Highly processed foods resemble drugs of misuse in a number of disturbing ways
this article is dumb in a lot of ways because SciAm is a pop science outlet and food addiction research is still mired in stupid and incorrect science about obesity etc. so im not endorsing this article. i' only posting it because one of the scientists interviewed keeps saying that people who feel they are addicted to certain foods (or eat compulsively or have binge eating disorder, they dont address the differences or similarities in the article) "don't get high" from food "the same way" one can get high from drugs.
one of the opposing scientists points out correctly that nicotine also does not get you "high" in the sense of impaired life functions, she doesnt say so but i will say that nicotine is used by many many of its addicts as a performance-enhancing drug and not just to avoid withdrawals. and yet nicotine is extremely high on the addictiveness scale. caffeine is physically addictive and causes withdrawals when discontinued, it also doesnt get you "high"in the way she means.
secondly, i'm from a family of disordered eaters of all kinds, i dont think a single person i know who is related by blood to me has a normal relationship to food, and i have spent a lot of time speaking to and reading subjective descriptions of compulsive eating and food addiction, as well as observing it occur in my family, and absofuckinglutely it causes similar or identical feelings to many different kinds of drugs. theres a person in my Problem Glyphs inbox whose problem is a compulsive eating disorder that is fixated specifically on pizza, which they describe as being the only thing that medicates them effectively against stress and trauma. this is really common with super high-reward foods and drinks even if they dont contain psychoactive substances
so i dont know what the anti-food-adiction-defiition scientist thinks shes talking about. i dont think shes ever actually spoken to a person with disordered eating in her entire life.
as an aside, this is also how a lot of the most severe anorexics describe their processes of avoiding food, and this has long been accepted as an addiction process at least partially, because it satisfies the psychological compulsion, but we know 100% that fasting and even starving often triggers endogenous opioids and absolutely causes altered states of consciousness. this is described subjectively by ED patients as well as observed anthropologically, its part of the process of achieving peak experiences, flow states and trance states in every human culture in the world, but so is feasting on high-calorie foods with a lot of sugar and fat in them. monkey brain loves calories, thats why we're so good at finding and making food and surviving famine.
so idk i think sometimes those really annoying My Experiences Are Universal bitches end up going into behavioral sciences and fucking things up













