Food Addiction: Analysis With an Animal Model of Sugar Bingeing

Abstract

“Food addiction” has been postulated as one cause for the rise in obesity and overweight in the US. However, while it has been considered a real condition among many individuals suffering from eating disorders and obesity, food addiction has only recently been seriously addressed by the scientific community. This chapter reviews the theory of food addiction and its possible evolutionary origins, and presents data from laboratory animal research and clinical studies that show addictive-like behaviors can result under certain feeding conditions, namely, in response to binge-eating sugar. Drawing on the drug abuse literature, behaviors such as bingeing, withdrawal, and craving during abstinence have been demonstrated in rats that are bingeing on sugar. Studies of the brain show neurochemical changes in sugar-bingeing rats that are similar to those observed in response to drugs of abuse. Imaging data reveal structural and functional brain changes in individuals who have pathological feeding behaviors (e.g., obesity, bulimia) that are also consistent with an addictive-like state. These findings have given the concept of food addiction a scientific basis, and this area of research may lead to new and innovative methods through which to treat individuals who have maladaptive relationships with food.