Is Food Addictive?: Insatiable Cravings

Insatiable Cravings

Terri Crecco believes she's addicted to sugar. Even as a kid, she had trouble resisting sweets. As an adult, when things aren't going well, cookies and ice cream make her feel better. Once, she downed a whole pound of jellybeans walking back to her office after her lunch break. "I meant to eat just a few, but I couldn't stop until I finished the entire bag," she says. "My cravings can be awful, insatiable. You can't ignore them." As a result, the 55-year-old New York City mortgage broker has been waging a lifelong battle with her weight.

Karsten Askeland, 56, a Niagara Falls police officer, got hooked on burgers, fries and other fast food when he was 14 and sidelined from sports after breaking his leg. Until then, Askeland had been a trim and athletic kid who played basketball and football, and was the fastest sprinter on the track team. Immobilized by his broken leg, he continued to eat as if he was still burning thousands of calories a week playing sports. Long after his leg healed and in the years beyond high school, he continued to indulge. "It would be nothing for me to eat my supper at Home and then go out immediately to McDonald's and order a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, a fish sandwich, a large order of fries and a large Coke. Sometimes I would go to McDonald's two or three times a day!"

Before Askeland knew it, his weight had ballooned to 280 pounds. In 1975 he began a strict low-calorie diet and exercise plan to get down to 190 so he could join the police force. But on his break from the night shift, he would head for the local Chinese restaurant. In time, he regained all the weight and more, reaching a high of 474 pounds. Since then, life for Askeland has been a struggle to lose weight and subdue those hard-to-deny cravings for fast food.

Stress and Comfort Food
What makes people eat like this? On a more modest scale, why do we reach for chocolate or doughnuts or potato chips when we're stressed, tired or bored? "Under stress, we crave foods that we liked as children, a time in our psychological life when there was little stress," says John Foreyt, PhD, professor of psychiatry at Baylor college of Medicine in Texas. No surprise, then, that when we're under pressure, we don't reach for the steamed broccoli.

Even animals respond to stress by indulging in fattening foods. A study at the University of California, San Francisco, found that chronic stress prompted lab rats to indulge in high-calorie foods (in the rats' case, food containing lard and sucrose).

When cravings start to sabotage health or weight-loss efforts, however, they may become a source of stress, and that's a double whammy. Can you lose weight despite yearnings for chocolate or cheeseburgers? Experts say yes, though conquering cravings can take some savvy strategy -- as well as insight into the brain and body chemistry that underlies the yen for Rocky Road ice cream or guacamole and chips.

Addicted

Gotta Have It -- Why?
Virtually all women (97 percent) and most men (68 percent) admit to having food cravings, according to one study. For women, chocolate and other sweets top the list, while men often yearn for entr茅es such as juicy steaks or cheeseburgers with all the trimmings. After menopause, women's cravings may become more like men's. "It's tempting to say that hormonal changes are to blame. But there also could be a group of older women who grew up during the Depression when more value was placed on meat and protein foods, so who knows?" explains Marcia Pelchat, PhD, a food-cravings researcher at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.

Hormonal swings seem to be at least partly responsible for women's cravings. Levels of both estrogen and the feel-good brain chemical serotonin drop when women are premenstrual. And there's a possibility that sweets, pasta and other carbohydrate foods can boost serotonin, making you feel better. Hormonal changes may also explain cravings for pickles and ice cream or other Pregnancy- related hankerings, but so far, there's no solid proof.

Could what we crave be something our body needs? Experts are pretty certain that missing nutrients are not to blame for the vast majority of cravings. True, chocolate provides the body with magnesium. But sad to say, if our bodies really were crying out for magnesium, we would be longing for big green salads, which provide a lot more than the small amount found in a chocolate bar.

Cravings have very little to do with hunger, either. Who is hungry at the end of Thanksgiving dinner when the pumpkin pie is served? And who turns it down? "If you're hungry, you don't really care what you eat. An unflavored bowl of oatmeal will do," says Allen Levine, PhD, director of the Minnesota Obesity Center.

Instead of satisfying hunger, cravings reward us and give us pleasure. Researchers are just beginning to understand the brain chemistry at work here. They have found that the creamy, rich taste of chocolate can give you a rush that's more subdued but not totally at odds -- biochemically speaking -- from what happens in the brain when drug addicts inject heroin or sniff cocaine.

Are Drugs the Answer?
At the University of Michigan, researchers found that cravings for sweets can be turned off with naloxone, a powerful intravenous drug ordinarily used to counteract heroin and morphine overdoses. They gave naloxone to 14 women who were binge eaters, 8 of whom were obese, and to 12 normal-weight women. While getting the drugs intravenously, the women were told to eat as much as they wanted of a mouth-watering array of cookies and candy bars. Once the drug entered their systems, the binge eaters lost interest in the high-cal smorgasbord. (The normal-weight women didn't eat any more or less.) Another Michigan study showed that naloxone squelched the pleasure binge-eating participants got from consuming chocolate and cookies.

This doesn't mean we need a heavy-duty drug like naloxone to curb our appetites, but it does reveal a biochemical relationship between food cravings and drug addiction. "I don't think we should be too horrified" at the parallels, says Dr. Pelchat. "Drugs are bad because they stimulate reward circuits more strongly and quickly than food, and make us neglect our responsibilities and fail to take care of ourselves."

Naloxone is much too powerful for everyday use, but some see promise in the drug Acomplia, currently awaiting approval by the FDA, which may help people lose weight or stop smoking. Still, it's doubtful that any drug will be able to cure our cravings. After all, they're not rational -- and they're not all governed by a single brain chemical. "We would have to know what other pleasures we would block," says Dr. Levine. Another problem with designing a drug: Cravings affect more than one area of the brain. When Dr. Pelchat and researchers at the University of Pennsylvania used functional MRIs to watch responses to cravings, they saw activity in brain areas related to emotion, memory and reward.

Researchers now want to know whether those reward mechanisms in the brain could be satisfied by alternative turn-ons -- music, perhaps, or video games or shoe shopping. That study is in the works. Shopaholics everywhere, beware!