Study: Pizza, chocolate top the food addiction

Processed and fast foods are perhaps something that most people on this planet has had at least once. Well if you’ve had it you know that you just want more of it. Pizza, French Fries and ice cream might just be the kind of food that you love to indulge in. The researchers have always wondered whether we can become addicted to food for quite sometime. A number of reports have surfaced that indicated that people lose control over the food they eat while experiencing a withdrawal or when they are cut off, just like with drug and alcohol addiction.

In a first, a team of researchers has looked at what types of foods could be the most addictive. For the study, they asked a group of 120 undergraduates at the University of Michigan, and another group of nearly 400 adults, about 35 different types of food ranging from pizza to broccoli. The other thing they asked was whether they think they could have had any problems controlling how much they ate a particular food. Eighteen of these items were processed foods which mean that they contained fat and added sugar. The results showed that pizza, chocolate, chips, cookies ice cream, French fries, cake and soda were all featuring in the toppers list. The bad thing about this is that, all of these items are processed foods, hence the added sugars.

Erica Schulte, a graduate student of psychology at the University of Michigan and lead author of the study, said,” In a similar manner that drugs are processed to increase their addictive potential, this study provides insight that highly processed foods may be intentionally manufactured to be particularly rewarding through the addition of fat and refined carbohydrates, like white flour and sugar”. The study was published in February in PLOS One. The researchers found that the foods that created the most problems were the ones with high glycemic load, meaning they contained a lot of sugar and caused a spike in blood sugar.

Mike Robinson, who is an assistant professor of psychology, thinks that many symptoms of food addiction look like drug addiction. This includes that people need more and more of the food items to get the same effect. In order to get the effect, they end up neglecting the negative consequences and feel the anxiety or agitation of withdrawal when they can’t have it.