A new study has found that food addictions result in similar activity in the brain as drug addictions. "This past year we got interested in the idea of food addiction and the neural process," lead researcher Ashley Gearhardt, a clinical psychology doctoral student at Yale University, told the Los Angeles Times.
"We just wanted to get down and deep into whether people really experience food addiction." The study was conducted by the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity. The researchers studied 48 women with an average age of 21 who ranged from lean to obese.
The food addiction was measured by the researchers based on an established test for measuring drug addiction. The test includes statements such as, "I find that when I start eating certain foods, I end up eating much more than I had planned.” The researchers used a functional magnetic resonant imaging (fMRI) to examine brain activity. It was done while the subjects were drinking a chocolate milkshake.
The researchers found that the respondents who scored higher on the food addiction scale displayed activity similar to that seen in drug addicts and the study also showed that the brain activity indicative of addiction was found in both lean and obese subjects who scored high when undergoing the test for food addiction. “We found that the high food addiction group showed low inhibition: They have less control in their consumption, and that's something we've seen also in addicts," Gearhardt said in a statement. Gearhardt added that more studies are needed to know whether people are born with a predilection for food addiction or develop it through their behavior.
