The Excerpt podcast: Food addiction is real. Here's how to spot it and how to fight it.

On today's episode of The Excerpt podcast: What do Oreos, Kraft Mac & Cheese and Lunchables have in common? A new study says they’re all addictive. The report also found that certain hyper-palatable foods were purposefully made that way by Phillip Morris and RJ Reynolds, the two tobacco companies that used to make them. What should people do to mitigate the risk here? Dr. Neal Barnard, President of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, joins The Excerpt to talk about food addiction and how people can fight it.

Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here

Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Dana Taylor:

Hello, and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, November 29th, 2023, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.

What do Oreos, Kraft Mac and Cheese and Lunchables have in common? One new study out says they're all addictive foods. There's a price there, but did you know they were purposefully made that way by Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds, the two tobacco companies that used to make them.

Our guest, Dr. Neal Barnard,, the president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, now joins us to talk about food addictions and how people can fight it. Thanks for joining us, Dr. Barnard.

Dr. Barnard:

Great to be with you today.

Dana Taylor:

Okay, so let's dig right in. Pun intended. Is food addiction common? How many people in the US are dealing with an addiction to certain foods?

Dr. Barnard:

Well, people are vulnerable to food addictions of every kind, and some of these are pretty benign. Your morning cup of coffee, you're not having it just because it tastes good. People want that caffeine jolt. And if they didn't get it, they miss it. So that's a form of food addiction, albeit a pretty benign one.

But in some cases, it's not so benign. People can get hooked on cheesy foods, meaty, fatty foods, things that really cause the waistline to expand. And along with it come a lot of health issues. So everyone is vulnerable to it. But we are seeing it more and more commonly, and we are seeing it at earlier and earlier ages.

Dana Taylor:

Okay. So how does it show up for people? Is it that you just can't stop thinking about a certain food until you eat it? What are the signals for it?

Dr. Barnard:

It's very much analogous to other kinds of addiction. Take cigarettes, for example. People have cigarettes. Maybe they get hooked at some point, but pretty soon they hit a certain rhythm every day. It's a pack a day or a half pack a day.

So it's a certain kind of dose that we want, and it's on a rhythm in the sense that we're doing it pretty much every day without fail. So with food, there's a certain food that you're hooked on.

You want it at a certain time of day. It might be 8:30 at night, and your refrigerator becomes magnetic. And it's specific. You don't go there for strawberries, you go there for chocolate or cheese or something like that.

And you'll miss it if it's gone. If you didn't have it that day, you really miss it in the same way as a person misses a drink or a cigarette, if that's what they're hooked on.

And the third thing, apart from it being cyclical and missing it if it's gone, is that you're paying a price for it. Something is happening. You are gaining weight you didn't want, or you're having health issues as a result.

Dana Taylor:

Okay. So who is most at risk here? I imagine there are some psychological factors here too?

Dr. Barnard:

And some of these are mixtures of physical and psychological. We were doing a diabetes study a number of years ago for the National Institutes of Health.

And I kept hearing some people say, "Well, this plant-based diet that you're encouraging us to eat for diabetes, it's very good, but I miss cheese so much."

And we kept hearing people talking about specifically cheese, not ice cream or other things. And that's partly because of the characteristics of cheese.

But in addition, we geno typed everyone. You take a blood sample and you look at their DNA. And what we discovered was that about half of the people in this study, 49%, actually had a low dopamine level.

In other words, the receptors for dopamine in the brain, that's the pleasure chemical. They didn't have the normal number of receptors as other people.

So they went through life not really feeling the same good feeling that other people have, and they were making up for it with addictive foods. And we've now identified lots of people who have that, so we can test for it.

And those people are set up not just for food addiction, but for compulsive gambling, smoking, drug addiction, anything that causes the dopamine drive that nature really didn't give them

Dana Taylor:

This new study in the Journal Addiction focused on hyper palatable foods, foods that were designed to be more addictive by the companies that wrote the book on addiction, Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds. What is it that makes them so addictive?

Dr. Barnard:

It's usually combinations. Sugar is part of it. But if you have a sugar fat mixture, that's more addictive than just the sugar alone. For example, you have an apple, it's got a lot of natural sugar, but nobody ever ate 16 apples because they were just so hooked on it.

But if you take sugar and mix it with fat, for example, as in a cookie, that combination has a greater neurological effect than other foods do. And you can prove it to yourself, that it's having a drug-like effect, because you can use Narcan, Naloxone.

The very same drug that we use to knock out heroin overdose, you can give it to a person who is binging on chocolate and you can take away that effect. They discover that they no longer have that huge craving.

So by the way, this is not a treatment. You don't go to the convenience store with a person and give them the Narcan to stop them from buying the chocolate bar.

But we use it in research to help us differentiate, do I just like something because of the taste or is it doing something in my brain? And with these Narcan studies, we can show that the sugar fat combination is really addicting.

So you take, for example, a french fry. It's really greasy, but it's also really salty. And for some reason, that combination gets us going. Potato chips, same way.

And even worse is cheese. Cheese, you don't think of it as being salty, but it's got more sodium than potato chips, more sodium than french fries and very, very fatty, high particularly in saturated fat.

And of all the typical foods, we find cheese is one of the most addicting. The average American is getting about 70,000 calories that they don't want from cheese every year.

Dana Taylor:

You're knocking out my favorites here, Dr. Barnard.

Dr. Barnard:

You and everybody else.

Dana Taylor:

Okay. So out of all the foods that are addictive in nature, which is the biggest offender or the biggest offenders in your opinion?

Dr. Barnard:

I really think that the cheese is right at the top of the list. And this is not accidental. There are laws that say the US government must promote American agricultural products.

So the US Department of Agriculture has actually signed contracts with fast food chains like Taco Bell or Burger King or McDonald's or Domino's Pizza or many others to specifically make cheese more prominent on their menu.

And back in 1909, when the USDA started tracking cheese consumption, your average person couldn't get through four pounds in a year. Today we are not at four pounds of cheese per year.

We are at about 37, or maybe for some people as much as 40 pounds of cheese per year. And that gets us to the 70,000 calories that people are unfortunately ingesting.

And with any addiction, the question is who cares? Is it doing any harm? And the answer is in virtually every case, yes. And with cheese, it's very high calories, very high fat, very high cholesterol, very high sodium.

And it has estradiol, which is the female sex hormone that comes from the cow into your Velveeta slice. And so those are the reasons why we're concerned about this.

Dana Taylor:

Okay. So what would you say to a patient who isn't sure if they're dealing with an addiction, how can they find out?

Dr. Barnard:

Well, what we do with everybody in the same way as a smoker or anybody else... A smoker might say, "Well, look, doc. I only have a cigarette when I'm at a party or just a few every day."

What we do is we say, 'Well, let's start with a clean slate. For the next month, let's just not have it." You're going to very soon learn what the addictive behavior is like.

So for healthful foods, the healthiest foods are fruits, vegetables, all grains, beans. These simple healthful foods that we like, but we don't crave. We're not addicted to them.

So we'll construct our menu of a healthy bowl of oatmeal with cinnamon and raisins for breakfast or something like that, or spaghetti with a marinara sauce. Healthy foods.

But when the patient comes in and says, "Oh, wait. Wait, doc, I just can't get through life without that big steak or the hunk of cheese," or something, then we start to think about is that a liking or is it an addiction?

And there, the way we could tell the difference is if it's something intermittent, not really addictive. If it's something that hits them just about every day, that's one of the hallmarks of addictive behavior.

Dana Taylor:

So what does it take for a person to break out of that rut, break an addiction to certain foods? What does treatment look like?

Dr. Barnard:

Well, we want to make sure that we really don't accentuate addictions more than normal. Everybody is prone to addictions. Our neurological chemistry can be hijacked.

And in fact, every food, every chemical that is addictive is something that really wasn't there. As part of early human history. We weren't smoking tobacco thousands and thousands of years ago.

People hadn't figured out how to ferment grapes into wine. They hadn't figured out how to make heroin or cocaine, and they hadn't figured out how to make cows stand still and get cheese until about 10,000 years ago. So our neurological structure hasn't yet quite accommodated to it.

But when a person feels cravings come on, we use the word halt, H-A-L-T. And this is something that the patients or participant says, "Wait a minute. Am I hungry?"

Hunger drives an addiction. It makes it much more intense. So just have something to eat. An orange, an apple, a banana, a piece of bread. That's not what you're craving but it turns down the hunger, and that turns down the addiction.

"Am I angry? Am I lonely? Chocolate was here. Where were you? Or am I tired?" So H-A-L-T, hungry, angry, lonely, tired. When we're aware of those things as accentuating the addictions, you can be aware, and that is not the time to go shop.

Dana Taylor:

So does the approach change for people who grew up eating and drinking these highly addictive foods? Is it more difficult in those cases?

Dr. Barnard:

Anybody could change. And it's important to recognize what you're hooked on, and recognize that certain things aren't bad. Nowadays, in today's sometimes punitive culture, people imagine that anything that has carbohydrate in it is bad.

"Oh, doc. I ate all that rice," or, "I ate a baked potato." And they're looking at you as if you're the priest who has to give them absolution from this.

The fact of the matter is, there's nothing wrong with that baked potato or that rice, despite the fact it's rich in carbohydrate. That's healthy for you, so forgive yourself for that.

But the things that are causing problems, these fatty mixtures, fatty sugary mixtures, and especially things like cheese, meat, chocolate, sugary things.

It's good to know what your alternatives might be. "So I went into the fast food place because that's what was there. Instead of the soda, I got the bottled water. It's not what I craved, but what the heck?" It will work. And as time goes on, you lose your taste for the other things.

"I was at the taco place. Instead of the meat taco, I got the bean burrito. Hold the cheese." Okay. Well, that will work. So know what your options are. Be prepared before you go. Don't go there when you're absolutely starving. And the addictions, the volume gets turned down a little bit.

Dana Taylor:

Well, having people in your corner can certainly help. How can friends and family members support a person who's working to combat an addiction?

Dr. Barnard:

Let people know what you're dealing with. For right now, I'm trying to get away from animal products. A very common thing. I want to eat more vegetarian, more plant-based, more vegan.

So you let people know what you're doing and they will become your defender. You're at a party and somebody's trying to push something on you. And your family member, your spouse, your partner, whomever, can say, "No, we're not doing that right now."

And that can be really helpful. In many cases, family members and friends want to join you in kicking certain things out of your diet, and that can really help too.

Dana Taylor:

Okay. What's the one thing that you'd like people listening to take away from this interview?

Dr. Barnard:

Not everything that you like is bad for you or is addictive. The addictive foods really are sugar and chocolate, cheese, meat. Those are the things that tend to get us into trouble.

And think short term. If you're breaking away from these things, don't say to yourself, "For the rest of my life, I'll never have another..." Whatever it is, fill in the blank. Because that's too daunting.

Instead, think short term. Some people think one day at a time or a week at a time or maybe, "For the next three weeks, I'm not going to have whatever." That makes it manageable.

Think short term, find good substitutes that are healthy for you, and don't test yourself. Don't tease yourself. Don't have those foods on the shelf. Clean house so that your tender brain structure isn't tempted by these things.

Dana Taylor:

Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Barnard.

Dr. Barnard:

Thank you.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to our senior producer, Shannon Rae Green, for her production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The Excerpt podcast: Food addiction is real. Here's how to fight it.