Food Psych Podcast with Christy Harrison · Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, CEDS

"Food Addiction" + Ultraprocessed Foods + Disordered Eating with Marci Evans

·1 hr 9 min·2 clips

Marci Evans contrasts her history with pizza and dried lentils to show why food responses can't be separated from context.

1. Food Psych Podcast with Christy Harrison revisits "food addiction" and ultra-processed food addiction nine years after its 2016 episode on the topic with Marci Evans. 2. Christy Harrison, a registered dietitian and author of Anti-Diet and The Wellness Trap, hosts Marci Evans, an eating disorders dietitian who is co-authoring a textbook and spent several months reviewing recent research. 3. Evans reads the research through an eating disorders lens and says the food addiction field and the eating disorders field are "occurring in silos alongside one another." 4. She says terminology has shifted from "food addiction" and "sugar addiction" to ultra-processed food addiction, but the NOVA classification still lacks agreement, with industrial-kitchen bread sometimes placed in group 4 and sometimes group 3. 5. She explains that the field has not settled whether this is a process addiction like gambling or a substance addiction like alcohol or nicotine, and that no causal link to specific foods, ingredients or processing has been shown. 6. On neuroimaging, she says critics note that reward centers also light up when "holding a baby or listening to music," so researchers now look at long-term changes in functional connectivity, which rests on only a handful of early-stage studies. 7. She says the Yale Food Addiction Scale 2.0, considered the gold standard, does not ask about dietary restriction or restraint, and she does not recommend providers use it alone to diagnose; she cites a 2020 article by David Wiss and Timothy Brewerton urging multiple tools to discern false positives. 8. Christy and Evans discuss how a pizza history versus a dried lentil history shows that moral attachments, generational legacies and sociocultural messaging cannot be stripped from responses to food, so neuroimaging without context is incomplete. 9. Evans reports that people who score positive for both food addiction and an eating disorder show worse treatment outcomes and more severe symptoms, with shared histories of trauma, early adversity, PTSD and ADHD, and that prevalence runs 14 to 15 percent in the general U.S. population versus up to 97 percent in eating disorder populations. 10. Suited to eating disorder clinicians, intuitive eating followers and anyone questioning food addiction claims.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Food Psych Podcast with Christy Harrison