Food Like a Drug

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I've already written about sugar once, but there's also the term food addiction. My thesis: food works like a drug, or at least a dependence can develop, maybe just through happiness hormones. Eating gives you a good feeling. A nutritionist once said we simply eat because it tastes good. Can that actually be proven? It makes sense, in any case: if something tastes good, you have more of it, a bit like with a drug. That reminds me of a scene in Innsbruck. At a presentation about the belly op, as I always call it, the chief sawbones said: if you polish off a pack of Snickers again afterwards, of course it won't help. Chief sawbones is admittedly a provocative title, but he annoyed me at the time, hence the choice of words. I found it stigmatizing and pretty cheeky. So I spoke up and asked whether obesity isn't mainly psychological in origin and whether it shouldn't rather be treated with behavioral therapy, since physical causes are probably behind it in only very few cases. He was, let's say, not amused, and neither were his trainees.

What the AI models say

At least part of it can be proven: in a small PET study with seven participants, the brain released dopamine after people ate a favorite meal, and the more pleasant they found the meal, the more dopamine was released. A review article describes how drugs and energy-rich food act through the same dopamine system and how repeated consumption can weaken self-control and encourage compulsive eating. So the nutritionist's explanation and the drug thesis do not rule each other out. It is true that obesity rarely comes down to a single physical cause, since forms caused by a single gene defect are rare. Predisposition still plays a big role: twin studies put the heritability of BMI at 47 to 90 percent, and many of the genes involved act in the brain, including areas for appetite, reward and addiction, which blurs the line between psychological and physical. In a 2020 consensus statement, 36 international experts concluded that weight stigma is common in healthcare too, and that the assumption that body weight comes mainly from a lack of self-discipline contradicts the current state of research. The prejudice also includes the idea that people with obesity are less intelligent: a review cites studies in which health professionals and fitness trainers viewed patients with obesity as lazy, lacking in self-discipline and unintelligent, among other things. In an experiment using photos of 158 contestants from the quiz show "Jeopardy!", participants rated a contestant as less competent the heavier he or she looked, even though weight had nothing to do with how the contestants actually performed.

Compiled by Claude (Anthropic), cross-checked by GPT-5.5 (OpenAI), GLM-5.3 (Z.ai), DeepSeek V4 Pro and Grok 4.7 (xAI).

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