What Causes Food Addiction ?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Diets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Most addictions normally have some root cause there is a possibility that some emotional trauma, could trigger it off or in some respects you could say it’s self punishment to a certain extent.

What Happens ?

So how does this all come about what is the process in our brains that makes us act this way, when you are motivated to do anything in life, there has to be a certain amount of good feeling with what you’re doing. In the human brain we have a chemical known as dopamine which is a motivational chemical this is what drives us to do things, and if there is a lack of it then not to do things.

Studies have been done on rats, that when stimulated with dopamine in their brain’s they will perform the same task over and over when given a dopamine fix, and a association that went with it. In the study done on the rats they were trained to press a switch and then given the dopamine fix.

When this happened the rats would continually press the button everytime they were given the dopamine fix until they couldn’t do it any more and were exhausted. So as we can see from this particular study when you do something that causes you to stimulate the dopamine receptors in your mind it is going to be very hard to stop this behaviour from happening.

This in a nutshell is how we become addicted to various substances, whether it be alcohol, smoking, shopping or any other addictive behavior. This is why it can be very hard to break addictive behaviour by willpower alone because this is all happening in the primitive part of your brain.

Are We Programmed This Way ?

It would seem we are some recent research that was done on people, revolved round using one particular sugary food dough-nuts, participants were shown a picture of a dough nut or a screwdriver, when they were shown a picture of the dough-nut, their brains electronic waveform activity went haywire but not when shown the screwdriver.

After the test subjects had eaten and quite a lot of dough nuts eight to be exact, their brain scans were totally different this time. When shown the same pictures again there was hardly any brain activity at all.

The test subjects were then tested after eight hour fast, to see what the results would be this time on this particular occasion to parts of the brain were stimulated, one part being limbic region which is otherwise known as the lizard brain, so it was saying here is food not only am I hungry, and making a decision between the screwdriver and the dough-nut.

The part of the brain that is called spatial reasoning decided that at the present time the dough nut, was far more important than the screwdriver was at the time. There probably wouldn’t even be any conscious thought during this process, so as we can see from this it’s very easy to understand what happens when we see food before us.

In a nutshell it’s all about needs at a certain time so if you’re walking down a dark alley your senses will be very highly attuned just in case you might think something is going to happen so on that particular scenario you’re less likely to be thinking about food.

And more what to do if someone tries to attack you. so in conclusion it’s probably best to make yourself aware and when you want to eat that sugary snack or doughnut, think consciously more do I really need to eat it or not.

And eat something in its place instead that isn’t so loaded with sugar.

Source : Daily Mail

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