“One of my first encounters with this perception that food could be addictive was early in my career. An acquaintance of mine had struggled with the belief that she couldn’t be trusted with certain types of foods. As such, she innocently thought not allowing these foods in her home would help her son develop a healthier relationship with the foods than she had. As her son grew older, however, I witnessed him sneak and frantically eat these foods when his parents weren’t around. The efforts to restrain his eating and desire for those foods backfired. This was not an issue of food addiction. It was a case of restricted exposure.
This fear of so-called food addiction, for adults and children alike, makes sense in our crazed diet culture. Diet culture doesn’t just encroach on our gyms and social circles, it’s become an insidious and overlooked contributor to media, medicine and top-tier research institutions. When well-respected news outlets report on the “dangers” of eating sugar and Yale University creates a food addiction scale, the public listens.”