You May Be Able To Improve Food Addiction By Healing Your Microbiome
The bugs inside of you may be what is telling you to eat certain foods and reject others
We’ve been on Florida’s east coast for a few days celebrating Bruce’s birthday by visiting beaches, seeing the Doobie Brothers (again), and visiting the racetrack and casino.
However, this morning I saw an article about a major Danish study of people who scored highly on the Yale Food Addiction Scale. It covered over 3,000 adults from the Food Addiction Denmark Project. The study found a high correlation between people who experienced food addiction and Type 2 diabetes regardless of their BMI. In other words, even people who were not overweight, but who reported addictive food behaviors, had a higher risk of Type 2 diabetes than individuals without food addiction.
I began to wonder, what is “food addiction?” I know from researching highly processed foods that these foods are deliberately engineered in food science labs to — there’s no other way to put it — addict consumers.
Why? It’s the addiction business model, which is also present in the pharmaceutical, tobacco, and alcohol industries. And much like Pharma, nicotine, and booze, a “support” and “recovery” industry has built up around the concept of “food addiction.” One can hardly search for any information about food addiction without finding dozens of sales funnel articles for residential treatment programs.
In the game of addiction, sales, and profits, it can take years for the general public and government organizations to decide what to do and respond to a problem.
It turns out that the concept of “food addiction” remains controversial. Most of the articles I found that push the notion that there “is no such thing” as food addiction are paid for, either in full or in part, by the businesses that make addictive food. One study I link below, by Rogers and Smit, was paid for by the chocolate industry.
If anyone doesn’t know by now, here’s the truth about the chocolate industry: 70% of chocolate is derived from child slave labor in Africa. This is true of fine European chocolates, Nestle candy bars, and Hershey’s kisses. It’s true of the gigantic bags of cocoa powder that used to get unloaded at the docks at the Philly Oreo plant where Bruce used to work.
And chocolate is just one food that’s often joked about as being “addictive.”
The truth is, all highly-processed foods have addiction potential. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM-5], food addiction isn’t a listed condition. However, there are some disordered behaviors associated with food that include compulsive overeating, cravings for high fat and sugary foods, difficulty in controlling food intake, and binge eating and “disordered eating patterns.”
Some studies have shown similar brain responses when eating highly-processed foods to addictive substances like cocaine or opiates.
Maybe It’s Not “You” Craving The Food
As many people are becoming aware, our bodies and minds do not operate independently of our microbiome, the most recently-discovered and least-understood organ.
None of the studies I reviewed about food addiction had any component related to the microbiome. As one example, the Danish study of over 3,000 people documented several disorders among their population in addition to Type 2 diabetes. Some study participants were being treated for mental health conditions and were receiving prescription antidepressants or other psychotropic medications.
In other words, these study participants were experiencing “food addiction,” along with many other behavioral and physical health challenges.
Eating To Heal Your Mind And Body
My ideas about food and healing started years ago. Back in the mid-2000s, I was asked to audit a two-year residential program for homeless people in Sacramento. This process is where I learned that the government would pay $60,000 per year to house and provide “programs” to homeless people, but it wouldn’t give that money directly to them so they could pay for their own place to live. The program lasted two years and had no plan for where the “graduates” would go on the day they were supposed to move out.
I was surprised when I reviewed their financial records and learned they were spending a lot on food. I talked with the food program manager, who told me he was a recovered addict (drug and alcohol) who believed that recovery started with good nutrition. So he was buying organic fruits and vegetables and the highest quality proteins he could find.
And it turned out that while the overall program just gave the homeless people a place to live for two years, on their own with good nutrition, a lot of the participants were healing and … shocker … helping themselves to get jobs and move out on their own.
When I started my own healing journey, I remembered my conversation with this gentle, kind man many times.
I’m not entirely sure how much of my microbiome I’ve healed by following the Zoe Nutrition program, but I feel much better overall: mentally, emotionally, and physically since starting the program in February. The biggest changes that the Zoe Nutrition program has introduced to my diet are variety of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and a serious reduction in the amount of red meat — really, any meat — in general.
I was and am as susceptible to food “addiction” as anyone. I ate Reese’s Peanut Butter cups every night for months. I experienced strong food cravings for foods I knew were unhealthy when I was pregnant with my daughter. I got up in the middle of the night and ate every night for years.
But I am not interested in those things any longer. It’s easy to say “no” to highly processed foods, junk foods, and sweets.
I am not going to get up in the middle of the night any time soon to eat broccoli and kale.
It’s absolutely tragic that decent nutrition isn’t associated more strongly with recovery from any addiction. It’s no surprise to me that the highly-processed food criminals (tell me again how it’s OK to make candy bar profits based on child slave labor) want to obscure the devastating effects of their poisonous products on people’s minds and bodies.
And that is what it is.
Highly-processed foods are addictive, without question. And, they also feed gut microbes that are strongly associated with depression and anxiety as well as a host of chronic health conditions. That’s where I started this morning: an association of “food addiction” with Type 2 diabetes regardless of the person’s BMI.
From personal experience, I can say that if people stop eating any highly-processed food, they will only experience cravings for a few days — at most. They will be able to, through daily nutritious meals, find their own way to control their food intake. Day by day, they’ll feel better in all ways, inside and out.
Because food is made to be fuel and nutrition for our bodies: it should never have been made into the addictive and unhealthy disease-causing terror that it has become.
If you’re interested in Zoe Nutrition, the program continues to develop and grow. Here is a link for $35 off.
Sources:
Alexis, Amber Charles, “Is Food Addiction Real?” Medical News Today, 25 June 2021, url: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/is-food-addiction-real
Adams, Rachel, Jemma Sedgmond, et. al. “Food Addiction: Implications for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Overeating,” Nutrients, 4 September 2019, url: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6770567/
Gordon, Eliza, Aviva Ariel-Donges, et. al. “What is the Evidence for ‘Food Addiction?’ A Systematic Review.” Nutrients, 12 April 2018, url: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5946262/
Rogers, Peter and Hendrik Smit. “Food Craving and Food ‘Addiction’: A Critical Review of the Evidence From a Biopsychosocial Perspective,” Journal of Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior,” 31 May 2000, url:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0091305700001970
Tamir, Irit. “Chocolate, Slave Labor, and Corporate Greed,” Oxfam, 6 August 2021, url: https://politicsofpoverty.oxfamamerica.org/chocolate-slave-labor-and-corporate-greed/
Tucker, Miriam E. “Food Addiction Tied to Type 2 Diabetes, Even Beyond BMI,” Medscape Medical News, 2 May 2023, url: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/991456
I need to write what I've personally found about how my biome affects my physical and mental health. It's mind blowing how important your gut biome is to your mental and physical health - and not one doctor has EVER discussed this with me or even mentioned it in passing.
Love this article. Gives me a lot of good ideas. Happy Memorial Day and a belated Happy Birthday to Bruce. Your friend, Gera.