Earlier this month, the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Center for Obesity Assessment, Study, and Treatment (COAST) hosted an expert panel to share their latest research into food and addiction. Whether your interest in this might be scientifically/psychologically oriented or perhaps more cultural/social/economically oriented, there's excellent stuff here for just about everybody. So please join me after the jump to find out what they had to say!
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The video (and partial transcript!) for this expert panel discussion is posted below. It's less than 30 minutes total, so I hope that most of you will have some leisure time over this Fathers' Day weekend to watch the whole thing, it's certainly well worth it.
For your convenience, I've painstakingly provided minute marker notes so that you can skip to the portions you think might interest you most. I've got markers for the start of each panel speaker's presentation and for selected points I thought readers here would find particularly noteworthy. I hope you find my minute marker notes to be both convenient and helpful. And though it's certainly by no means a complete transcript, I hope the hearing impaired find it at least somewhat helpful.
Please note: my transcription excerpts are not "official" and therefore not exact word for word (mostly left out the "ums" and such), but they're pretty close.
Just to set it up properly, here's the text intro to the video:
UCSF Center for Obesity Assessment, Study, & Treatment Presents:
FOOD and ADDICTION: Environment, Psychological, and Biological Perspectives
Food and Addiction: Reflections on the Research
Presented by:
A panel of experts reflecting on the current state of research into food and addiction and logical initiatives that attempt to address the problem.
(Problems with the video? Click hereto view at YouTube).
00:38 MARY DALLMAN, BIOMEDICAL SCIENCES GRADUATE PROGRAM, UCSF. She speaks (very briefly) about the importance of taking a multi-disciplinary approach to the problems of obesity and its treatment.
01:42 WILLIAM HARTMAN, CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST, specialist in obesity treatment since 1982:
•03:36 "My patients, actually I ask them to read Kessler’s book, The End of Overeating, which is really a good lay description of the addiction hypothesis. And they come back, person after person, and say, (#1)That rings true, and (#2) the proposed treatment isn’t going to be strong enough".
Note: WHEE has an outstanding series on the Kessler book. It's a highly informative chapter-by-chapter review by Edward Spurlock and Clio2. You simply must check it out if you haven't already.
•04:30 "In terms of treatment we’re going to get a little help conceptualizing it from the DSM-5... my understanding is there’s going to be a de-emphasis on dependence, more emphasis on the stuff we clearly see with food: cravings, loss of control, urges, and ultimately we may be looking at "use disorders" rather than calling it addiction".
Note: He had some really good points (plus humor!) in his presentation, and draws some parallels between fast food and marijuana - how both have radically changed in size and potency over the last few decades.
07:13 BARBARA LARAIA, NUTRITIONAL EPIDEMIOLOGIST, DEPT. OF MEDICINE, UCSF, specialist in understanding the role of household food insecurity in the United States and the food environment on diet and weight in women and children:
•08:12 –"We have found that household food insecurity is associated with weight, overweight, obesity, (and) weight gain".
•10:40 - She discusses the negative impact of food insecurity on pregnant women and "food deserts" in poor communities:
"The exposure of food insecurity in the household is really driving a dependence on these very palatable foods because they’re what create some satiety so women and children feel full. There’s a cyclical nature when women and families that have money at the beginning of the month can get some food and at the end of the month they don’t have enough food, and they are constantly dependent on this poor nutrient quality food".
11:15 LARRY TECOTT, PSYCHIATRIST/NEUROSCIENTIST, DEPT. OF BIOPHARMACEUTICAL SCIENCES, UCSF, specializes in using molecular-genetic approaches to understand the brain’s serotonin system and how it impacts feeding and affect:
•12:04 With regard to the distinction between environmental and genetic factors in obesity, he says:
"The obesity epidemic is clearly not due to changes in genetic factors, which have not been keeping pace with the changes in the incidence of obesity. However it doesn’t mean genetic factors aren’t very important – they are likely to be very critical in determining who is going to become susceptible to an obesogenic environment and who isn’t."
•12:55 In addition to mentioning the "addictive responses to sugar" and the "feeding responses to stress", he talks about hedonic (pleasure related) vs. non-hedonic mechanisms regulating feeding. Very interesting stuff.
15:45 ROBERT H. LUSTIG, UCSF DIVISION OF ENDOCRINOLOGY AND METABOLISM.. He starts out his presentation with a short clip from the movie Super Size Me:
"That occurred on day 18 of his little McDonald’s binge. The bottom line is this guy is thin, his girlfriend was a vegan chef, he wasn’t exposed to any of this crap. 18 days of McDonald’s and he just described withdrawal, so it can happen to anybody. You don’t have to be genetically predisposed, anyone can do it".
•17:05 He gets into some technical stuff with the brain ("The limbic triangle"), but he’s got a chart up there so it’s not too difficult to follow. His explanation of "The limbic triangle" sets up his main point, which is this at 18:25:
•18:25 "We showed that when you drop insulin in humans, not only did they feel better, they started exercising and they reduced their carbohydrate consumption down to nil. So we took a whole bunch of obese adults consuming 900 calories a day in carbohydrate, gave them a drug that suppressed insulin called Octreotide, they lost 12.6 kilos over 24 weeks and reduced their carbohydrate intake from 900 to 350 calories a day – spontaneously, by themselves - and started exercising because they felt better..."
•20:48 "So we have now a vicious cycle of increased consumption and metabolic disease driven by the stuff we put in our food that has gone up immeasurably. And it’s not fat that’s gone up, it’s sugar that’s gone up. Our total fat intake is exactly the same as it was 25 years ago within 5 grams, plus or minus 5 grams for males and females. Our sugar intake is 6 times higher. We’ve gone from 15 grams a day fructose consumption to 90 grams a day in fructose consumption...it correlates perfectly with the obesity and metabolic syndrome epidemic".
24:25 MARY DALLMAN, who was extremely brief in her official presentation, totally throws down and gets really, really science-y here in the Q & A session. It's extremely fascinating stuff (that I couldn't even begin to transcribe) about how restricted food intake affects learning and memory.
25:50 ROBERT LUSTIG relates a very sad "food desert" story.
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