High fat foods leads to food addiction

[shootingstar]

http://www.vancouversun.com/health/H...647/story.html

And that's one heck of a bacon burger featured in pic within article.
The opposite may be true.at least for me for some high fat foods. Maybe eating less high fat food, one loses taste/liking for it for over time. It's been slow, barely noticeable process.

I do eat decadent food but much bacon hasn't been my thing for many years. I love peameal bacon which is not as fatty, but doesn't mean it's much better.

And I rarely eat cheesecake anymore..another high fat food if done the traditional way.

[moonfroggy]

I have read that all pocessed/refined foods are adictive and when I changed my eating habits/diet to an almost vegan whole foods lifestyle eating tons of veggies lots of fruit and minimum grains. Plenty of beans and som nuts and seeds daily for fat and avacdo too. When I did that my taste buds changed th food that tastes good to me changed and now instead of processed starchy food I crave salads and smoothies.

[limewave]

The more I've been paying attention to my diet the more I realize that I am very much addicted to certain foods. You know the saying "betchya can't just eat one!"

My triggers tend to be any highly processed food. If I have a Dorito, I end up eating half the bag. Ice cream. Pizza (from Delivery).

Those are foods I just have to stay away from altogether.

This study isn't very surprising to me, but it does affirm what I've noticed in myself. And that just makes me want to avoid those foods even more.

[zoom-zoom]

The more I've been paying attention to my diet the more I realize that I am very much addicted to certain foods. You know the saying "betchya can't just eat one!"

My triggers tend to be any highly processed food. If I have a Dorito, I end up eating half the bag. Ice cream. Pizza (from Delivery).

Those are foods I just have to stay away from altogether.

This study isn't very surprising to me, but it does affirm what I've noticed in myself. And that just makes me want to avoid those foods even more.

This is how I am, too. Though my triggers are almost always the carby, crappy, overly-processed garbage (I can eat a box of Cheeze-It crackers and then move on to the sugar-laden granola bars) and rarely whole foods, whether high in fat or otherwise.

[Tri Girl]

not surprising to me either. I've recently become an all organic eater (as much as humanly possible) and I've totally cut out EVERY BIT of high fructose corn syrup and aspartame (do you know how hard that is to cut that out- that stuff is in EVERYTHING ).
And you know what? I don't have crazy sugar cravings like I used to. I still have some organic cupcakes every now and then, and have some organic, naturally sweetened sweets, but I don't have NEARLY the cravings I used to before, and when I eat it I am satisfied with one or two bites. My tastes have changed. I find those "food like substances" that I used to eat before kinda unappealing now (but mostly I think it's because I know what's in it and it ooogs me out).
Interesting...


p.s; confession time: I'm no angel. I DID have a banana split last week. First one in many months, but I wanted it and it tasted dang good. I still like my crap sometimes, just not as much as before.

[GLC1968]

I think that article is 100% misleading. The rats became addicted to highly processed foods full of fat AND sugar and 100% completely devoid of fiber, vitamins and minerals.

If you can show me how rats got fat eating only say pemmican or avocados, then you might convince me that the fat was the culprit.

As most everyone here has mentioned, it's the highly processed foods that we can't stop eating. And there is a reason for that - they've been created for just that purpose! McDonalds or Coca Cola or Kelloggs or Sara Lee WANT you to get addicted to their food. They remove the healthy stuff to make it more shelf stable and lo and behold - now humans can eat more of it and even better...they start to crave it! Wow - jackpot! Lets keep this up...what else can we process the crap out of in order to sell more and more and more???

It's disgusting. Admittedly, I'm a victim every time I respond to a desire for Cadbury's Mini Eggs (which are the work of the devil, I swear!) Me and those rats...we are both doomed.

[KnottedYet]

poor little rats were actually starving, they were eating nutrient-deficient foods and their bodies were desperately trying every available option (including the brain reward system) to try to pull in some nutrients. "In the wild" high-fat and high-sugar foods are nutrient-rich, which is why just about every critter out there craves them.


Never mind food addiction, though. I'm quite concerned about my oxygen addiction. I keep trying to swear off the stuff, but the more dirty car exhaust I inhale, the more I crave oxygen! I can be taking in great lungfuls of car exhaust 20 times a minute, but I *still* feel the craving to breathe! I'm breathing and breathing and breathing, more than I usually do, but I still yearn for more breaths!
(oxygen = nutrients, car exhaust = nutrient poor food substances)

[nscrbug]

OMG! That picture of the bacon burger in that article just about made me hurl!!! The bacon doesn't even look fully cooked...ewwwwwwwwww!!!! I was craving something sweet and sugary just now...but looking at the pic, actually made me lose my appetite.

[shootingstar]

OMG! That picture of the bacon burger in that article just about made me hurl!!! The bacon doesn't even look fully cooked...ewwwwwwwwww!!!! I was craving something sweet and sugary just now...but looking at the pic, actually made me lose my appetite.

Admittedly I prefer proscuitto, but even much of that is not good since it tends to be quite salty.

What is appalling is a trend by some chefs to combine bacon with other gourmet cooking recipes. (I realize that it is used to give flavour to some traditional dishes at the beginning of cooking process.)

But even too much of healthy food can not be a great thing: for instance, I can absent-mindedly munch through several slices of artisanal bread within a few hrs., bread that has no fat, eggs, sugar nor hardly any salt. I really have to watch myself at times.

The breadmaking thread elsewhere in TE forums, is some evidence of enjoying some 'fruits' of labour.

[OakLeaf]

What is appalling is a trend by some chefs to combine bacon with other gourmet cooking recipes.

Is it really a "trend?" I thought it was just a "style." DH and I have a word for it (not just bacon, but ham hocks, etc.): "po'kified." Sometimes we'll go to a restaurant and two thirds of everything on the menu will be po'kified. That's when they even bother to disclose it. I ordered a salad topped with shrimp the other day. The salad was completely ridden with slices of pepperoni and some other type of summer sausage.

IAE it bugs the !@#$ out of me, too. There are so many people who don't eat pork, whether for religious, moral or health reasons. Myself, I'll pick the pork out and eat it anyway, but for a lot of people, the whole dish would be wasted. Why make two-thirds of your menu inaccessible to such a large group of potential customers? (Don't answer that. I know the answer, and it isn't pretty. )


On topic: what GLC and Knott said. It's just another round of the same old thing that's been going on for the last 40 years. That study just came out about HFCS, so the HFCS industry (who is responsible for all those "low-fat" processed foods) counter-attacks on fat. That's all this latest is.

[Trek420]

40 years? Check out the fad "low carb diet" circa 1825

http://old.eatright.org/videos/nnm/timeline.swf

Food fads come and go, it's good to eat "food that's made from food" and traditional cuisine of any culture. For example for many people the first generations arriving in the west eating the "western diet" or processed foods those new generations gain in height, and weight .... and the western way of death heart disease, cancer, and especially diabetes.

"Moderation in all things" is what my grandmother said. She survived breast cancer and lived to be 100 (or 99, we're not sure. A singer, a little vain, she'd lied about her age when she came to the US ) Have the bacon, just not platters of it.

And that's exactly what I'm going to practice is moderation after this piece of cake from the Sonoma Il Fiorrini bakery chocolate on chocolate with chocolate birthday cake.

[crazycanuck]

nevermind...I get annoyed by "the latest research says"...

[lph]

Heheh - cc, I'm not a scientist by profession but by nature, and this is my take on it:

- people "know" a whole lot of things that aren't true, or just partly true
- even when they are true, people often don't know why, or have a misconception as to why.

There is an enormous difference between experiencing for yourself that eating burgers daily makes you crave them, and "proving" (science doesn't really do that, but no matter) that eating high-fat junk food essentially rewires the brain to the point that these rats rather starved themselves than eat healthily, that there was a high level of addiction, and that people could be born with a predisposition to this kind of food addiction.

I agree that the study did seem flawed, but the results were very interesting anyway.

[kacie tri-ing]

This article frames the same study differently. It more as "high calorie and processed" food. I think lots of people understand that fat is not the problem (but one of the three macronutrients we all need).
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62R23O20100328

Here is an awesome/quick/new fat article. Granted, those runners are certainly not eating tons of processed junk.
http://triathletefood.com/?p=5475

[GLC1968]

Kacie - that article is a MUCH better interpretation of the study in my opinion.

I should clarify - my beef wasn't with the study itself but with how that article portrayed it. And let's face it, that article is as far as most of the population would ever get...they'd never even bother to read the study and form their own opinions. It's just easier to quote a respected newspaper than to do the work for yourself, right? (my mother comes to mind here...)

Personally, I'm glad that some one is finally putting into measureable terms the things that us 'weight fighters' have known for a long time. Some foods are just harder to resist and they can be a real problem. Food addiction is actually worse than alcoholism or cocaine addiction in some ways because 1) its socially acceptable to be a junk food addict - especially if you can do it and stay thin and 2) you can't just abstain from eating in order to 'cure' it. Of course, it takes longer to ruin your life or kill you than the the other addicitons...