18 Feb, 2010

Brace yourself for a fairly intense scientific finding: The independent, not-for-profit Scripps Research Institute in the US has found that the brain responds to junk food the same way it does heroin.

So, apparently, your arvo Kit Kat is in the same category as a class-A drug. Furrowing your brow in disbelief? So did we. So we called in the big guns for an immediate explanation.

The sugar hit

Junk food is cheap, readily available and advertised everywhere. Heroin is quite the opposite. So how can these two very different things have the same negative, addictive effect on your brain? According to David Kessler, former head of the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) in the US, scientists at food corporations have combined sugar, salt and fat in ways that are “hyper-palatable”.

They’ve invented “Frankenstein” foods that take massive willpower to resist – he cites Heinz Tomato Sauce and Starbucks white chocolate mocha Frappuccinos as examples. Kessler says that this kind of chemically composed food works on the brain’s pleasure centre the same way drugs do. “The real problem is we’ve created a world where food is always available and it’s designed to make you want to eat more of it,” he says. “For many people, modern food is simply impossible to resist.”

A real addiction?

Dr Russell Keast, an obesity expert from Deakin University in Victoria, agrees that processed foods are engineered to be extremely tasty, and adds that our addiction to them can be explained by evolution. “Salt, sugar and fat are essential nutrients that were scarce for millions of years, so humans developed complex appetites for them. However, today, these compounds are everywhere. And our bodies haven’t evolved fast enough to deal with the change.”

So, here we are, with huge caveman cravings for salt, sugar and fat in a society that’s brimming with them. Scripps Research Institute also discovered that junk food addicts develop a tolerance, and require much more food to feel satisfied. “They lose control,” says Paul Kenny, who headed the study. “This is the hallmark of addiction.”

Getting clean

Melanie, a 27-year-old teacher, jokes that she’s a reformed junk food addict. “I used to eat takeaway every day,” she says. “Macca’s, fish and chips, KFC, pizza, everything. I’d wash it all down with soft drink and still feel hungry. Sometimes, I’d wake up in the middle of the night wanting corn chips and chocolate, and I’d drive to the servo at 3am to buy them. I weighed more than 90 kilos when I was living like that.”

So how did Melanie kick the habit? “It was hard,” she admits. “I really was addicted, just craving junk all the time. The main things I did to get back on track were walking everywhere, going to the gym, and not keeping processed food in the house.”
Food psychologist Denise Greenaway from rainbowfood.com.au says Melanie deserves praise for sticking it out and getting her body back into a healthy weight range.