Don't underestimate the power of fabricated food. The food industry has worked hard to design foods that more powerfully activate brain reward circuitry than foods available in the natural environment, not unlike the way the tobacco industry manipulated their product to produce maximal addictive effects. In neuroimaging studies, obese individuals and drug addicts display the same abnormalities in brain reward areas, and impaired function of a frontal lobe area needed to control cravings and impulses. The loss of control that drug and food addicts display is not due to choice or weakness; it is due to a brain disease that is at least partly, and in some cases perhaps wholly, acquired.
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Don't underestimate the power of fabricated food. The food industry has worked hard to design foods that more powerfully activate brain reward circuitry than foods available in the natural environment, not unlike the way the tobacco industry manipulated their product to produce maximal addictive effects. In neuroimaging studies, obese individuals and drug addicts display the same abnormalities in brain reward areas, and impaired function of a frontal lobe area needed to control cravings and impulses. The loss of control that drug and food addicts display is not due to choice or weakness; it is due to a brain disease that is at least partly, and in some cases perhaps wholly, acquired.
March 1, 2011 - 12:37pmThis Comment
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