[When it comes to food, a sticker saying it’s compulsively
moreish is as much a slogan as a warning.]
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TAKE THIS ADDICTIVE FOOD AWAY FROM ME!  
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David Mitchell
October 15, 2023
Guardian
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_ When it comes to food, a sticker saying it’s compulsively moreish
is as much a slogan as a warning. _

Fast food is the best!, by ebruli (CC BY 2.0)

 

According to the _British Medical Journal_, “Not all foods have
addictive potential.” Sounds like the writer had just struggled
through a couscous salad. There’s some very non-addictive grub out
there, and most of it’s good for you. Heaps of runner beans, great
squidgy clods of spinach, bottomless bowls of vegetable soup, vast
leaves of molar-defying kale – we’d all live for ever if that was
all we ate. Or at least it would feel like that.

The same could not be said for spaghetti carbonara – it’s not very
good for you, and yet I have often found eating it to be a test of
endurance. The British version, that is. I’m sure in Italy it’s
quite different: the thinnest of eggy coatings on perfect pasta with a
subtle sprinkling of pancetta. But in the UK, it’s an eternity of
creamy sauce melding into mushy coils of spaghetti, relieved only by
the occasional oblong of packet ham glooping to the surface. The first
mouthful hits the spot, but after that it’s like trying to consume a
bog: however much you stuff in your mouth, the mixture just resettles
and there’s the same amount left. You end up eating garlic bread
alongside it just to break the monotony of texture.

This was not the point the _BMJ_ was trying to make at all. It was
not mournfully reflecting on mastication marathons, but warning that
some food genuinely is addictive. That sounds like a joke: of course
we’re addicted to food. We’ve got it bad. If we go cold turkey,
eschewing everything including cold turkey, we die. But that’s not
what the journal is getting at. Some food, research has shown, is
differently addictive. Addictive above and beyond our nutritional
needs. Addictive like alcohol, tobacco and gambling.

On the face of it, this seems like one of those bits of research that
only demonstrates something everyone already knows. That doesn’t
render it invalid. Throughout history there has been a lot of stuff
people supposedly already knew that turned out to be bullshit. Science
is there to distinguish the sage proverbs – “a stitch in time
saves nine” – from the old wives’ tales – “whatever the
illness, bleeding the patient is bound to help”. Stupid old wives.
Though all those bleeding doctors were men, so full credit to them for
finding a misogynistic way of referring to the practice once
discredited.

I’m not saying Mini Cheddars exert an equal pull to the yearnings of
crack withdrawal, but it conforms to the same pattern

Still, this is something that feels true: we want to eat more of the
things that are nice to eat. More and more of them. Much more than we
need or is good for us or, ultimately, we can endure. We all feel the
magnetism of the Mini Cheddar. There they are, in a bowl. You feel
that you would like to have one, so you do. Then you feel, more
strongly than you felt you would like to have one, that you would like
to have another one. This accelerating desire continues, not
indefinitely, but far beyond the point where the ingested salt, wheat
flour and dried cheese are of positive metabolic use. I’m not saying
Mini Cheddars exert an equal pull to the deepest yearnings of crack
withdrawal, but it all conforms to the same pattern.

This research, an analysis of 281 studies in 36 countries, makes all
that official. Some foods can “evoke similar levels of extracellular
dopamine in the brain striatum to those seen with addictive substances
such as nicotine and alcohol”. And what sorts of foods are these?
According to the _BMJ_, we’re talking about UPFs. Ultra-processed
foods. That basically means packet food – breakfast cereals, ready
meals, sweets, chocolate bars, processed meats etc. In the UK, it
makes up more than half
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our diet. So the 14% of adults and 12% of children the research claims
are addicted to them sound like conservative estimates. (Though not
Conservative estimates, which would probably be: it’s all fine and
obesity is just a manifestation of economic growth.)

These foods are often quite bad for us, particularly if we eat loads
of them. Two-thirds of adults in the UK are overweight or obese, so
that’s well over two-thirds by weight. What to do? The researchers
suggest similar approaches to those adopted with other addictive
substances, such as tobacco. Labelling to warn of the foods’
addictive properties and restrictions on advertising – things like
that ban on junk food TV ads before 9pm that the government recently
shelved
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Then again, it’s also shelved a raft of environmental measures, so
perhaps the thinking is that it doesn’t matter how fat we all get if
the planet’s becoming uninhabitable anyway? Or is the idea that we
use weight gain as a form of human carbon capture? Out of the
atmosphere and on to everyone’s arses.

Sadly, the fact that UPFs are both addictive and bad for us is not a
coincidence. The moreish quality is the tastiness we all associate
with unhealthy food. The researchers illustrated this with the example
of an apple, a salmon and a chocolate bar. The apple has a
carbohydrate-to-fat ratio of roughly 1:0, the salmon’s is 0:1, but
the chocolate bar is 1:1. This ratio rarely occurs in nature and our
metabolisms behave like they’ve struck nutritional gold which, in
the hunter-gatherer era for which our bodies evolved, they would have
done. Nowadays there are shelves and shelves of packets packing that
sort of dopamine-triggering, saliva-inducing punch, and there’s
nothing to stop us gorging on them but willpower.

In the unlikely event of any government being able to endure the
lobbying might of global UPF manufacturers, some warning labels and
some advertising restrictions might be worth a try. But I can’t
imagine they’d make a huge difference. We already know about this
addictive quality – it’s called deliciousness.

How insulted would a Michelin chef be if one of their culinary
creations didn’t qualify for an addictiveness warning? Without one,
the state would effectively be saying: don’t worry, there’s no
danger that you’ll eat any more of this than is good for you. When
it comes to food, a sticker saying it’s compulsively moreish is as
much a slogan as a warning. So maybe the sector can be encouraged to
self-regulate? Pringles have shown the way: once you pop, you can’t
stop.

_David Mitchell’s new book, Unruly
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_Support fearless, independent journalism
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quality reporting on the events shaping our world._

* food
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* Fast Food
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* addiction
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