Obesity and Addiction:  Food and Drug Reward Overlapping Circuits in Human

Obesity can be a consequence of hormone imbalance, genetic mutations, and other diseases, but obesity can also be a direct result of eating disorder – food addiction. What do food and drugs have in common? They can both make you addicted and have adverse effects on your life and do severe damage to your health. Food and drug reward overlapping circuits prove our body is amazing work of art: there are millions and millions of processes going on, and our brain can develop good or bad habits, depending on many different factors. Finding the similarities between obesity and addiction helps treat the disorder more efficiently and proves everything can be normalized once the real cause of the problem is detected.

How food and drug reward circuits overlap?

The key word to this question is dopamine. This hormone plays an essential role in both food and drug addictions. Overeating is the first signal of addiction. Any other consumption of food other than eating from hunger is driven by reward properties that affect mesolimbic dopamine (DA) pathways. Although food and drugs activate DA pathways differently, the result is the same: our body produces hormone of happiness as if we did something good and got rewarded for it. Just like Pavlov’s dog, our body produces dopamine even before the food is consumed, making changes in our brain and causing the circle of addiction. Our brain tricks us and makes us think this food will do us good and that we need to eat it: we see food, our brain sends the signal of happiness and desire to eat it; we eat it because we want this dopamine hormone to increase; we connect food consumption to the feeling of pleasure, and we practically become addicted to dopamine caused by food consumption. This is the reward cycle which is pretty much similar to drug addiction.

How is addiction born?

If this action of consuming food when not hungry repeats over time, supraphysiological DA is repeatedly stimulated and this causes plastic changes in the brain. This means we will react the same way over and over again because our brain is used to perceiving food as a reward. Vulnerable individuals are more likely to develop food addiction and to have “plastic changes in brain”. If you want to learn more about addictions, how and why they appear and how different addictions are treated, register for Integrative Addiction Conference (http://integrativeaddictionconference.com ). Educated professionals will share their knowledge, latest researches in science and their experience with you.

What kind of cycles exists?

Proper functioning of neuronal circuits is required to gain the ability to resist the urge for drugs or food. Six of those circuits are important for addiction: reward/saliency, inhibitory control/executive function, conditioning/habits, motivation/drive and interoception and aversion avoidance/stress reactivity. What maintains the overconsumption of foods or the taking of drugs is the discrepancy between the blunted neurophysiological effects and the expectation for the food/drug effects (conditioned responses).

Drug addicted and obese individuals have more in common than impairments in dopaminergic pathways. These pathways regulate the neuronal system, which can be associated with more than reward sensitivity. Conditioning (learning/memory), stress reactivity, impulse control and interoceptive awareness are also controlled by the neuronal system and are affected by dopaminergic pathways. Dopamine controls all these and is the key to both drug addiction and obesity.

According to neuroimaging studies, the middle insula plays a critical role in cravings for cocaine, cigarettes and – food. Individuals with damage in this region are more likely to stop with their addictions without experiencing relapse or cravings. The insula has another important role: it is a primary gustatory area. This area participates in many aspects of eating behavior, for example in taste. On the other side, the rostral insula (which is connected to primary taste cortex) processes and represents the pleasantness or reward value of the food one is about to eat. Insular is involved in the interceptive sense of the body, in motivation, in emotion and emotional awareness; therefore, a contribution of insular impairment in obesity is expected.

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Although obesity and addiction overlap in the brain circuits, there is still a difference: food intake behavior regulation is much more complex than the regulation of drugs. Drug intake is mediated by rewarding effects of drugs while food intake is controlled not only by hedonic factors (rewarding factors) but also by multiple peripheral and central factors; these factors are the so-called homeostatic factors; they sense the nutrient requirements of the body necessary for survival). Science is discovering more and more evidence that homeostatic factors (insulin, leptin, ghrelin…) modulate food intake; homeostatic factors increase and decrease the sensitivity of brain reward circuits to food stimuli.

Overall, the rewarding cycle is present in both food overconsumption and drug abuse; there are many more overlapping points of two circuits. You can find out more at the conference. Professionals will give you any information you need and remove your doubts. Visit the website and register for education: http://integrativeaddictionconference.com/