26
votes
Can you really be addicted to food? Researchers are uncovering similarities to drug addiction in some eating patterns.
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Authors
- Claire Wilcox
- Published
- Oct 10 2025
- Word count
- 1306 words
If you can get addicting to psychological things like gambling I wouldnt be surprised if you can be addicted to anything, under the right circumstances.
Medicine is fixing the body (and mind by extension) with science. Science doesn't provide teleology, only mechanism. Divorced from ascientific ethics, or married to scientism, the value is life itself, or reproduction. From this standpoint, of the body as a machine to spread DNA, the most efficient way to live is to reproduce as soon as possible, raise the child to ~12, just old enough to survive, and then starve to death. Everything else is addiction.
Surely the existence of grandparent behaviour across every society indicates that helping children survive past the age of 12 is more efficient at spreading human DNA.
Only because humans are not driven exclusively by medical logic, my point.
Humans are substantially driven by evolution, which has genetically embedded a lot of these behaviours into most of our brains and bodies though. The route evolution has taken us down is a high investment paradigm of reproduction. We have relatively few children and they are useless for several years before being even remotely capable of caring for themselves.
A large part of our survival strategy is contingent on passing down knowledge (what food is safe? What places are safe? How do I hunt? What’s up with the seasons?), which is another time intensive process and which is also heavily dependent on long lived, non-breeding elders to act as a knowledge repository and to provide childcare and teaching.
None of this sounds very medical.
Can you expand on that?
I mean, not really. Teaching isn't medical, nor is tradition, or hunting, or even arguably food safety.
My point was not "humans should pump out kids and die", it was that medicine is a specific paradigm of thought which derives its value from the perpetuation of life and nothing else. Medical associations these days try to remedy that, but the root of medical practice is to do no harm and to heal the sick, and any QALY values are built out of that underlying mindset first, whatever is conducive to the life of the organizations issuing ethical decrees second, and those human values you've highlighted third, at best. For all the ideals of informed consent and patient autonomy, doctors and their licensors stand as barriers to elective procedures and treatments very often, for the "good reason" of protecting people from themselves.
Addiction is when something is bad for you, you know it, and you keep doing it, right? But when someone enjoys their life-destroying vice, the medical view is still to place that habit into the frame of disorder. So of course there's food addiction. It doesn't matter if it's the individual's choice, if they are not taking medical advice, they are disobeying, they are ignorant, they are to blame.
When you look at brain patterns of people enjoying things, they look similar. Addictive drugs are very fun, as is food. The neural circuits that are resultant from severe addiction derive from fundamental morphology that drives habit formation and motivation in the first place. Absent any rationale beyond "make the body work", anything that gives humans a reason to live is a slippery slope towards addiction.
Sir this is a Wendy's
Finally, a reasonable response.
I think there should be a different word for this.
No, food "addiction" is not the same as drug or alcohol addiction. One of the primary ways to live with addiction is to stop using the thing you're addicted to. You can't exactly stop eating like you can stop using cocaine, we even consider it a disease to stop eating.
Ok, but it seems reasonable to me that I could be addicted to oreos or soda pop or other specific items that I crave.
sugar addiction
highly processed food
Yeah as a self declared food addict, I don’t really buy the idea of “well we can’t stop eating.” No one’s really eating copious amounts of broccoli every day. I was binging Hostess snacks, ice cream, chips, pizza. When I made the effort to switch to real food, I wasn’t wanting to eat endless amounts of chicken breasts and green beans. I just ate the amount necessary.
Yeah! T-that would be crazy....
>_>;
<_<;
It's been probably more than 10 years and I'm still mad Red Robin's endless side cut me off after maybe the 6th or so serving of steamed broccoli + salt.
Lol I love this (I mean I hate this! Grrr!) , and will try to potentially use it as a mantra when I'm struggling to do the right thing (which is often). Broccosalt wouldn't hesitate to press this advantage, Broccosalt is here take what's theirs and darn tootin' right it's theirs!
:< but perhaps Broccosalt is the better version of me, one who eats their vegetables, and exercises, and have been seeing an OT about executive functioning for longer, and has their life together as an adult, and isn't even tempted to take advantage of petty nonsense and give in to making dumb easy evil choices all the time.
Incidentally, I just read one of Ted Chiang's short story from Exhalation, Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" (Hugo Award and Nebula Award finalist), the one about infinite parallel selves. :) Perhaps there's a version of me who went to work in HK decades ago, became a ruthless capitalist and side with money and power easily, and cheering on Might making Right why not.
I hope there's no version of me out there who is totally awful, but (this is Chiang's brilliant story idea, not mine) what small good I do today can ensure that every single branch from today has also done this small good, and hopefully becomes a habit for all those versions which begats more good actions. (Conversely, even though there's no ability to undo the evils I've done up till now, I have the potential to make those evil the absolute low points, by being better from here on)
I could live off an endless conveyor of steamed broccoli with melted cheese if my poops didn't become DeAtH iNcArNaTe as a result.
I always wonder if those studies look at insulin and blood sugar at all, they never seem to be mentioned and doctors rarely pay any attention to low blood sugar, they congratulate you for not being pre diabetic.
If you regularly eat a lot of sugar, your body adapts to produce enough insulin to manage that. If you then do someone like try keto, your pancreas doesn't understand that, it continues to produce enough insulin to manage what you were eating before, it takes some time for it to adjust.
The original article linked to a paper about withdrawal symptoms, a lot of those are also signs of hypoglycemia.
I'm not arguing that there's no possibility of food or sugar being addictive, I'm saying I think we need a different word or at least a qualifier. I do think it's interesting that the point of view used here is that food can produce the same chemical changes in the brain as addictions, rather than looking at food response as normal body function and then saying that other addictions have the same effects.
I don’t think it takes as long as you’re suggesting for the insulin to adjust. I have bloodwork set about 9 months apart. March 2021: Diagnosed with pre-diabetes. My diet got worse until about September when I did keto. By December my A1C was fine. It wasn’t even significantly lower it just went to the normal range by like .2 points or something like that.
I think there’s a warped idea around insulin where people will blame it for all sorts of things including their lack of weight loss.
I'm not sure how it came off, as far as I know it takes about a week for most people, a few it takes two weeks. I didn't mean to imply it takes a long time.
I do know that a week can feel like a really long time if you spend it with very low blood sugar.
I’ve been telling my doctor for five years that I have a food addiction.
So far, semaglutide based treatments are the only thing that has truly helped but even those I can feel like my addiction can surpass them despite it feeling awful to do so. My addiction is telling me to finish my plate, finish what’s in the cupboard, finish what’s in the pan, don’t keep leftovers for later etc.
Difficult…
If there is still some addictive need for food that semaglutide doesn’t take care of then I sincerely want to wish you the best in finding a way to quash it. Hang in there 💪
I certainly get fixations on certain textures and flavors, as well as emotional compulsions. If the news of the day makes me feel some kind of way, I know I’m going to go look for something with a crunch (because I am big mad and want to fight) or something fatty and sweet (because I need comfort) or something chocolate (because it’s got compounds that make my brain happy and it’s often faster than making tea).
The trick is to put something in my path that’s either healthy (celery for crunch, peanut butter or hummus or active culture yogurts, high protein/fiber chocolate flavored bares ) or less destructive (pork rinds for crunch, sugar free ice cream, snack size chocolate bars on a high shelf). This replaces old habits of potato chips, pints of full sugar ice cream, and full sized candy bars.
I’ve also switched my drinks to sugar free versions (both aspartame sweetened and stevia sweetened; I do not care for the overwhelming taste of sucralose) and try to make sure that I’m regularly eating fermented foods to keep my gut health in balance.
Am I addicted to foods? No, I don’t think that I am. But I do know my habits.
(Lightly edited for errors and to break up a large block of text.)