**Food Addiction**:
– Description: Refers to compulsive overeating, binge eating, cravings, and associated behaviors like grazing.
– Signs and Symptoms: Include eating alone, consuming food quickly, guilt, depression, and physical signs like fatigue.
– Effects: Linked to obesity, increased risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and contributing to the obesity epidemic.
– Management: Treatable with nutritional assistance, medication, psychotherapy, and FDA-approved drugs like lisdexamfetamine.
– Research and Studies: Use of the Yale Food Addiction Scale, brain changes in compulsive overeaters, and links to emotional struggles.
**Prognosis and Epidemiology**:
– Prognosis: Can lead to chronic conditions and death if untreated, high relapse chances, 50% recovery with proper treatment, success reliant on adherence and support.
– Epidemiology: Lifetime prevalence in the US at 2.8%, global obesity issue, addictive eating behavior supported by data, and activation of similar brain regions as drugs in various activities.
**Treatment and Prevention**:
– Treatment: Involves talk therapy, medical counseling, nutritional guidance, dental appliances like jaw wiring, and programs like Overeaters Anonymous.
– Prevention: Involves addressing behavioral obstacles, developing intervention models, dental practice interventions, and sugar taxes to combat obesity.
**Dentistry Role in Addressing Obesity**:
– Dentists’ attitudes towards addressing obesity in patients vary.
– Dentistry plays a role in obesity treatment and can contribute to addressing obesity.
– National survey on dentists’ attitudes towards obesity.
– Dentistry involvement in obesity treatment.
**Pharmacological Management and Factors Contributing to Eating Disorders**:
– Pharmacological Management: Options like Topiramate, Vyvanse, and Bupropion for binge eating disorder.
– Factors Contributing to Eating Disorders: Environmental, genetic, social, and psychological factors play a role.
– Relationship Between Binge Eating and Substance Use: Study on the link between binge eating and illicit substance use in non-clinical women.
This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. (February 2017) |
A food addiction or eating addiction is any behavioral addiction that is primarily characterized by the compulsive consumption of palatable (e.g., high fat and high sugar) food items which markedly activate the reward system in humans and other animals despite adverse consequences.
Psychological dependence has also been observed, with the occurrence of withdrawal symptoms when substituting foods low in sugar and fat. A person cannot develop a trait that codes for an eating disorder. Professionals address psychological dependence by providing behavior therapy and through administering the YFAS (Yale Food Addiction Scale) questionnaire, a diagnostic criteria of substance dependence.
High-sugar and high-fat foods have been shown to increase the expression of ΔFosB, an addiction biomarker, in the D1-type medium spiny neurons of the nucleus accumbens; however, there is very little research on the synaptic plasticity from compulsive food consumption, a phenomenon which is known to be caused by ΔFosB overexpression.