Wow … I am loving all these smart folks talking about food reward and obesity! Be sure to check them all out if you haven’t:
- Stephan Guyenet (who started it all): part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 and his podcast with Chris Kresser
- Paul Jaminet’s thoughts and his followup (see items 3 & 4)
- Psychiatrist Emily Dean’s thoughts
A couple of my own lay comments. One, because Stephan is really dragging it out (what a tease ;), lots of folks are getting hung up on what actually makes something “palatable.”
I don’t know what Stephan has in mind, but based on my understanding, what happens is that we can associate reward with flavor. Flavor is part taste (bitter, sweet, salty, etc) and a lot of smell.
But reward is separate: it involves the bang we get for the buck. In general, we evolved to find higher calorie foods rewarding since they were valuable to us.
I whipped up this graphic to show a simple (overly simple I’m sure) view of how foods fit in a flavor/reward matrix:
As Paul Jaminet states so clearly, our preference for flavor AND reward are wired into us courtesy of millions of years of evolution.
But here’s the other critical piece: once you stop talking real, whole foods and start talking “professionally designed industrial food” (see podcast around 25:00), you’re talking a whole ‘nother ballgame.
These modern “foods” are full of ingredients that are not what our brains evolved to handle: whether it’s the sugar, salt, fat (or typically the combination of all three). The End of Overeating by former FDA chief David Kessler is a great read for more on this subject:
Animals, humans included, seem to have a built-in preference for features larger than those that occur naturally. …
Just as a compulsive gambler can’t place a single bet and feel satisfied, many people can’t stop after a few bites of hyperpalatable food. We have become conditioned to seek more reward. The barricades to repetitive behavior have been toppled. We keep looking for the next big wow.
Your brain on porn … or industrial food
Via a Matt Stone post, I came across this fascinating video series on internet porn addiction. There are two things that are great about it: first, it’s extremely well produced and explains a complicated subject in a way that’s very accessible to the lay person.
Second, although the theme is porn, the author uses food so frequently that it’s really a must-watch for anyone curious about how what we eat can affect the brain’s reward circuits and lead to overeating and potentially food addiction.
The first video is embedded above (all six are here), and aside from the slightly embarrassing title, is completely safe for work.
Eat for health, lose the weight?
I like this quote from Zoe Finch Totten of Full Yield:
People overeat Doritos because those foods are designed to trick the body’s beautiful ability to be able to self-regulate. When you eat primarily health-supporting foods you will recover those protective mechanisms.
So, like Carbsane, I’m not sure about the whole “raising fat setpoint” that Stephan talks about. To me, the idea that removing the hyperpalatable foods — thus allowing your normal appetite control systems to function — feels more like an issue of modern foods overriding leptin signalling.
Remove those foods, and the system should be able to get back to normal … at least regarding appetite.
This will be a great start (and likely the reason most diets work initially — they remove these foods). But it’s not likely to be sufficient to remove industrial food (or go bland).
I think Paul is spot on when he points out the connection between poor diet (toxins and malnutrition) and obesity. You not only want to remove Seth Roberts’ “ditto foods” — you want to replace them with foods that will promote health. And especially heal the systems hurt the most by all that industrial food: the liver and the gut.
The other key piece is to realize the implication: you’re unlikely to have health or weight loss eating lots of modern foods. So short-term diets are not the answer.
Ah, but there’s the rub. The folks for whom food reward is likely the biggest problem are the last folks who want to get off the stuff for the rest of their lives.
But maybe they don’t need to?
Tim Ferriss’ cheat day
Interestingly, this concept of food reward has me rethinking Tim Ferriss’ cheat day concept in his Slow Carb diet.
Ferriss promotes it as a way to cycle calories back up to keep the thyroid functioning well. But it actually may be a good strategy for those with food reward issues. The 4HB diet is essentially 6 low-reward days followed by one high-reward day.
I still don’t like the cheat day as a license to go nuts, but to me, it suggests that you might be able to incorporate ultra high-reward foods in a strategic way to avoid problems. More in a future post.
Great post Beth!
You’re one of the people that understands the distinction between taste and reward in this whole debate…
And it’s a crucial distinction…because in a world of cheap and easy tasty foods, very few will succeed in complying with a bland (i.e. non-tasty) diet.
Avoiding hyper-palatable (especially engineered) foods, on the other hand, is relatively easy.
And that still leaves us with an infinite variety of meal choices, macro-nutrient preferences, meal frequency tweaks etc.
Bottom line, resolving the food reward theory of obesity does not mean a life of bland, tasteless food….it just means intelligent control of a very specific sub-set of foods; i.e. hyper-palatable foods.
Cheers
Harry
Thanks Harry! I like that: “intelligent control of a very specific sub-set of foods.”
Would that we could all have the conviction of a Kurt Harris and avoid “candy cigarettes” … or their real-life counterparts forever.
I think it’s a process. You need to crawl before you walk, walk before you run. Eventually the goal should be to really avoid/minimize hyper-palatable foods. But for some of us, that may come later, after the body and brain are back to a more healthful state.
Hi Beth - thanks for the linkage! I do worry about Tim Ferris’s diet, because it is basically the same thing as Body For Life, and in body for life forums folks struggling with binge eating disorders had some real problems with those cheat days.
It may be a form of compusivity, or not, but it just feels right and sustainable to eat a serving of my favorite food every day. A diet that excluded chocolate would not be attractive to me. I suppose eating good quality chocolate is my version of drinking a glass of wine in the evening (I don’t drink alcohol). Maybe it is a form of ritual. A pleasureable pause.
But a cheat day makes no sense to me: if you eat in a way that satisfies you and that you enjoy then why would there be a reason to behave differently? Cheating would be generated by restriction, I imagine. Restriction is very different from gradually learning to feel satisfied with smaller amounts of highly palatable foods. And restriction is different from learning to recognize which foods cause problems for you as an individual, and then avoiding them. I don’t “restrict” wheat, for example; I avoid it because it causes problems for me even though I have no scientific rationale to explain why that happens. I have no idea why wheat drives (increases) my hunger and creates cravings that otherwise don’t happen.
Hi hopefulandfree
I like your thinking re cheat days…it certainly would be ideal to be perfectly satisfied with non-problem foods (i.e. total abstinence from hyper-palatable foods).
I find that some of my clients prefer this ‘cold-turkey’ approach…but this is a small minority (say, one in ten).
Most, however, find that the (a) prevalence of hyper-palatable foods, (b) the centrality of hyper-palatable foods to social occasions, and (c) the sheer fun of eating hyper-palatable foods, to be incompatible with life-long restriction.
And, given that for many people, it’s either ‘on the wagon 100%’ or ‘off it in a screaming heap’, it’s better to include a regular ‘release valve’ to allow space for some infrequent hyper-palatable foods (without incurring the physiological and addictive damage suffered from chronic consumption).
Also, (unlike allergens like wheat) there is nothing intrinsically damaging about hyper-palatable foods. The poison is in the dose and in the frequency. One piece of chocolate cake, once per week is quite compatible with a long and healthy life…one whole cake once a day is not.
Cheers
Harry
All, thanks for the comments! I’m going to do another post on this shortly, but think that there’s definitely a range of what may work for some and not for others.
The question is whether a daily (or weekly) food is a gateway to disordered appetite and/or eating. I get lots of comments on my 4HB Slow Carb diet post from people who treat the cheat day as a binge day, gain half their lost weight back, then get discouraged. This is why I don’t like the “cheat day” as Ferriss describes it. But I do think there’s something interesting in the idea of limiting hyperpalatable foods to once a week.
I also think you need to differentiate between those foods you want to eat every day because you enjoy them AND they nourish you, versus foods you want to eat every day because they over-stimulate your reward system (thus potentially leading to tolerance issues where you need more and soon it’s a snowball down the hill towards weight gain and/or binge eating).
Me, I eat a little bit of good dark chocolate (here’s my current fave!) regularly during the week. But I save the Thai take-out for once a week.
I love Yoni Freedhoff’s HuffPo post this week. It has to be about the life you will enjoy over the long term, not the one you will tolerate.
So clearly white-knuckling it without ever eating these foods isn’t ideal (though it may be necessary for some). But by the same token, treating “professionally designed industrial foods” as benign and/or as parts of a daily diet is certainly not ideal for some/many of either.
The real trick is figuring out where on the continuum one needs to be!
Ah, thanks to both Harry and Beth for further discourse on this! It really does seem to come down to what works for the individual when balancing sustainability (thanks for Freedhoff link!) and nutritional values.
I wonder now if my ability to eat a serving of chocolate every day (about 220 calories) was partly constructed by me (intrasubjectively and/or unconsciously)as a beneficial practice because I know I would choose to give up that pleasure if it became problematic (if I began to eat more than one serving on a regular basis.)
Also (please bear with me here), I wonder if choosing to eat more than one serving (which I have done only rarely, although there were no negative results) might:
1) risk the activation of cravings or obsessions because of psychological tension (constructed as concern-fear-that eating more might be risky), or
2) create a physiological response similar to addiction (from increased ingestion of highly palatable food/substance), or
3) if it is even possible to distinguish the difference (through neural imaging, for instance) between those 2 possibilities-that is: to know if the fear/feeling of risk could alter neurochemistry in such a way as to create neurotransmitter or hormonal responses which then activate compulsivity pathways.
Thus, the mental/emotional reaction would lead to the increased risk of the very behavior that was feared.
In such a case, it would be better to maintain a neutral emotional response, or to actively teach oneself (conditioning? biofeedback?) to remain emotionally neutral about eating behaviors, in general, even those that seem to carry behavior-related risk. Anyway, I think this is the approach to eating (emotionally neutral meaning no guilt or self judgement attached) that I’ve been practicing for a few years now.
I do think there is a question of susceptibility here. Eating more chocolate may be more or less of a problem for people depending on whether their food reward systems are prone to it and whether the chocolate serves as a reward. Good chocolate may be satisfying but it’s not necessarily as “rewarding” in terms of the sugar hit as your average candy bar.
As others have noted, not everyone who drinks (or drinks a lot) becomes an alcoholic, nor does everyone who does cocaine or heroin become an addict.
So for me, I think the real issue is to avoid using food to resolve stress, as that is absolutely a way to reinforce the behavior. So having strategies for not using food when triggered is key.
And as you suggest, you also don’t want to have food *become* the trigger (as in the video above). I agree with Harry that having an intelligent strategy for including these foods as a ‘release valve’ may be useful, especially initially when the brain is at its most fragile (as far as food reward/dopamine/etc goes) state.
Over time, with the right strategies, I don’t think it remains a constant struggle. I’ve commented before that I suspect it’s like grief. Hurts like hell at first, and you’ll always be aware of it, but over time, it lessens and isn’t always overbearing.
Hi hopefulandfree and Beth,
Even years after being lean, and even with my entire business depending on me maintaining tip-top shape all year (not to mention my insufferable vanity), I still find that eating ‘treats’ in either (a) an unstructured way (e.g. grabbing a piece of choccie as the impulse dictates) or (b) in a regular, but structured way (e.g. one or two small squares every night) gets me obsessing about more treats, more snacks…and it all starts to feel like a struggle.
On the other hand, indulging the pleasure centre “all in one hit” (once a week), with no cues being satisfied in between hits, seems to suppress food obsession very well. The key for me (and many of my clients) is the FREQUENCY of the stimulus (sorry about the caps…I don’t have any italics on this set-up).
I also suspect that severing the ‘cue-reward’ cycle plays a part (i.e. ignoring cues all week dissipates the strength of the cues over time); as opposed to regularly satisfying that cue (even with only a small sized reward), which amplifies the salience of the cue.
As to the 2 options hopefulandfree postulated, I think both can play a part. But, I definitely agree with Kessler that hyper-palatable foods can materially alter your brain chemistry quite rapidly (although, IME, their neurological effects can be reversed by abstinence pretty quickly too; psychology lags behind, however - “habits die hard”!).
Cheers
Harry
P.S. I’m very much looking forward to your next post on this topic Beth! Really like your table too (I would perhaps add fruit to the lower-right quadrant as the classic exemplar of flavourful but not hyper-palatable food).
Harry, your and my experience seems to match. Although I find that my regular 85% chocolate does not trip cue-reward for me … perhaps because the rest of the meal is low reward? (As an aside, interesting implication for the consumption of diet sodas with high reward meals a la a Big Mac and fries!).
So that’s the trick is to figure out where you are on the continuum and adjust accordingly. Though of course, even if eating hyper-palatable foods doesn’t affect one’s appetite in a negative way, that doesn’t mean they deserve a regular place in the diet.
Alrighty then … gotta start work on the next post!