Thread: Food addiction

Although there are many intoxicants that effect everybody, alcohol, drugs, even sex to some extent. But what is the cause of food addiction?

If you are eating ice cream, just finished a bowl, and think 'I want some more', even if you are full. Why is this?

Addiction to food has spread in my opinion because of the freedom of food choice we have and how easy it is to aquire it. Yet we are grown adults and most seem to have not very good control on eating. What is the cause behind wanting to eat more even though you are physically full?

If it becomes so bad that people need restraint (which I am sympathetic with), they recieve advice and diet plans from their doctor or health advisor, yet they still persist. I found an artcile that which the governemnt wishes to actually place a law onto restaurants to not serve obese people. Can you believe that?

Most probably won't pass congress but still seems very absurd to me. It is a very extreme method of controlling obesity if you ask me.

What is the nature and biology behind food addiction. And what are your opinions of this new 'law'?

Discuss

I read an article on the obesity epidemic in Scientific American several months ago; metabolism is a very complicated issue, and varies greatly from person to person, so narrowing down exactly what it is that makes people compulsively over-eat isn't that easy. Some of it may be genetic, though I imagine it must be exacerbated by the current environment somehow, otherwise the occurrence of obesity wouldn't be so drastically larger now compared to the past.

A lot of people, though, simply don't know how to eat right, and combine this with making unhealthy food being the most cheap and available, and you get a country full of fat people. Some third world countries are going straight from having their people being largely malnourished to having their people being largely overweight, because soda companies have flooded their markets. Drinking soda is one of the worst things you can do if you want to lose weight. There's a huge amount of calories in every can.

Even diet soda has it's own negative effects. It's so ridiculously sweet, yet yields so few calories, that if you drink it often enough, your body begins to recalibrate. It thinks that sweet foods are low in calories, and to get the right amount of calories, you need to eat a lot of sweet foods. So excessively drinking diet soda can actually cause you to start overeating.

I don't think we need a law preventing fat people from eating as much as we need to teach children to develop good eating habits from day 1.