Addiction Recovery

It is a well-known fact that people like food. In fact, most people not only like food, they love food. They go living day by day just for that particular sweet taste of a certain food they like. Foods contain certain nutrients and hormones that assist the body with growth and development. Some foods assist in creating chemicals that help keep you healthy. Foods that are high in sugar and fat tend to turn that chemical around; making foods that are not good for you, the food you feel you need the most. It can get to the point where these people become addicted to food. Food contains chemicals that can transmit certain reactions to the brain. Such reactions can be the urge to eat more foods with a higher fat and sugar content. Because of this, it turns eating into an addiction. Some individuals carry a certain gene that makes them more susceptible to being an over eater. Some people carry a similar gene that makes them less susceptible to being an over eater. People who carry the gene that makes them want to overeat, crave the foods they want and in turn eat those foods creating a downward spiral. This in turn creates the addiction to eating certain foods.

Dr. Pawel Olszewski from Waikato University in New Zealand has discovered a pattern that describes the addictive behavior. He has found that foods that are higher in sugar and fat content contain a chemical that produces changes in the brain that resembles addictive behavior. Dr. Olszewski has conducted several tests and experiments to prove this theory on rodents. His findings were astronomical.

Dr. Olszewski claims that foods that are more delicious to individuals with a high sugar and fat content, have the same chemical compound for addiction as morphine or nicotine. Because of this, it makes those types of foods more addictive. It has been discovered that when eating foods that are higher in sugar and fat content, individuals tend to eat more until they are too full. This is because these types of foods have empty calories that cause the body not to feel as full. The chemicals that control the full feeling are stomped down with the sugar and fat content of the foods the individual is eating. Because of this, individuals eat more and more every day, creating an obesity crisis in the world. Foods that are high in sugar and fat content cause overeating and eventually can cause individuals to become overweight or obese.

Individuals are more susceptible to becoming overweight or obese because there are so many different sugary or fatty foods available on the market. When subjected to these foods, individuals tend to eat more of them than the healthier foods. It becomes very difficult to break the habit of eating the foods higher in sugar or fat content. This in turn causes many problems in humans today.
Problems that could arise:

• They could become overweight or obese
• They could have high cholesterol
• They could contract diabetes
• They could die

Individuals carry certain addictive tendencies. Individuals naturally have genes that can cause them to be addicted to many different things. When certain individuals eat a high sugar and fatty diet, the brain gets a signal from the chemicals that this is something the body needs.

Dr. Olszewski discovered that if you inject a patient with a drug that suppresses the addiction gene into rodents that have been on a sugar and fat diet, they begin to go through withdrawals from eating those types of foods. The drugs release a hormone to the brain that helps it to respond to the food addiction. This in turn helps the individual to stop wanting to eat the sugary or fatty foods available to them.

This in turn helps the individual to take better steps to eating healthier foods that keep their bodies in check. Baking foods in the oven or grilling foods on BBQ grills are just a few choices to help make better decisions about eating healthier. By making, the decision to eat foods that have a lower sugar and fatty amount in them, individuals will not be as overweight as those who are addicted to those fatty and sugary foods.

Because of his research, Dr. Olszewski is confident that someday it could help other physicians to diagnose these addictive behaviors in patients. This in turn can help patients, who are more susceptible to obesity, control it with a personalized therapy. By creating this type of therapy, it will assist the patients to become more in control over their body and addictions.

Dr. Olszewski has not achieved this goal yet. However, he is working on a way to fight the addiction to the higher sugar and fatty foods. By achieving this, he will be helping many individuals around the world to become healthier, thinner individuals.