Part the First: Ultra-Processed Foods and Addiction. Big Ag and Big Food may finally have a problem with their big moneymaking products. We have discussed UPFs here several times before. They fill the center aisles of grocery stores in much of the Anglophone world. This article in Scientific American adds to wave of information coming out: Can Ultraprocessed Foods Be Addictive? A Neuroscientist Weighs In.
The recent surge in the use of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs has propelled addiction-adjacent terms such as “food noise” and “food cravings” into common vernacular. But can food actually be addictive? Now some neuroscientists and food behavior researchers are trying to understand if food—particularly ultraprocessed foods—can be addictive in the same way as other known substances, such as cigarettes, alcohol and cocaine.
Whether UPFs meet all formal criteria of being addictive, including tolerance, does not matter in a very real sense. UPFs are food-like substances engineered by the Great American Food System (and its international subsidiaries everywhere) to be both habit forming and the default choice for many due to convenience, calorie density, mouth feel (why does that term give me the creeps?), apparent price, and advertising. Regarding price, it is true that cooking real food – animal and vegetable – from scratch is less expensive and healthier than a diet consisting largely of UPFs. But that doesn’t matter to the vast numbers of the precariat who live in food deserts where cooking at home has become a lost skill and employment often is sporadic and purposively unscheduled. I know why zero-hour employment requirements give me the creeps. They are a signal evil of the Neoliberal Dispensation, just one more violation of the categorical imperative.
This article is in the form of an interview with Alex DiFeliceantonio, who is an appetitive neuroscientist at Virginia Tech (emphasis added):
When we’re thinking about food addiction and looking qualitatively at what people are eating when they are saying that they can’t stop eating, we have to put it in the framework of a substance use disorder. These disorders affect life in an untenable way. Food addiction isn’t in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) like substance use disorder is, but there is a proposal to have it put in the DSM.
We typically look to the Yale Food Addiction Scale for clinical evaluation. The scale was designed to assess the same criteria as the substance use disorder criteria in the DSM. The scale also contains what we call clinical indicators that a person is experiencing symptoms of an addiction and those symptoms are poorly affecting life—such as the ability to engage in social situations or engage in aspects of work or life. If we accept that food addiction exists—if you give the Yale Food Addiction Scale to large population-level studies and do it across multiple countries internationally—we generally find that around 12 percent of people [experience] it.
A combination of factors can lead to an addictive behavior. And the most common is the addictive potential of the substance combined with the vulnerability of the person. We think about both of those things with food, too: ingredients that could have addictive potential and the people who could be most vulnerable. We also look at food attributes, such as high refined carbohydrate content, which is known to trigger reward pathways in the brain.
Excessive UPF “use” can certainly be considered a substance use disorder (bordering on substance abuse). The vulnerability of the “user” is certainly an aggravating factor. There are few people more vulnerable than the “left behind” who make up such a large percentage of the population in much of the Global North. And while Big Food prattles on about “making good personal choices,” that is unserious except about making money where UPFs are virtually the only choices in a food desert and the major products sold in supermarkets. Going back one hundred years to Andrew Nelson Lytle, we should remember: “A farm is not a place to grow rich, a farm is a place to grow corn.” And he was not talking about corn the GMO commodity crop that is now used primarily to make ethanol as a superfluous additive to gasoline, feedlot feedstock used to “finish” industrial beef, and high-fructose corn syrup to sweeten UPFs.
Other aspects of substance-use-disorder criteria include loss of control over intake and highly patterned intake. That’s what we see in binge-eating disorder. Binge-eating disorder and food addiction are not the same thing, but they share similarities. If we look at the foods people report consuming when they binge eat, they tend to be things that would be classified as ultraprocessed – things like pizza, ice cream, candy, chips. They’re very rarely things like fruit, nuts, beans.
This is where “food science” enters the picture. These men and women with a PhD design UPFs to hit our bliss point for Salt, Sugar, Fat. As the tagline put it about Lay’s potato chips. This must be the earliest version of “Nobody can eat just one!” starring the great Bert Lahr. And no, nobody can eat just one potato chip. This is no accident:
The current scientific thinking is we have one reward system and lots of different things that can be rewarding. All addictive drugs increase dopamine in the striatum [a brain region beneath the cerebral cortex that is involved in motor and reward processing]. This has been the dogma since 1988 with [a paper by pharmacologists Gaetano Di Chiara and Assunta Imperato]. It’s the same thing [with certain foods]. If you infuse sugar and fat into the oral cavity of an animal, you see an increase in dopamine. If you infuse these things directly into the gut [of animals], you also see increases in dopamine. There is no agreed-upon threshold in which we say a substance that is addictive must increase dopamine in the striatum by x amount.
Modern ultraprocessed foods started to become widespread in the U.S. around the 1950s. Those foods are acting on a reward system that evolved to deal with natural rewards from the environment.
When we’re thinking about food addiction, we know that there are certain levers or ways to highly activate the reward system, and ultraprocessed foods seem to access the most levers. They elevate levels of sodium, fat and refined carbohydrates in the body (Salt, Sugar, Fat again). And this is aided in various ways—with emulsifiers, with texture changes, with flavor changes – ultraprocessed foods are made to be the most palatable, the most delicious. We don’t think about broccoli as an addictive substance; we think about foods that contain enough of these potentially addictive nutrients in combination to be addictive substances.
So, are UPFs really addictive? The data certainly indicate they are. Whether the science and politics of food (which are intertwined, here and here, for example) will allow us as citizens (instead of consumers) to eat properly is the question. California has filed a lawsuit against UPF manufacturers (and these are manufactured products), but this is not a fight for lawyers. Nevertheless, one argument from Big Food resonates these days. In certain circles, we do overpathologize everything:
One pushback I hear is we don’t want to overpathologize everything. But I think that if about 12 percent of a population is telling you that they have a problem, maybe we should look at it, or we should at least give it some concerted study and determine what it is. People also say it’s a behavioral addiction—you are not addicted to food as a substance; you are addicted to the act of eating. But that argument falls down pretty quickly when you look at what people are eating. If you were addicted to the act of consuming, you would be eating things that were hard or crunchy or that required a lot of work to consume. And that’s not really what we see. We see people losing control over intake for items that are high in fat and sugar—refined carbohydrates.
One place the battle is being fought is in the medical curriculum in American medical schools, but not very well so far. Nutrition is generally taught as a subdiscipline of Biochemistry, with politics and economics left out of the curriculum. Given that UPFs and food politics have been an issue since the 1950s it is past time for emphasis to change. The Farm Bill has become what Earl Butz wanted when he told American farmers to “get big or get out.” The change we need seems too difficult to manage, but it is not. As we have discussed here before, this is a political problem with a political solution.
The Farm Bill could subsidize the production of actual food instead of industrial commodities such as corn (maize) and soybeans, which are primary inputs in UPF production. And “farmers” could be farmers again instead of cogs in the machine that grinds them down, while making it possible for all the people, not just those with the wherewithal to shop at whatever version of Zabar’s they use, to eat well as members of a local community. Again, this is a political problem with only a political solution. For those who want to read about how to do it at the local level, Barbara Kingsolver has an answer in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Not all of us can grow our own food, but we can support those who do grow our food for us!
Part the Second: The American Chestnut Returns. Speaking of food, most of us heard this song at least once over the past month. Through the early twentieth century the American chestnut was the tree in American forests. Travelers including William Bartram marveled at forests of chestnut trees. The nuts were delicious and the wood was useful for all things. Alas, chestnut blight put an end to this. Until now.
I have followed this story at a distance because a friend has been involved in the chestnut recovery project, but I did not know that For the First Time in Decades, Hikers Can Walk in Forests of Mature, Wild American Chestnuts:
Hundreds of years ago, American chestnut trees dominated the Appalachian Mountain forest-scape. They stood an imposing 100 feet tall and eight feet wide at maturity, lived for up to 600 years, and covered an estimated 200 million acres of land from Mississippi to Maine. Carpenters prized their lumber. Farmers regaled their ability to produce cheap and nutritious feed for livestock. Gourmands crowned their nuts the world’s finest.
Then an invasive blight from East Asia arrived around 1904 (as a natural consequence of international trade, along with the fire ant and the Formosan termite). The fungus attacked tree trunks and felled the giants by the tens of thousands. While lone trees survived here and there, their nuts were infertile without others to cross-pollinate them, and by 1950 American chestnuts became functionally extinct.
“The devastation represents one of the greatest recorded changes in natural plant population caused by an introduced organism in history,” says West Virginia University emeritus professor of plant pathology and former American Chestnut Foundation president William MacDonald. Had the tragedy been avoided, hikers on the iconic Appalachian Trail would not only experience a “radically different landscape” but enjoy “some very tasty treats around their fall campfires,” he says.
The ACF has spent the past seventy-five years working with various conservation agencies to crossbreed blight-resistant American chestnut trees using clippings from anomalous survivors and Chinese or Japanese varieties.
Large stands of publicly accessible American chestnut forests are now found in more than a dozen locations spread across the Virginia mountains. Other smaller experimental plots exist in Kentucky, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and Maine, but the largest and oldest sit within ten miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway at Lesesne and Matthews State Forest in Galax. Sky Meadows State Park in Delaplane and the Mountain Lake Wilderness near Blacksburg also hold destination-worthy groves.
This is tale of scientists not giving up, doing work that is by its nature slow and painstaking. They recovered a giant of the forest. This science as it should be done and an object lesson that problems can be solved. Next on my list is the recovery of more than a miniscule remnant of the longleaf pine forest that covered much of Southeast North America when William Bartram was traveling, but not in the Farm Bill way that pays tree farmers to plant longleaf pines in rows like industrial corn. We already do that with pine trees intended for paper production in these parts and a forest they do not make. If we are going to survive the coming inconvenient apocalypse (and it is coming), this can be done only by going back to the land while producing everything we need, animal, vegetable, and mineral, for use instead of only for profit. Our choice and it is really very simple.
I thank WHS for the chestnut link. Apologies for the abbreviated Coffee Break today as we begin the new year. Make this into an open thread if you desire. I don’t think we have had one of those in a long while.
Happy New Year! May 2026 be a good year for all! Thank you for reading. See you next week.
