What is Food Addiction ?

What is Food Addiction ?

What is Food Addiction ?

In a sense, we are all food addicts. Think about how it feels when it is not able to eat. You begin to crave foods and be more physically and emotionally more comfortable cravings continue to eat becomes the most important thing you can do. It is the constant experience of people who struggle with food addiction, even if they have enough to eat.

Food is essential for survival, and unlike other addictive behaviors, it is normal to eat several times a day, and I look forward to eating for pleasure. However, several features of normal or excessive casual food dependency separation.

Firstly, food addiction is inadequate, so that people overeat to feel better, often ends up making them feel worse, and gives those more to feel again. Food addiction can harm the health, causing obesity, malnutrition and other problems.

Second, the excess food that people with food addiction are persistent, if a person addicted to food is eaten too much food - and often the wrong kind of food - too much time. Each of us overeat from time to time, but people with food addiction often eat every day, and we eat, not because they are hungry, but as the primary means of coping with stress. So if you are not able to overeating, the experience of anxiety.

The controversy of food addiction

As behavioral addictions, the concept of food addiction is a controversial topic

Learn more about the controversy of food addiction.

The field is divided between those who think that overeating can be a kind of addiction, and those who believe that real addictions are limited to psychoactive substances that produce symptoms such as physical a tolerance and withdrawal. Although this has been shown in research of sugar and fat (both components of obesity the most common causes of food), and other studies show that food produced opiates in the body, many believe that is not necessarily an addiction.

However, the growing epidemic of obesity in the last 20 years has increased public health problem. In almost all states in the United States, one in five adults is obese. Childhood obesity is classified as the main health problem for children in 2008, more than any drug abuse, third runner or unskilled, who were ahead of obesity in 2007.

This concern, as well as effective treatments for addiction, which are successfully applied to more behavior problems contribute to a movement towards understanding overeating and the consequences of obesity and related health problems, in terms dependence.

Food addiction is included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM -5), referred to as binge eating, and classifies eating disorders. Supercharging is also a characteristic of other eating disorders as described in DSM known as bulimia. Controversy remains as to whether eating disorders are actually dependencies, but many experts believe they are.

How is food addiction like other addictions?

There are several similarities between food addiction and substance abuse, including the effects on mood, external signals to eat or take drugs, expectations, moderation, ambivalence and award.

Neurotransmitters and the reward system of the brain have been associated with food and other addictions. In animal studies, for example, dopamine has been found to play a major role in global loyalty systems, and sugar frenzy has been shown to influence the activity of dopamine.

Foods, drugs and other substances and addictive behaviors are associated with pleasure, hedonism and cultural social desirability, or subculture. When advertising or people around us say food, medicines or activity feel good, it offers a self-fulfilling prophecy. We are more inclined to seek, and we are more likely to experience pleasure when we deliver.

A unified theory of addiction and mental health?

The similarities between food addiction and other addictions suggest a food processing universal basis and other outbuildings. Some experts go further, the theory overlaps , similarities and co -occurrence of mental health problems , including substance abuse, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder , eating disorders , and the phenomenon of new addiction or mental health problem developing when an old addiction is treated , indicating that they are the expression of underlying diseases related . He argued that the use of these conditions separately prevents the development of a comprehensive vision of addiction.

Further evidence is needed to support the proposed ideas, and now, practitioners differ in the extent these problems are in the frame.