Food Addiction, Rewiring of the Reward Centers in the Brain and Why People are Getting Fatter




Hmm, remember when we first started figuring out that tobacco smoke was killing people?  There were many law suits.  The food and beverage industry my face the same in the future.


Here is a very interesting article, although I think the heading is misleading.  Sure the body craves fat - but usually in combination with sugar!  When I was doing the Fat Fast many years ago due to weight loss resistance and Hashimoto's thyoriditis, I didn't find myself craving more and more fat, even although 80% or more of my diet came from fat.  I was actually losing weight on 1000 or fewer calories a day.  I knew of other insulin resistant folks that were having similar success and losing over 100 lbs that way!


Here you will find help for binge eating.  


Here are some excerpts from the article but do read the whole article if you are interested, it's an eye-opener.


"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.


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.


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.


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