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Enticing sights and smells of our favorite foods might make stomachs growl, but new research shows food can do even more, activating the same brain areas as illegal drugs and alcohol. This ScienCentral News video has more.
Food Fix
Numbers count for Cristina Tur. She eyes them going up, scrutinizes them going down. She rages when they don't change, weeps when they move in the wrong direction.
Tur's not a stockbroker. Her fixation with figures comes from a lifetime of chronic dieting that's seen her bounce haphazardly from one eating plan to another. "Calorie count, South Beach diet, the one with the liquid diet, the one where you have to drink shakes, no carbs..." Tur lists these as some of the many eating plans she's toyed with. "Every year I try something different. It didn't work. It worked for a little. And then you try something else. It's because you want a magic pill."
Gene-Jack Wang, a nuclear physician at Brookhaven National Laboratory, has found new evidence that the mere sight and smell of food can trigger an area in the brain—the orbitofrontal cortex—to light up in much the same way it does when substance abusers talk about their addictions, suggesting that overeating may be a biologically wired impulse in some. "The brain activation [we see with food]…we can consider that conditioned response that we're born with in order for us to survive," Wang says.
Wang studied 12 patients who first discussed their favorite foods. They agreed to fast for 16 hours before taking Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans, a technique used to look at brain activity. As Wang allowed patients to smell and taste—but not swallow—their favorite dishes, he recorded their brain activity. Then he made a connection: In prior research he did on substance abusers Wang saw the same areas of their brains activate when they talked about drug taking and drinking.
Brain image of cocaine abuser image: Brookhaven National Laboratory
"In a normal body weight subject, the moment they see food, the same area of the brain lights up," Wang explains. "That means that when people feel the most hungry they have the most reaction in that front of the brain, that area of the brain similar to the cocaine abuser."
Jonathan Stewart is a psychiatrist involved with depression evaluation services at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He sometimes counsels patients with problematic eating and food habits and says that they report, "a rush, a thrill which sounds, let's say similar, to somebody who uses cocaine or heroine."
The connection between craving, addiction and substance abuse, Stewart says, might be traced to the brain's opiate receptors, proteins on nerve cell surfaces that the brain uses to send chemical signals called neurotransmitters: "There's likely to be, at least to that degree, a commonality amongst eating problems, gambling and some drug addictions."
Tur believes that food is absolutely an addiction: "The only problem is with alcohol you can become abstinent, with food you can't. It's a killing addiction because you, if it gets out of control, you die. That's what the doctor told me, 'You're committing suicide very slowly.'"
As scientists slowly uncover the pathways food trigger in the brain, Wang hopes that "some of the drugs used to help the substance abuser relieve their craving for drugs, those kind of medications may be developed for this group of people to relieve their craving for food and to decrease their food intake."
But he cautions against pharmacology as a sole weight loss method: "Education is always important. Education, education, education. Eating a pill tries to solve the problem from a single way. That's not going to work. You need to go through all these channels." Tweaking lifestyles to strike the proper balance could induce weight loss: "You don't need to change too much of your behavior," Wang says. "You just need to adjust to the behavior as such that it helps you more."
For the past two years, Tur's been doing just that. A daily appointment at her local pool prompts her to rise at 5 a.m. to swim for an hour before school. She credits exercise with helping her keep off seventy pounds. With only 30 more to lose from her five-foot, two-inch frame, Tur's darkest diet days finally seem behind her.
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