Eating excess fat in the form of binge eating can predispose us to developing alcoholism | Health & Wellness

In detox we ate until we burst. I don’t remember a single junkie who didn’t go crazy for ultra-processed foods, me being the first. Now, a review that analyzes the most recent studies reveals that binge eating seems to influence our vulnerability to developing an addiction.

If you’ve ever been to an addiction therapy group, you know that it’s common to talk about our difficulties with food. And it turns out that half of the people who have developed an addiction also have an eating disorder. This is not surprising, since alcohol consumption and sugar consumption, for example, share the same pathways in the brain: both intakes make us feel gustirrinin.

That is a thing of our reward system when the release of dopamine occurs in the limbic system. Keep in mind that when we learned to walk on two legs, we still did not have access to supermarkets and had to survive in contexts of extreme scarcity, so our biology dedicated itself to rewarding us when we found more caloric food.

While I was admitted to the rehabilitation center I did not know this, although I must have suspected it because every time I wanted to consume they gave me a glass of water with sugar.

I always thought that both behaviors—dysfunctional drinking and eating—were the result of enormous difficulty regulating ourselves emotionally. And there is some of that, but there is still something much more striking: it turns out that binge eating high-fat foods in adolescence can serve as a trigger in the development of addiction. And be careful, because I say fats and not carbohydrates which, apparently, do not have much to do with this relationship.

Until recently, the prevalence of drug use among people with eating disorders relative to the general population had been studied, but we did not have much information about the relationship between binge eating and the risk of problem drinking. . Today, however, there are some very insightful articles supporting the idea that the type of food and the way it is consumed play a critical role in the development of alcohol use disorders.

One of these articles is signed by doctors Blanco-Gandia and Montagut-Romero, from the University of Zaragoza, and doctor Rodriguez-Arias, from the University of Valencia. This is the first review that analyzes the most recent studies with animals. Research is focused on two models of animal feeding that modulate reward system function that I mentioned earlier: models where the rat has an open bar and models where the animal has limited access to food. Well, what was observed is that the open bar resulted in an obese animal with metabolic syndrome, while limiting access generated an intermittent pattern that closely resembles the dynamics of binge eating. That is to say, what was relevant when developing a binge eating disorder was not the amount that was eaten, but the way in which it was eaten.

Another study, in turn, highlighted the fact that rats that had ingested fats showed a clear preference for alcohol over water, something that did not happen with those that had ingested carbohydrates. Finally, based on the published literature, the authors deduced that the relationship between binge eating disorder and substance use disorders is bidirectional. That is, binge eating can become a gateway to drug addiction, and drug addiction, on the other hand, can end up causing various eating disorders.

The results have not only been obtained with animal models, a study with 428 university students showed a causal relationship between a high-fat diet and binge eating behaviors with increased alcohol consumption. This is not trivial considering that, according to the latest report from the World Health Organization, the global obesity rate has doubled in the last thirty years, especially in children and young people who eat products rich in fats and sugars.

A new risk factor

We are talking about the fact that there could be a new risk factor that we were not taking into account when studying, diagnosing and treating addiction to substances: the way of eating foods rich in fat. Which means that, in addition to preventing your children from starting to drink too soon, observing the environment of friends, managing to stimulate them with alternative leisure activities to drinking or teaching them to regulate themselves emotionally, you will have to observe how they eat. Not only to detect whether they eat a lot or little junk food, but to identify how they eat it.

I take this opportunity to drive a wedge: some of us associate binge eating with obesity, but it doesn’t work that way: many people binge eat and are not obese, and most obese people do not binge.

Keep in mind that your child’s brain is learning and while their reward system—the one that tells them “you love that and want more”—is already fully developed, their prefrontal cortex—the one that tells them “that’s not good for you” — is still in diapers. And before this dilemma the binge occurs. Therefore, we face a situation in which this type of food is modulating the brain function and behavior of the generations that the societies of the future will have to support.

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