VIDEO: An alternative idea to food addiction

The concept of food addiction is a hotly debated one.

In this video, Fatima Cody Stanford, MD, MPH, MPA, MBA, FAAP, FACP, FAHA, FAMWA, FTOS, an obesity medicine physician and associate professor of medicine and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and director of Diversity & Inclusion of the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at Harvard, discussed an alternative idea to food addiction.

Stanford said that she believes the concept is derived from a lack of understanding regarding the pathophysiology of how the brain regulates desire for food and emphasized that food is unlike opioid or alcohol use disorder because everyone must eat to live.

“I do think that a propensity to highly processed, highly palatable foods can potentiate this idea or concept that is termed ‘food addiction,’” she told Healio. “I might treat [patients] with a therapy that changes their brain’s regulation, and then they no longer ‘have food addiction.’ It's because I'm treating the biology that's causing them to think that this is part of their issue, as opposed to recognizing that it's part of their biology influenced by the environment that we live in.”

For more information on the food addiction debate, see the full story here.