Is Fast Food as Addictive as Drugs?

New research findings show that fast food can be highly addictive. So, people who find it difficult to say no to fast food, or if they crave it daily are actually not at fault.

According to Michael Moss (Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist of Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions), Fast food can be as addictive as Heroin.

Moss explains: While heroin relies on morphine, fast-food relies on fat, salt, and sugar in drawing out the addictive nature of a person eating fast food or a drug abuser taking Heroin. Fat, salt, and sugar release dopamine which morphine also does.

We need dopamine to survive. While food keeps us alive, dopamine motivates us to eat which makes it difficult to give up on fast food.

Moss also highlights that food manufacturers are the main culprits. They use the addictive property in fast food to their advantage. Maltodextrin is an additive in their food. It is a highly processed starch derivative with the same addictive properties as sugar and it is undetectable. It plays with your glucose level, shooting it all the way up and then immediately bringing it back down, prompting the brain to look for more food to boost dopamine. It leads us towards searching for food that has the same effect on our body and it becomes an endless cycle. This is the core reason behind craving unhealthy fast food.

Finally, parents should encourage their children to avoid fast food, thus avoiding potential addiction and then shaming them for poor eating habits. It is a real problem in our society today. Fast-food restaurants should be closed down by the governments but that is unlikely. So as parents we should avoid setting examples that might lead our children towards unhealthy food addictions and potentially fatal illness and disease.