Food and Health Rethought

Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity: Food is Crack

OK. I sensationalized that title slightly. Point is my AMA Morning Rounds informs me that the study points to marked similarities in brain activities in food and drug addiction:

The Los Angeles Times /Hartford Courant (4/5, Weir) reports, “A new study from the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity,” which was published online Monday in the Archives of General Psychiatry, found that addictions to food and drugs result in similar activity in the brain.” Before reaching this conclusion, researchers recruited “48 women with an average age of 21 who ranged from lean to obese.” The participants “took a test developed at the Rudd Center to measure food addiction, based on an established test for measuring drug addiction.” The researchers discovered that “the brains of subjects who scored higher on the food addiction scale exhibited neural activity similar to that seen in drug addicts, with greater activity in brain regions responsible for cravings and less activity in the regions that curb urges.”

Read the full study here if you’re a science geek.

WSJ coverage here.

Time coverage here.

CNN coverage here.