Takes the Biscuit

In "What cookies and meth have in common", Richard A Friedman, "professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at the Weill Cornell Medical College" is trying to flog "food addiction".

First though the origins of this term are worth perusing - there's evidence of professionals seeking to dump this on their usual patsies, hoi polloi.

About a decade ago, a group of American psychiatrists studying obesity decided to look into whether some people's anecdotal claims of food addiction could be proven.

Anecdotal eh?

The idea of food addiction, far from being something new, was first proposed by T.G. Randolph in a 1956 paper, “The descriptive features of food addiction; addictive eating and drinking.”

That paper is not available to view. It seems to include alcohol which is no longer seen as a food [as well as a drug] but probably was then. I had no idea this came from a professional source. Friedman again,

Neuroscientists have found that food and recreational drugs have a common target in the “reward circuit” of the brain,

Wow. There's no comparison and I'm sure he knows this.

All rewards — sex, food, money and drugs — cause a release of dopamine

Meeting your body's energy needs-eating- is not so much a reward as rewarding. The release of chemicals like dopamine express the usefulness of energy to the body, along with any other life-enhancing or worthwhile activity.

Drug abuse on the other hand beats the ever loving crap out of neural (and other) structures like reward circuitry in the course of bringing about its effects.

...the gentle impact of natural opioids, produced by our own bodies, resembles a summer breeze compared to the hurricane of physiological disruption caused by drugs designed to mimic their function.

It's like the difference between exhaling and vomiting your guts up, eyes teary and with bust blood vessels, nerves shredding vibrating with the effort.

The drug’s ability to release high levels of dopamine rapidly in reward areas of the brain produces the "rush" (euphoria) or "flash" that many people experience.

Evidence of low D2 receptors in the case of drug users or addicts is largely down to damage done during the process of drug taking. These drugs are classed as "neurotoxins";

Dr. Volkow discovered that people addicted to cocaine, heroin, alcohol and methamphetamines experience a significant reduction in their D2 receptor levels that persists long after drug use has stopped.

Versus the origins of lower D2 levels identified in people who are merely fat/ter,

In a 2010 study, Diana Martinez and colleagues at Columbia scanned the brains of a group of healthy controls and found that lower social status and a lower degree of perceived social support...were correlated with fewer dopamine receptors, called D2s, in the brain’s reward circuit.

A significant reduction versus fewer. This study's findings are consistent with others showing this tendency can cluster among families regardless of their respective sizes. I also have to go back to that low D2 and the functionality of such as the reward circuitry, "Dopamine is involved in.... (pleasure from natural behaviors such as eating)".

If your life is less rewarding than it might be is a lessening of these receptors sign of a circuitry that's not being overly used? Use it or lose it as they say.