Food addiction and obesity: unnecessary medicalization of hedonic overeating

Abstract

The concept of addiction is loaded with connotations and often used for its political as much as its medical utility. The scientific case for food addiction as a clinical phenotype currently rests on its association with generic diagnostic criteria for substance-related disorders applied to everyday foods and eating-related problems. This has fused the concept of obesity with addiction regardless of whether it fits the definition. The hedonic/reward system can account for ingestion of foods and drugs, confirming that they share neural substrates that differentiate liking and wanting. These are normal processes recruited for natural homeostatic behaviours and can explain the phenomenon of hedonic overeating as a consequence of human motivation pushed to extremes by an obesogenic environment. Food addiction constitutes a medicalization of common eating behaviour, taking on the properties of a disease. Use of this medical language has implications for the way in which society views overeating and obesity.Controversy over the concept of food addiction and its viability as a distinct clinical disorder is being fuelled by misconceptions on both sides of the debate 1,2

Alisol A attenuates high‐fat‐diet‐induced obesity and metabolic disorders via the AMPK/ACC/SREBP‐1c pathway

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Are trans diagnostic models of eating disorders fit for purpose? A consideration of the evidence for food addiction

“…Eating behaviour has been relatively neglected, but the concept of food addiction has brought it into the foreground . Nonetheless, the concept of food addiction is controversial, in part due to the different levels of description being used. For example, the Yale Food Addiction Scale examines behaviours and subjective reports, while the focus of other studies has been on underpinning mechanisms .…”

The association of serum leptin levels with food addiction is moderated by weight status in adolescent psychiatric inpatients

“…We applied YFAS (Gearhardt et al, 2009), the first and most widely used psychometric instrument for this purpose. However, the items of the YFAS questionnaire were tailored alongside the DSM-IV criteria for "substance related and addictive disorders," which causes ongoing debates (Finlayson, 2017;Hebebrand et al, 2014;Long et al, 2015;Schulte et al, 2017;Ziauddeen et al, 2012). New conceptual constructs like "food use disorder" (Nolan, 2017) or a Disordered Eating Food Addiction Nutrition Guide came up recently (Wiss & Brewerton, 2017).…”