Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on UnsplashEver wondered what makes certain kinds of food irresistible? What makes a snack so perfectly savoury or sweet that before you know it the whole thing’s gone and you’re feeling very bloated? American psychologists and a food scientist conducted a study to answer exactly what kinds of food that are inherently addictive. Caution: the findings won’t shock you.
The study took a set of subjects and ran them through a standardized test to determine the vulnerability to food addiction in an individual. Following this, the subjects were tasked with ordering 35 foods by how hard they are to stop eating. Using this information, the scientists analyzed the characteristics of each food and attempted to determine what ingredients, kinds of nutrients, or levels of processing led to food that felt more addictive.
The conclusion? Foods that have been processed to add more fats and carbohydrates tend to be more addictive. This includes foods like pizza, ice cream, bacon, chocolate, and chips. At the bottom of the list were things like carrots, brown rice, cucumbers and literally just water.
These results are all fine and dandy, but hasn’t it been common knowledge that junk food is more addictive than vegetables for a while now? Go into any household with a child and ask the parents what foods they have trouble getting their kids to eat. It’s not gonna be pizza and ice cream, that’s for sure.
Jokes aside, food addiction is serious business. According to a 2013 study, one in 20 Canadians suffer from food addiction. Dr. Guang Sun, one of the researchers behind the study, noted that food addiction is quite similar to drug addiction. To think that food, a prominent aspect of our culture, could be a source of unhealthy addiction if not handled with care, has horrifying implications. Dr. Sun also noted that even individuals who are not diagnosed with food addiction may see the effects of it in smaller quantities. As he put it, “food addiction symptoms are potentially part of the cause of increased fat mass in the general population.”
Obesity and overweight rates have been on the rise, nearly doubling since the 1970s. While the growth is slow, it is still ever present and will certainly shape the health demographics of the future. Being overweight or obese can have numerous detrimental effects on the human body including many cardiac and kidney diseases. Discovering a way to alleviate food addiction, a contributing factor to obesity, would likely go a long way towards making the population of Canada more healthy overall.
In the face of this, the main conclusion of this study seems a bit lacklustre, but that’s probably because it’s one of the first forays into the exact reasons behind the spread of food addiction. Most research up until now have been focused on why humans are susceptible to food addiction, and not what foods are addictive. This study is useful because it pinpoints a specific group of foods that merit further research to determine their addictive qualities.
Perhaps with further (and hopefully less obvious) research, scientists will be able pinpoint specific kinds of fat and carbohydrates that are most likely to lead to food addiction. The most obvious practical use of this knowledge would be creating diets that limit these nutrients over time which could hopefully lead individuals who suffer from food addictions back to a more healthy lifestyle.
Or developing a super-food so addictive that it puts fast food restaurants out of business.
