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Fatty Foods Addictive as Cocaine in Growing Body of Science

By Robert Langreth and Duane D. Stanford - Nov 2, 2011 12:01 AM ET

Food addiction Denis Stenderchuck/Getty Images

If fatty foods and snacks and drinks sweetened with sugar and high
fructose corn syrup are proven to be addictive, Big Food may face the
most drawn-out consumer safety battle since the anti-smoking movement
took on the tobacco industry a generation ago.

If fatty foods and snacks and drinks sweetened with sugar and high
fructose corn syrup are proven to be addictive, Big Food may face the
most drawn-out consumer safety battle since the anti-smoking movement
took on the tobacco industry a generation ago. Photographer: Denis
Stenderchuck/Getty Images

Food addiction

Cupcakes sit on display at a bakery in New York.

Cupcakes may be addictive, just like cocaine.

A growing body of medical research at leading universities and


government laboratories suggests that processed foods and sugary drinks
made by the likes of PepsiCo Inc. and Kraft Foods Inc. (KFT)
aren’t simply unhealthy. They can hijack the brain in ways that resemble addictions
to cocaine, nicotine and other drugs.

“The data is so overwhelming the field has to accept it,” said Nora
Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “We are finding
tremendous overlap between drugs in the brain and food in the brain.”

The idea that food may be addictive was barely on scientists’ radar a
decade ago. Now the field is heating up. Lab studies have found sugary
drinks and fatty foods can produce addictive behavior in
animals. Brain scans of obese people and compulsive eaters, meanwhile,
reveal disturbances in brain reward circuits similar to those
experienced by drug abusers.

Twenty-eight scientific studies and papers on food addiction


have been published this year, according to a National Library of Medicine
database. As the evidence expands, the science of addiction could
become a game changer for the $1 trillion food and beverage industries.

If fatty foods and snacks and drinks sweetened with sugar and high
fructose corn syrup are proven to be addictive, food companies may face the most
drawn-out consumer safety battle since the anti-smoking movement took on the
tobacco industry a generation ago.

‘Fun-for-You’

“This could change the legal landscape,” said Kelly Brownell, director
of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity and a
proponent of anti-obesity regulation. “People knew for a long time
cigarettes were killing people, but it was only later they learned about
nicotine and the intentional manipulation of it.”
Food company executives and lobbyists are quick to counter that nothing
has been proven, that nothing is wrong with what PepsiCo Chief Executive
Officer Indra Nooyi calls “fun-for- you” foods, if eaten in moderation. In fact,
the companies say they’re making big strides toward offering consumers a wide range
of healthier snacking options. Nooyi, for one, is as well known for calling
attention to PepsiCo’s progress offering healthier fare as she is for
driving sales.

Coca-Cola Co. (KO), PepsiCo, Northfield, Illinois-based Kraft and Kellogg Co. of
Battle Creek, Michigan, declined to grant interviews with their scientists.

No one disputes that obesity is a fast growing global problem. In the U.S., a third
of adults and 17 percent of teens and children are obese, and those numbers are
increasing. Across the globe, from Latin America, to Europe to Pacific Island
nations, obesity rates are also climbing.

Cost to Society

The cost to society is enormous. A 2009 study of 900,000 people,


published in The Lancet, found that moderate obesity reduces life expectancy
by two to four years, while severe obesity shortens life expectancy by as much as
10 years. Obesity has been shown to boost the risk of heart disease,
diabetes, some cancers, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea and stroke,
according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The costs of treating illness associated with obesity were estimated at $147
billion in 2008, according to a 2009 study in Health Affairs.

Sugars and fats, of course, have always been present in the human diet
and our bodies are programmed to crave them. What has changed is modern
processing that creates food with concentrated levels of sugars,
unhealthy fats and refined flour, without redeeming levels of fiber or
nutrients, obesity experts said. Consumption of large quantities of
those processed foods may be changing the way the brain is wired.

A Lot Like Addiction

Those changes look a lot like addiction to some experts. Addiction “is a
loaded term, but there are aspects of the modern diet that can elicit
behavior that resembles addiction,” said David Ludwig, a Harvard researcher and
director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at
Children’s Hospital Boston. Highly processed foods may cause rapid spikes and
declines in blood sugar, increasing cravings, his research has found.

Education, diets and drugs to treat obesity have proven largely


ineffective and the new science of obesity may explain why, proponents
say. Constant stimulation with tasty, calorie- laden foods may
desensitize the brain’s circuitry, leading people to consume greater
quantities of junk food to maintain a constant state of pleasure.

In one 2010 study, scientists at Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter,


Florida, fed rats an array of fatty and sugary products including Hormel Foods
Corp. (HRL) bacon, Sara Lee Corp. (SLE) pound cake, The Cheesecake Factory
Inc. (CAKE) cheesecake and Pillsbury Co. Creamy Supreme cake frosting. The study
measured activity in regions of the brain involved in registering reward
and pleasure through electrodes implanted in the rats.

Binge-Eating Rats

The rats that had access to these foods for one hour a day started binge
eating, even when more nutritious food was available all day long. Other groups
of rats that had access to the sweets and fatty foods for 18 to 23 hours
per day became obese, Paul Kenny, the Scripps scientist heading the study wrote in
the journal Nature Neuroscience. The results produced the same
brain pattern that occurs with escalating intake of cocaine, he wrote.

“To see food do the same thing was mind-boggling,” Kenny later said in
an interview.

Researchers are finding that damage to the brain’s reward centers may
occur when people eat excessive quantities of food.

Sweet Rewards

In one 2010 study conducted by researchers at the University of Texas in Austin and
the Oregon Research Institute, a nonprofit group that studies human
behavior, 26 overweight young women were given magnetic resonance
imaging scans as they got sips of a milkshake made with Haagen-Dazs ice
cream and Hershey Co. (HSY)’s chocolate syrup.

The same women got repeat MRI scans six months later. Those who had
gained weight showed reduced activity in the striatum, a region of the
brain that registers reward, when they sipped milkshakes the second
time, according to the study results, published last year in the Journal
of Neuroscience.

“A career of overeating causes blunted reward receipt, and this is


exactly what you see with chronic drug abuse,” said Eric Stice, a
researcher at the Oregon Research Institute.

Scientists studying food addiction have had to overcome skepticism, even


from their peers. In the late 1990s, NIDA’s Volkow, then a drug
addiction researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island
applied for a National Institutes of Health grant to scan obese people to see
whether their brain reward centers were affected. Her grant proposal was turned
down.

Finding Evidence

“I couldn’t get it funded,” she said in an interview. “The response was,


there is no evidence that food produces addictive-like behaviors in the
brain.”

Volkow, working with Brookhaven researcher Gene-Jack Wang, cobbled


together funding from another government agency to conduct a study using
a brain scanning device capable of measuring chemical activity inside
the body using radioactive tracers.

Researchers were able to map dopamine receptor levels in the brains of


10 obese volunteers. Dopamine is a chemical produced in the brain that
signals reward. Natural boosters of dopamine include exercise and sexual
activity, but drugs such as cocaine and heroin also stimulate the
chemical in large quantities.

In drug abusers, brain receptors that receive the dopamine signal may
become unresponsive with increased drug usage, causing drug abusers to
steadily increase their dosage in search of the same high. The
Brookhaven study found that the obese people also had lowered levels of
dopamine receptors compared with a lean control group.
Addicted to Sugar

The same year, psychologists at Princeton University began studying


whether lab rats could become addicted to a 10 percent solution of sugar
water, about the same percentage of sugar contained in most soft drinks.

An occasional drink caused no problems for the lab animals. Yet the
researchers found dramatic effects when the rats were allowed to drink
sugar-water every day. Over time they drank “more and more and more”
while eating less of their usual diet, said Nicole Avena, who began the
work as a graduate student at Princeton and is now a neuroscientist at
the University of Florida.

The animals also showed withdrawal symptoms, including anxiety, shakes


and tremors, when the effect of the sugar was blocked with a drug. The
scientists, moreover, were able to determine changes in the levels of
dopamine in the brain, similar to those seen in animals on addictive
drugs.

Similar Behavior

“We consistently found that the changes we were observing in the rats
binging on sugar were like what we would see if the animals were
addicted to drugs,” said Avena, who for years worked closely with the
late Princeton psychologist, Bartley Hoebel, who died this year.

While the animals didn’t become obese on sugar water alone, they became
overweight when Avena and her colleagues offered them water sweetened
with high-fructose corn syrup.

A 2007 French experiment stunned researchers when it showed that rats


prefer water sweetened with saccharine or sugar to hits of cocaine --
exactly the opposite of what existing dogma would have suggested.

“It was a big surprise,” said Serge Ahmed, a neuroscientist who led the
research for the French National Research Council at the University of
Bordeaux.

Yale’s Brownell helped organize one of the first conferences on food


addiction in 2007. Since then, a protégé, Ashley Gearhardt, devised a
25-question survey to help researchers spot people with eating habits
that resemble addictive behavior.

Pictures of Milkshakes

She and her colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging to examine brain
activity of women scoring high on the survey. Pictures of milkshakes lit
up the same brain regions that become hyperactive in alcoholics
anticipating a drink, according to results published in the Archives of
General Psychiatry in April.

Food addiction research may reinvigorate the search for effective


obesity drugs, said Mark Gold, who chairs the psychiatry department at the
University of Florida in Gainesville. Gold said the treatments he is working on
seek to alter food preferences without suppressing overall appetite.

Developing Treatments
“We are trying to develop treatments that interfere with pathological
food preferences,” he said. “Let’s say you are addicted to ice cream,
you might come up with a treatment that blocked your interest in ice
cream, but doesn’t affect your interest in meat.”

In related work, Shire Plc (SHP), a Dublin-based drugmaker, is testing its Vyvanse
hyperactivity drug in patients with binge- eating problems.

Not everyone is convinced. Swansea University psychologist David Benton


recently published a 16-page rebuttal to sugar addiction studies. The
paper, partly funded by the World Sugar Research Organization
which includes Atlanta-based Coca-Cola, the world’s largest soft-drink maker,
argues that food doesn’t produce the same kind of intense dopamine release seen
with drugs and that blocking certain brain receptors doesn’t produce withdrawal
symptoms in binge-eaters as it does in drug abusers.

Industry Response

What’s still unknown is whether the science of food addition has begun
to change the thinking among food and beverage companies, which are,
after all, primarily in the business of selling the Doritos, Twinkies
and other fare people crave.

About 80 percent of Purchase, New York-based PepsiCo’s marketing budget, for


instance, is directed toward pushing salty snacks and sodas. Although companies
are quick to point to their healthier offerings, their top executives
are constantly called upon to reassure investors those sales of snack
foods and sodas are showing steady growth.

“We want to see profit growth and revenue growth,” said Tim Hoyle,
director of research at Haverford Trust Co. in Radnor, Pennsylvania
an investor in PepsiCo, the world’s largest snack-food maker. “The health foods are
good for headlines but when it gets down to it, the growth drivers are the
comfort foods, the Tostitos and the Pepsi-Cola.”

Little wonder that the food industry is pushing hard on the idea
that the best way to get a handle on obesity is through voluntary
measures and by offering healthier choices. The same tactic worked for
awhile, decades ago, for the tobacco industry, which deflected attention
from the health risks and addictive nature of cigarettes with “low tar
and nicotine” marketing.

Food industry lobbyists don’t buy that argument -- or even the idea that
food addiction may exist. Said Richard Adamson, a pharmacologist and
consultant for the American Beverage Association: “I have never heard of
anyone robbing a bank to get money to buy a candy bar or ice cream or pop.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Robert Langreth in New York at


rlangreth@bloomberg.net; Duane D. Stanford in Atlanta at dstanford2@bloomberg.net

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