Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--And My Own (14 page)

Then there’s the fact that social mores in America encourage eating just about everywhere. “If you go to Japan, it’s sort of socially prohibited to eat on the street,” says Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, a former White House advisor on health and chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. Zeke is also a
Morning Joe
regular. “People just don’t do it. It’s very different in America.”

Price also plays a role. The fact is that eating nutritious food is more expensive than the alternative. “Compared to things like fresh fruits and vegetables, processed foods have a decreased price per calorie, and the economists will tell you that has a role,” Emanuel acknowledges.

On top of that, our lives no longer require much physical activity. The kind of hard labor we used to do has been largely replaced by machines. We no longer walk to work; we drive. We have to deliberately seek opportunities to burn off calories because they are no longer built into everyday life, as they were for earlier generations. Put that together with today’s food environment and we begin to understand why we’ve gotten fat.

“Everything about modern living that makes it modern is obesigenic,” says Katz. “The problem is a flood of highly processed, hyperpalatable, energy-dense, nutrient-diluted, glow-in-the-dark, bet-you-can’t-eat-just-one kind of foods” coupled with “wave after wave of technological advances giving us devices to do all the things muscles used to do.”

The problem is a flood of highly processed, hyperpalatable, energy-dense, nutrient-diluted, glow-in-the-dark, bet-you-can’t-eat-just-one kind of foods.

—
David Katz

That pretty much sums up why the American obesity crisis started about forty years ago. David Kirchhoff of Weight Watchers calls it “a perfect storm of overeating and under-exercising.”

If my theory that some of us are addicted to unhealthy foods is confirmed by science, we’ll be able to understand a lot more about why we eat when we don’t want to. Ashley Gearhardt, PhD, a faculty member in the Department of Clinical Psychology at the University of Michigan, is a research pioneer in that area. When, as a graduate student at Yale University, she first began examining the possibility that food could be addictive, the very idea was mocked. Now, people are looking a lot more closely at the science that could explain food addiction, and her work is considered groundbreaking.

Although we still need to understand the biology better, it is no longer fringe thinking to suggest that foods “jacked up in their level of sugar, fat, and salt are addictive to some people,” says Gearhardt. “I think one reason that people don’t take food addiction seriously is because we all need food to survive. But in looking at the obesity epidemic, you realize that it’s a certain type of food that shows this addictive potential.”

The villain is no surprise: the food we call
ultraprocessed
, or
highly palatable. Another term for it is
junk food
. It contains ingredients in quantities that are simply not natural to the body.

Gearhardt’s research is built on well-accepted principles of addiction. As she explains it, the addictive potential of any substance is based on two factors: the speed of its absorption into the body and the level of activation in the brain’s reward system. “If you look at a food that’s naturally occurring, like a banana, it has a decent amount of sugar in it, but it comes naturally packaged in a way that is high in fiber and high in other antioxidants that slow down the absorption of the sugar into our bloodstream,” she explains.

Now, let’s compare that to a handful of jellybeans. There is more sugar in the candy, but more significantly, that sugar gets into the bloodstream a lot faster because it has no fiber or antioxidants. This means our response to the rewards in those jellybeans is a lot stronger than our response to the rewards in the banana—and that’s what can make a food addictive.

“There are foods that are naturally elevated in sugar, like fruits, and there are foods that are naturally elevated in fat, like nuts and meats, but there are very, very few foods that are naturally elevated in both sugar and fat,” notes Gearhardt. “Just by combining sugar and fat, we’re creating a food that is abnormally rewarding.” That’s why we crave it. “So even though you know it’s causing you massive health issues and mental health concerns, you feel compelled to keep consuming it and really struggle to stop,” she says.

Sounds a lot like a drug addict, doesn’t it?

Besides fat, sugar, and salt, Gearhardt says other additives in foods, such as caffeine, have properties that make them potentially addictive. And caffeine sometimes shows up in places that
the average consumer wouldn’t expect—like candy and chips. “If you are consuming caffeine in these products, you’re going to crave it a little more and feel a little more withdrawal when you stop eating it,” she says. Gearhardt’s research shows that a person eventually needs more of the processed food to get the same pleasurable response, another classic signal of addiction. In other words, if one handful of M&Ms is good, the whole package is better.

Zeke Emanuel is a little less certain that processed foods are actually addictive, but he does think the theory needs further study. “It’s being explored, how the brain becomes habituated to certain things and not others,” he responds. “For anyone to definitively say, ‘Yes, there’s an addiction pathway there that these manufactured foods plug into’—I think it’s just too early in the research. But it’s very interesting.”

Echoing Governor Christie, he added, “This is not simply a matter of willpower.”

Michael Prager is one man who is persuaded that food can be addictive. Prager, who has tipped the scales at 365 pounds, told Diane and me that he once felt totally out of control around food. Now he calls himself a recovering food addict. As a newspaper editor on the
Hartford Courant
. Michael worked the night shift. On his short commute home, he would sometimes get off the highway at an exit that has a Wendy’s, Burger King, and McDonald’s, side by side by side.

“One time I hit ’em all, the fast food triple play,” he told us. “I went through the drive-thru at the first place. I pulled over
so I could eat in secret, although I’m fully aware that you can see through the windows of cars. Then I went next door to the next one. I bought another entire meal—soda, fries, sandwich—pulled over, ate it, and then I went to the next one and did the same thing. Three of them at one time. I was trying to get back at people who I had decided had wronged me in some way, as if I could hurt them by doing this.”

His bad behavior didn’t end there.

“At my worst, you could find me lying on the floor of my living room at three in the morning,” Michael continues. “The reason I’m not sitting up anymore is I’ve had too much food, and it’s too painful to be sitting up. And lying down made it possible to get more food in.” That was important, he says, because “I was more into volume than I was into any particular substance. I didn’t discriminate. I would go to a convenience store after work and get a quart of milk and a box of cereal and a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter and a jar of jelly. My goal was to have enough food to get me through the night so that I didn’t have to get up at four in the morning to go out and get more.

“At work, I would try to figure out how many times I could go to the vending machine without people noticing. I was over three hundred pounds. People know that I’m an overeater, so who was I kidding? I would go to the vending machine and buy three things and go in the bathroom and eat one of them and then bring one back, and that would be the one that everybody could see. And then I’d have another one that I’d keep in my pocket and try to sneak.”

Michael doesn’t behave like that anymore, as he explains in his memoir,
Fat Boy, Thin Man
. Today, he follows a food plan
that involves weighing and measuring most everything that goes in his mouth. He now weighs 210 pounds, a weight he has maintained for more than twenty years. How did he get there? A big part was in-patient treatment: exactly what a drug addict or an alcoholic needs to confront substance abuse.

Today Michael is a motivational speaker, talking about an addiction he feels was created and nurtured by the “Big Food” makers. “Studies have documented a biochemical sensitivity to hyperpalatable foods, usually processed foods, that promote the phenomenon of cravings and cause people to act unreasonably and irrationally with food, trying to solve other problems,” he explains. “If you take out the word
food
and you put in
alcohol
or you put in
cocaine
, the concept of addiction is not controversial.”

Michael’s story and his behavior as a food junkie is all too real to me. If we had a medical diagnosis called
food addict
, I’m convinced I would qualify. Most people assume that all food addicts are fat, but I’m here to tell you they are not. Just because I have a healthy body weight doesn’t necessarily mean I have a healthy relationship with food.

Most people don’t know that I still fight my cravings for “bad food” every day. Even my
Morning Joe
partner, Joe Scarborough, thought I was a highly controlled eater—overly controlled, I think he would say. Joe and my executive producer, Chris Licht, were always pushing me to eat more when we were out on the road together. They thought my diet was far too restrictive, and they were very concerned about me.

And then they became witnesses to a breakdown in my highly disciplined diet. It happened in a big way on one of our road trips, and became an inside joke on
Morning Joe
, although it wasn’t all that funny to me. Joe told the story to Diane when she interviewed him.

“We were in Dallas at a Bob Schieffer journalism symposium at Texas Christian University, and we had been going from five in the morning to about ten-thirty at night. We had not had time for dinner, so our producer Louis ordered Mexican food for us to take in the car on our way to the airport.

“I swear to God, I heard in the backseat of the Suburban what sounded like raccoons going through the ten plates of Mexican enchiladas. Mika had devoured a meal that was intended for, like, four or five people. She’d eaten the entire thing and she had this sauce all over her face and going down the front of her shirt.

“I said, ‘What in the hell are you doing?’

“And she snapped out of her trance and said, ‘Oh, my god. Oh, my god.’”

Joe said that was the first time he truly realized just how extreme a battle I sometimes fought with food.