Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
If you find yourself binging on pizza, chocolate, or French fries, there’s a good reason for that, according to a new University of Michigan study that confirmed what experts have suspected for years– highly processed foods are the most addictive kinds.
In research published Wednesday by the journal PLOS One, UM assistant psychology professor Ashley Gearhardt and her colleagues investigated which types of foods are most likely to be involved in “food addiction,” a phenomenon often linked to obesity.
That pizza is too tempting
Binge eaters often prefer highly processed foods such as pizza or French fries, but these foods haven’t previously been evaluated for generating an addiction-like response.
“We propose that highly processed foods share pharmacokinetic properties (e.g. concentrated dose, rapid rate of absorption) with drugs of abuse, due to the addition of fat and/or refined carbohydrates and the rapid rate the refined carbohydrates are absorbed into the system,” the authors wrote in their study. “The current study provides preliminary evidence for the foods and food attributes implicated in addictive-like eating.”
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Gearhardt and her colleagues conducted a pair of studies to examine the potential link. In the first, they recruited 120 undergraduate students and had each of them complete the Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS). The participants then looked through a nutritionally-diverse group of foods and chose which ones were associated with addictive-like behavior.
In the second study, they recruited 384 participants recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk and, using the same 35 foods, used hierarchical linear modeling to investigate which food attributes (grams of fat, protein content, etc.) were related to addictive-like eating behavior. Afterwards, the study authors examined how individual differences influenced this association.
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They ultimately found that unprocessed foods such as brown rice and salmon that have no added fat or refined carbohydrates were not associated with addictive eating behavior. Rather, men and women experiencing symptoms of food addiction or with higher body mass indexes reported having more problems resisting highly-processed foods that had added
Not all foods are created equal
“The current study provides preliminary evidence that not all foods are equally implicated in addictive-like eating behavior, and highly processed foods, which may share characteristics with drugs of abuse… appear to be particularly associated with ‘food addiction,’” the authors wrote.
Lead author Erica Schulte, a doctoral student in psychology at UM, noted that some individuals could be particularly sensitive to what they view as the “rewarding” properties of those types of food. “If properties of some foods are associated with addictive eating for some people, this may impact nutrition guidelines, as well as public policy initiatives,” Schulte added.
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Among the issues the study’s findings could impact are the marketing of these types of foods to children, the researchers noted. Future studies could also examine if these potentially addictive foods could trigger changes in brain circuitry in a similar way as other known addictive substances.
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