What is Processed Food Addiction

If you’ve ever tried quitting carbs or sweets then you know how hard it is to fight a donut craving that feels like it ‘came out of nowhere’ . . .

“This can feel as intense as it does for a smoker in the midst of a cigarette craving,” says Joan Ifland, Ph.D., M.B.A., a Nutrition Counselor & Food Addiction Researcher who can give tips on how to fight through in-the-moment cravings.

“It’s also important for the long term to understand where cravings come from, why they are happening, and what triggered them in the first place,” explains Dr. Ifland. “Unfortunately most diet programs don’t prepare people with the emotional and mental tools needed to fight intense (or even mild!) cravings, and this is why most diets fail. Cutting out processed foods truly is like overcoming a lifelong addiction.”

When I read these words, I knew she was speaking to me. And most likely to millions of people, just like us, we know it is HARD to break that sugar and carb addiction. So I asked the author of the textbook Processed Food Addiction: Foundations, Assessment, and Recovery to speak to my readers on this topic. Highly enlightening!

WHAT IS PROCESSED FOOD ADDICTION

BY: Dr. Joan Ifland

The world is gripped by an epidemic of diet-related diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and hypertension. Diet-related diseases are the leading cause of preventable death. One plausible explanation for the epidemic is that diet-related diseases are driven by an addiction to processed foods such as sugars, artificial sweeteners, flour, salt, caffeine, processed fats, dairy, and food additives.

Understanding processed food addiction is important for a number of reasons. Adapting an addiction recovery model to overeating could open the door to successful resolution of a broad range of mental, physical, and emotional medical conditions. The addiction recovery model includes abstinence from the addictive substances. In addition to processed foods, these include sugars, flours, gluten, excessive salt, dairy, processed fat, caffeine, and food additives. Abstinence from addictive foods works to create control like abstinence from alcohol for the alcoholic, abstinence from cocaine for the cocaine addict, abstinence from tobacco for the smoker and so forth.

Congruent with abstinence from addictive processed foods is limiting the food-addicted person’s exposure to cues (triggers) that stimulate the cravings associated with repeated loss of control over food. If an addictive mechanism is at work in processed food, abstinence from addictive processed foods and associated cues could resolve the anguish of overeating.

Perhaps the most compelling evidence for processed food addiction comes from brain imaging. Overeaters and drug-addicted people both show hyperactive reward and stress centers in the brain. They also show that these active centers are diverting blood flow from the frontal lobe causing the rational braking system to crash. Almost every aspect of the individual, family, and society at large is affected by this addiction-related loss of rational thought. In addition to neurological functioning, drug and food addiction show similar behavior patterns, morbidity, genetic variations, family systems, fetal syndromes, corporate addiction business practices, crop subsidies, and demographic patterns.

Another strong body of evidence comes from the diagnostic criteria for addictions as published by the American Psychiatric Association in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Illness 5. Many people endorse 6 or more of these 11 criteria which is the threshold for a severe addiction. The 11 criteria are unintended use, failure to cut back, time spent, cravings, failure to fulfill roles, relationship problems, activities cut back, hazardous use, use in spite of consequences, tolerance (eating more), and withdrawal symptoms. Practitioners can easily surface the signs of processed food addiction by asking these 11 questions of their patients.

Finding out that patients have a severe addiction to processed foods can be lifesaving. Severe addictions have historically been treated with multi-year stays in residential recovery facilities. However, in the case of processed food addiction, this is not feasible due to cost and travel restrictions related to comorbidities of obesity. The best hope for severely food-addicted people is immersion online programs that provide frequent meetings throughout the day, 365 days per year. Patients will be deeply relieved to finally have the right name for their loss of control over food.

About the Author:
Founder of The Food Addiction Reset, Dr. Joan Ifland is a graduate of Stanford University with 20 years’ experience in the science of nutrition, food addiction, and recovery. She’s specializes in how processed foods impact the body, mind and emotions. The Founder of Food Addiction Reset, Dr. Ifland is the author of the textbook, Processed Food Addiction: Foundations, Assessment, and Recovery.