction. She also investigates how food advertising drives eating behavior and the development of food preferences in infants. She has more than 100 academic publications and her research has been featured in media outlets including The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, and the Today Show.
Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Gearhardt
Ashley Gearhardt, PhD: I’m thrilled to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Mills: Not all researchers agree that food can be addictive. But you and others argue that ultra-processed food in particular can be. So, first of all, what is ultra-processed food? And what’s the evidence that this type of food can be addictive?
Gearhardt: Ultra-processed foods is something we’ve really just started to understand and investigate recently. We are really thinking about these ultra-processed foods as these industrial creations, that when you look at the back of the ingredient list, it looks more like a chemical science experiment than it does food. You don’t really recognize most of what goes into it. And what we’re realizing is that the food industry’s gotten really good at creating products that trigger our bliss points, that make us want more, and more, and more. And they don’t hit our satiety signals the way real food, fruits, vegetables, legumes, the sort of food we’ve been consuming for all of human history. These foods are so wildly different than those foods that some people have suggest that food is a wrong term for it, and we should instead call them chemical substances.
Mills: What’s the difference between being addicted to food and just liking to indulge in treats more than you should? How can you tell if someone meets the threshold for addiction?
Gearhardt: I think that’s such a great question and it really gets at a little bit of a myth around addiction. I think people think you’re either addicted or you’re not. And in general, we really see that it looks like more of a dimension. Some people will drink alcohol and not have any issues and can completely moderate it. Some people have a tendency to sometimes binge drink or consume past what’s good for their health, but they’re not necessarily consuming in such a compulsive out of control way that it’s starting to really impair or distress them. When I started to do this work, I really thought, well, how do we tell whether somebody’s just eating a bag of chips at the end of the day, and it’s just a stress reliever, like having a glass of wine, or whether they really are showing an addictive profile?
And so, I took our diagnostic criteria that we have in the DSM to try and dissociate between social drinkers and somebody who’s actually addicted to alcohol. And I’ve applied that to the intake of these really highly processed foods with unnatural levels of refined carbohydrates and fats. And so, the hallmarks of addiction that I’m looking for are a loss of control over intake. You’re continuing to use in the same way, even though it’s causing you emotional problems or physical problems. You’re having these intense cravings where it’s just occupying your mind. And it’s starting to really impair or distress you in a way that other important things in your life, like your social engagements, or your health, or your ability to focus at work are being negatively impacted.
Mills: How widespread do you think food addiction is? Are there research-based estimates of what percentage of people meet the criteria for it?
Gearhardt: Yes. In 2009, we developed the Yale Food Addiction Scale, when I was in my PhD program with my advisors Will Corbin and Kelly Brownell. We just took those diagnostic criteria for what was called substance dependence at the time and applied it to the intake of highly processed foods. From that scale, we can estimate a similar diagnostic profile for what would look like a clinical level of addictive pull to these foods.
Recently, there’s been a meta-analysis that combines across a range of the studies that have been done to provide us with an estimate of how many people might be really showing this kind of full blown addictive pull. And the estimate’s about 14% of adults. And that’s shockingly similar to what we see with alcohol, another legal, easily accessible substance. About 90% of people drink, but probably about 12% to 14% of people actually show a sign of an addiction to it.
One of the things that’s really striking to me is that we also have a version of this scale for children. And a meta-analysis that came out in children and adolescents found that about 12% of children were showing signs of this clinical level of food addiction. That is, of course, way past what we would see with something like alcohol, or cigarettes, or cannabis, because kids are not really getting exposed to those products until typically adolescence, early adulthood. In contrast, as you mentioned, it starts to become a majority of the diet for kids, at least in the United States and in other westernized countries.
Mills: There was a study that came out, I think just last week, that talked about how nobody should start drinking alcohol until the age of 40. I’m just wondering, should we be doing something similar with processed foods, no processed foods until you’re 40?
Gearhardt: Yeah. We certainly know that the brain is vulnerable. The younger you are when you’re exposed to an addictive substance, the more likely you are to have problems. To me, it’s one of the big questions and concerns about this sort of research is that kids are being exposed to this and aggressively marketed to, especially children of color are particularly being aggressively marketed to, by the food industry. And so, it’s setting them up where this is one of the major sources of reward, sources of ways to cope. It’s not just really about the calories. It starts to be about the hedonics, the pleasure, the emotion regulation from a very, very young age. We do see that children who are showing these signs of addiction in their eating, they have higher body mass index, higher emotional overeating. They’re less sensitive to their satiety signals. They have greater body fat percentages. So, it would suggest that this is a group of children who are at risk.
Now, I’m a mother of two young children, and I have to tell you, it’s hard. I know all of this, but we have an environment that is set up to make my job, as a parent, as hard as humanly possible when it comes to navigating what my child eats and what we eat as a family. And so, I’m focused on how do we set up an food environment that encourages health over profits?
Mills: Are people who are at risk for other addictions also at higher risk for food addiction? For example, if you have a family history of alcohol or other substance use, might you be a candidate for food addiction?
Gearhardt: Yeah. We actually just have a study recently coming out in this in the APA journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors. And there, we found that a family history of problematic alcohol intake was associated with a much more heightened risk of food addiction, actually even it was a better predictor of food addiction than even having personal alcohol problems. It would really suggest that if you have a family history of addiction, you look back and you can see, even if it wasn’t food, you had family members who were struggling with things like alcohol, that this might tell you that you might be at heightened risk when it comes to responding to our food environment in a way that’s problematic. In this study, we found that the people who are showing this kind of compulsive addictive pattern of intake with these highly processed foods were also at heightened risk for their own personal alcohol problems, and smoking and vaping. So, it would suggest that there could be this cluster of addictive risk that’s expressing itself across multiple substances.
Mills: I have to ask you a question about a particular food. I know you’ve talked about how processed foods can be addictive, and that people don’t tend to get addicted to carrots, or peas, or things like that. I mean, you can control how much of that you eat. But there’s one thing that I think is delicious, which is homemade bread, like the best bread ever in the world. And I mean, I could eat that every meal, two loaves. What’s happening with something like that, which is not a processed food?
Gearhardt: Kim, it actually is, I would consider, a highly processed food. Right now, the field is really struggling with what are the best terms. And ultra-processed has really been focusing on the kind of industrial concoctions of these sorts of foods that we are already designed and programmed to find, that frozen pizza, tasty and that cookie you pick up on your impulse buy at the gas station to be yummy. But I, in my lab, have really been focusing on highly processed foods. And how we define that is the inclusion of refined carbohydrates and/or added fats. And so, even though it’s homemade, it’s homemade from a processed ingredient, which is refined flour or refined carbohydrate. When you combine that often with things like salts and there’s often fats in those breads as well, what you’re doing is you’re creating a product that delivers really reinforcing refined carbohydrates, and fats, and salts to your body in a way where you can just devour it really rapidly. And often we add butter, right? Or some olive oil that we dip into it.
Mills: Right.
Gearhardt: And so, we’re amplifying it even further. And so, when we compare that to something like, let’s say, a bean or even a banana, the level of refined carbohydrates in that is a higher dose and the speed in which we can eat it, and the speed in which it impacts our gastrointestinal systems and gets into our blood systems is much more rapid. When I think about how we’ve created addictive substances, it’s really similar. For example there’s nicotine in eggplants, there’s nicotine in cauliflower, but nobody’s getting addicted to eggplants and cauliflower to get their nicotine. It’s about the kind of processed cigarettes, the processed tobacco leaves, that you get that provides a dose of artificially high levels of nicotine at a really rapid dose. And then, when you get the industrialized ultra-processed version of the tobacco cigarette, it also has a bunch of additives in there, like sugar, and cocoa, and menthol, and things that even further amplify it. That’s what I see with these foods, that it’s really about our brain getting hooked on really powerful, impactful, rewarding substances that can set you up to lose control.
Mills: If in fact food is addictive, I mean, let’s say that somebody has a food addiction, if they’re taken off of highly processed foods, is there a period of withdrawal? Are their symptoms similar to the withdrawal that you might feel from stopping cigarettes, or alcohol, or a drug, another drug?
Gearhardt: Yes. My lab has actually found some evidence that this does occur. It’s preliminary early evidence. I’d say we need some more experimental work. But when we’ve asked people who, in the last year, have given up highly processed foods, have tried to cut down on it, and asked them about their experiences, they’ve reported that they experience many of the classic signs of withdrawal that we see in other addictive drugs. Again, I think we hit on a little bit of a myth here that people often think of withdrawal from addictive drugs as really physical, where you’re vomiting, and you’re shaking, and you’re sweating. Well, if we think about withdraw from cigarettes, it really doesn’t look like that. It’s more about irritability, and agitation, and cravings, and you feel edgy, and that’s really aversive and plays a role in people returning back to cigarette use.
When we look at those same exact criteria, when it comes to people trying to cut down on highly processed foods, they report those same things—that they feel edgy, irritable, anxious. They have cravings that are challenging, where they can’t focus on other things. They feel down, they have anhedonia. And they report that that’s one of the biggest factors that lead them to go back to their highly processed foods. One of the things that was striking to me when we did this research is we asked people to identify, what was the period after you cut down where it was the most intense, those symptoms were hardest to deal with? And people said it was about three to five days after cutting down on the highly processed foods, they really felt like it was really challenging to manage. When we look at withdrawal from other addictive substances, it actually follows that same time course of about three to five days is when it really peaks. And then, if you can stick with it, it starts to get better over time. And after about six weeks, you start to feel a lot better.
I think one of the things, again, that’s striking about it in the context of food is that we also looked at this and talked to parents about when they tried to cut down on their children’s highly processed food intake. And the parents said, “Oh, yes, my kids were more irritable. They were anxious. They would try and sneak food. They were acting out. They were so much harder to parent. And it was the worst about three to five days after we tried to cut back.” And so to me, this suggests that this might be a really important factor that’s contributing to our really high failure rates in being able to sustain dietary change that we’re completely missing right now and we’re not addressing,
Mills: Are there treatments then that help people get over that hump? What would you say to somebody who’s really trying to kick the habit?
Gearhardt: Yeah. So, this is an area where we definitely need more scientific study. I feel like we’re so in the spot right now where we’re still really arguing about whether this is a real thing, that we’ve only started to pivot into what are the best ways to treat this. But there is some emerging evidence. When we look at the behavioral side of things, we see that a lot of the intervention targets that we traditionally use in our addictive treatments also are really key with trying to get control of your food intake.
And that’s about being able to identify your emotions and developing healthier ways of regulating your emotions that doesn’t rely on the substance, whether that’s alcohol, or food, or tobacco. Helping people really identify what are their cues and triggers ahead of time. And that might be seeing an advertisement on TV or a certain time of day where you usually snack or a certain person who either makes you mad or is the person you usually go get your 3 o’clock coffee break donut with. Having more of a sense of your cues and your reactions can start to give you some of your power back. We’re also seeing that some of the medications that we see are effective in treating substance use disorders, like naltrexone and bupropion, are also showing some evidence of being effective in the context of binge eating and addictive eating, that these are medications that might help support people in their recovery.
One thing I think that is interesting in the opposite side is that we’re really starting to think about, in the realm of traditional addictive substances, about the food that you’re eating and how that might set you up to be successful or not in your recovery. And so, we’re starting to really understand that, when you’re really hungry, you’re actually calorically deprived, then those gut hormones that tell you you need calories have a direct message system up to the reward centers of the brain. And they say, “Hey, pay attention. We need some reward. We need some food. We need some calories. We need some cues.”
So, we’re actually seeing that, if you’re really hungry, it might not just make you more vulnerable and sensitive to highly processed food cues, but also make you more vulnerable to traditionally addictive substances, like alcohol, cigarettes, and cocaine. And that having people really focus on eating regularly, three meals, one or two snacks of high quality foods, getting enough protein, stabilizing that blood sugar, that might be not only be really key in recovering in the context of your relationship with these highly processed foods, but also may be an overlooked intervention that we could use and the recovery from other addictive substances.
Mills: Is there any relationship between food addiction and anorexia or bulimia?
Gearhardt: Yeah, so we’ve done work on that, and we’re definitely seeing in the context of bulimia nervosa really high endorsement rates of food addiction. Some studies have estimated that up to 80% to 90% of people who have bulimia nervosa report experiencing an addiction, an addictive like profile, in their relationship with food. In some ways, that’s really not surprising. They’re both hallmarked by a loss of control. With binge eating disorder, we see it’s maybe more about 50% of people with binge eating disorder meet for the food addiction phenotype and 50% don’t. The 50% that do are more likely to endorse addictive mechanisms, like intense cravings, emotion dysregulation, heightened impulsivity, those core factors that we think of as playing a big role in substance use disorders.
Anorexia nervosa has been more of a perplexing one. It should be the complete opposite. But we see particularly individuals who have anorexia nervosa, binge/purge subtype, where even though they’re not eating large amounts of food, they subjectively experience it as a loss of control binge. That group of people will also endorse addictive eating. I’m really curious that, in the same way we see that some people have objective binge eating, where they’re objectively binging on lots of food, but some people aren’t having a lot of food, but experience it as a binge, whether we’re also seeing that with food addiction. Where some people, all they eat is like a turkey sandwich and a bag of chips. And they say, “Oh man, that was really an addictive eating episode.” So, in the context of anorexia, we really need to understand it more. We do see that that endorsement of food addiction in anorexia is associated with a more severe clinical presentation and potentially a worse clinical prognosis.
Just to pivot a little bit, I think one thing I want to make really clear is that a lot of people have asked me, well, isn’t this already covered in our diagnoses? We have binge eating disorder. We have bulimia. It is food addiction. It’s just that. I would say that, that really isn’t the case. I think, when we look at those estimates of prevalence, we see that about, as I mentioned, about 14% of adults are endorsing this food addiction phenotype. Whereas, only about 2% of people endorse binge eating disorder, about 1% have bulimia nervosa. And that means we have tons of people who are endorsing a clinically relevant phenotype of problematic eating that’s in line with addiction that we’re not addressing and we’re not treating. And those individuals are more likely to have lower qualities of life, to have higher psychopathology across the board, to be less likely to respond to our traditional treatments for weight loss and for disordered eating. And so, I think we really need to attend to them and help them, even if they’re not presenting in a way that’s captured by our more traditional eating disorder diagnoses.
Mills: One thing that we’ve talked about on this podcast before is the problem of weight stigma. Do you worry that talking about food and eating as an addictive behavior might increase the stigma around weight and obesity?
Gearhardt: Absolutely. The institute where I got trained was the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale. And there was a really big group there. Rebecca Puhl, as one of the leaders, really focused on weight stigma. So, it was front and center for me and my training. And so, actually Rebecca Puhl, myself, and others have done work where we’ve actually experimentally investigated this concern that we had, that if we talk about these highly processed foods as addictive, are we doubly stigmatizing an already stigmatized group? Actually, our research has found that it’s either neutral and doesn’t increase stigma, or if anything it might reduce stigma towards individuals with higher weight.
Because right now, we’re at where I see we’ve been with a lot of addictions in the past, which is that it’s just a focus on willpower. You just have to try a little harder, calories in calories out. And what it’s ignoring is that there’s a trillion dollar industry that is using its research and development budget to specifically design these highly processed foods to trigger unnaturally intense levels of reward in your brain in a way that makes it hard to manage. And that if this is triggering this addictive compulsive pull, it’s not just an adult choice, but really the result of a toxic environment really pushing a risky food substance that we’re not well informed about. And so, that seems to actually be somewhat helpful in reducing stigma and reducing the belief that people just aren’t trying hard enough and it’s just a matter of willpower.
Mills: Do you have any advice for parents who are trying to figure out how to feed their young children? I mean, you alluded to the fact that you are struggling as a parent yourself. Is it better to avoid these prepackaged ultra-processed foods altogether? Or if you forbid kids to eat them at home, are they going to be more tempted to go out and get them, maybe at a neighbor’s house, or when they’re older, they’ll just overcompensate for the fact that my mom never let me eat this stuff?
Gearhardt: I’d say this is an area where we need more longitudinal research. Almost all of our research in this area is really cross sectional. And so, for a long time, there’s really been, for parents, this idea of, if you restrain or restrict your child from having highly processed foods that you’re going to cause them to then develop a restrictive eating disorder. They’ll binge in other places where they can get it. But one of the caveats to that sort of work, and I’ve been somebody who’s treated eating disorders before, is that parents will come into me and they will say, “From the moment this child was born, they have had such a strong reward pull and drive towards these highly processed foods that they’ll eat them to the point where they’ll throw up. And so, if I don’t step in and try and help moderate that or prevent that you, they will get sick. They will have such problems with these foods.” And so, we also see that kids who are maybe prone to this intense reward drive with these foods, it’s eliciting parents to try and step in and restrict more.
Now, in general, I think either extreme is probably not going to be where we land. I think saying, it’s full there’s no, there’s no moderation, it’s eat these highly processed foods whenever and however you want with your kids, there’s no kind of guidelines in your house, is not great. On the other end, if it becomes an obsession in the family, and you never, ever, ever eat these highly processed foods, it’s the forbidden fruit, I think that’s probably not great either. The hard part is it’s probably one of those complex topics where it’s a middle ground, and that for each family it’s probably going to be a somewhat unique answer.
And so, in my own family, I try and make it the default where the majority of what we’re eating is real food, actual food. But we’ll absolutely have times where we eat popsicles or we’ll have a Friday pizza night. But I try and make it less of the status quo. Now, that’s what works for my family. But I don’t think that there is one perfect answer for anyone. And honestly, I think we need to be a lot kinder to parents that, as scientists, we don’t have the answer, and that they need to figure out what is healthiest for their family and with their children.
Mills: You’ve written that this is an issue that can’t be solved at the level of individual choices, which is what we were just talking about, and that instead we need broader societal changes and regulations around food and food advertising to really make a difference. What are the changes that you think are needed?
Gearhardt: Yes, I think when we look at the history of addiction, this is so clear to us that, when we look at tobacco, which—diet-related disease related to excessive intake of these highly processed foods is on par with killing the amount of people that tobacco products do. This is as big of a public health crisis. And we really saw that with tobacco, it wasn’t that we developed better treatments to help people realize that tobacco was addictive or unhealthy. It was that we really focused on the environment and policies, and things like restricting advertising to children, getting vending machines out of places where you could just go get it and there wasn’t an ID check, taxation to really set it up where there’s economic factors that nudge people away from this substance, are all factors that have been considered in the context of changing our highly processed food environment.
There are countries that have been really frontrunners on this. Chile has made really huge changes about restricting advertising and packaging of these foods that are really targeting children, increasing taxation and really doing public efforts to change our attitude and relationship to these foods. The UK has a lot of new policies coming on board soon. America’s really at the backend of this. We’ve really not been the leaders in this.
Mills: Well, we’re the pioneers of ultra-processed food, aren’t we?
Gearhardt: Absolutely. And it’s just like how we were for tobacco. We were the biggest creators and exporters of tobacco products. And it’s really not surprising that we’re the leaders with these ultra-processed foods, because the biggest producers and creators of ultra-processed foods from 1980 to 2007 was Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds, big tobacco. They use the same playbook to market these foods, often create some of these foods, like Kool-Aid. That was a creation from big tobacco. And target children, target racial ethnic minorities, and then really try and deflect and focus solely on personal responsibility as the answer to the negative public health consequences associated with their substances, and the funding of scientists and politicians to really be in their court rather than thinking about what’s best for society.
Mills: I had mentioned earlier that not all researchers agree that food can be addictive. And in fact, you recently wrote a journal article in the form of a back and forth discussion with another scientist debating the point. What are the main areas of disagreement among researchers right now? And what research do you think needs to be done to fill the gaps in our knowledge?
Gearhardt: That’s such an excellent question. This is science where we need more attention and we need more of a focus on it. It’s definitely not an open and shut case. But I would say that there’s starting to be more and more of a general consensus around whether people can show signs of addiction in their eating. I mean, it’s really clear when we think of, what are the hallmarks of an addiction? That loss of control, those intense cravings, continued use despite negative consequences. If we think of tobacco, one of the biggest pieces of evidence was that someone will be told, “You’re going to die. You have emphysema. You have lung cancer. You have to stop smoking,” and many people couldn’t.
We see that, for a lot of people, they’ll get a type II diabetes diagnosis, they’ll have a heart attack, they’ll have gastric bypass surgery to try and deal with health conditions and severe obesity, and arguably the majority of people are unable to make sustainable changes in their intake of these highly processed foods. For many people, the craving, the pull, the desire for these highly processed foods is too great. And even though they know it’s actually literally killing them, they are unable to change their behavioral patterns. So, I think there’s starting to be an understanding that, okay, those indicators of addiction and people’s behaviors seem to be there. But now the debate is really about, what is the role of the food? And some people have said it’s really not about the food. It’s just about the act of eating, regardless of the food that you’re consuming. Because we can’t identify a single chemical agent that is addictive. And so, I actually think that, personally, that these highly processed foods are an essential ingredient in being able to trigger this addictive response.
When we look at, scientifically, what are the foods that people consume in a compulsive, addictive, loss of control manner, it’s about 100% highly processed foods. If people could binge on kale and bananas, or strawberries and watermelon, and get the same fix, they would. These are people that are desperate to change and they’re unable to.
Now, I think it turns to, what do we use as our benchmarks for evaluating what foods may be addictive and how do we know? And I’ve been really focusing on what are the benchmarks we use with tobacco? Tobacco products are incredibly complex substances. They have thousands of chemicals in them. And we were able to say these tobacco products are addictive, and nicotine is the addictive agent, because of the benchmarks that they were able to trigger compulsive use. They’re highly reinforcing, meaning we’ll work hard to get them. They change our mood, they impact our brain. And when we look at these highly processed foods, they tick all those boxes. They actually trigger—sugars and fats, highly processed foods trigger the same amount of dopamine release, which is the most key neurotransmitter in addiction. They trigger the same amount of dopamine release in the brain as nicotine, as alcohol. And so, when we think about whether they are as powerful, I would argue that they are.
And so, I think more research really needs to be focused on—even in this podcast, we’ve said food addiction so many times, and that’s what I called it when we first started doing the research. It’s clearly not all foods. It’s clearly this subset of highly processed foods that are unnatural, highly refined, highly rewarding products. And that’s what people get hooked on. We can’t get people to eat enough fruits, and vegetables, and legumes, and lean meats, even when we spend millions of dollars on public health campaigns to encourage them. Whereas, people are really struggling to get a handle on their relationship with these foods, even in the face of really stark consequences.
Mills: Are you saying the argument on the other side, the researchers who don’t believe this is an addiction, is because you can’t identify this one substance, like nicotine?
Gearhardt: That’s the main argument. And that eating is just so complex that it’s so hard to tell. However people are dying. This is now the number two, maybe even number one, cause of preventable death in the United States is our relationship with these highly processed foods. When I think about this, I also find that idea that we did not identify tobacco was addictive because we were able to tell something about the chemical signature of nicotine. As I mentioned, nicotine exist in eggplants and cauliflower. Nicotine in a nicotine patch is not a very addictive—if anything, it’s a treatment. It’s not just about whether it has the chemical in it, but about what is the dose in which it’s delivered? How rapidly is it delivered to the system? And is it further amplified by additives? We see, with nicotine, that the flavor additives, the taste, the sugar, the cocoa, the menthol starts to play a huge role in amplifying that nicotine. Right now, we’re considering taking menthol out of cigarettes and that’s thought to save millions of lives, not due to any change in nicotine content, but because the menthol, that flavor, that cue becomes so potent and powerful in driving the addictive response.
And so, when I look at these foods, I don’t think carbohydrates in any form are addictive, I don’t think fat in any form is addictive. But when I look at how it’s delivered in these highly processed foods where it’s refined, made to be exceptionally potent—I mean, heck, if you think of natural foods, fruits have sugar, nuts and meats have fat. In natural foods carbs and fat don’t come packaged together. Breast milk is probably our best example of carbohydrates and fat being delivered together. Because they’re both really potent reward activators. When we think of our processed foods, the majority of them have fat and carbohydrates that are refined, and then at levels that far surpass what we see in naturally occurring foods. I don’t think our brain knows what to do with that. And I think if you have risk factors, like a family history of addiction, or trauma is a big one we’re seeing, or struggle with emotion regulation, then you are at heightened risk for being vulnerable to these foods.
Mills: Well, Dr. Gearhardt, this has been fascinating. I really thank you for joining me today.
Gearhardt: My pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me on. I really enjoyed it.
Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org, or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofspychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan.
Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.
