How to tell if you’re hooked on junk food – and what to do about it

A collection of the world’s most renowned experts in ultra-processed foods will convene in London for the International Food Addiction Consensus Conference next month. The gathering ultimately aims to get addiction to highly processed junk foods officially recognised as a condition by both the World Health Organisation and leading psychiatry institutions.

“We’re getting together to say, ‘Yes, this is an actual syndrome’,” explains Dr Vera Tarman, a specialist in addiction medicine and author of the book Food Junkies, who is speaking at the conference. “Because people may not appreciate just how addictive these foods are.”

This might seem like an overstatement, but Dr Tarman points to the fact that the estimated 25.9 per cent of the UK population who are obese continue to consume junk foods excessively despite such eating patterns causing them health problems. This is a known pattern of addiction that is also seen with alcohol, tobacco and other substances.

“Every obese person and diabetic knows that they shouldn’t be eating these foods, but they’re hooked,” she says. “These foods basically become like drugs, and when you have constant exposure to a drug, the more likely you’re going to develop a food addiction syndrome.”

The precise reasons why ultra-processed foods are quite so addictive is a complex and multifaceted picture, one that relates to how they’re produced and the accompanying food environment.

Why they’re so addictive

Items ranging from crisps, chocolate bars and soft drinks, to some apparently healthy options such as flavoured yoghurts and branded breakfast cereals, are often described by food experts as being “hyperpalatable”.

This means that they have been carefully formulated within the laboratories of major food companies, often through decades of extremely clever chemistry. They are then trialled on tasting panels to discover the precise sweet spot for sugar, salt and other ingredients that will make people eat as much as possible and boost sales by maximising their addictive potential.

“Hyperpalatable foods are designed with combinations of taste-inducing ingredients, particularly fat, sugar, and salt,” says Prof Christina Vogel, a food policy expert at City University of London and the University of Southampton. “The combination of these ingredients together works well beyond what any single ingredient could produce alone. Almost all of us are exposed constantly in our everyday lives to these hyperpalatable, unhealthy foods that are difficult to stop eating.”

According to Chris van Tulleken, an associate professor at University College London and author of the book Ultra-Processed People, one of the biggest tricks behind many common ultra-processed foods is a careful balance of opposing tastes which encourages us to accept far more of a particular ingredient such as salt or sugar, than we otherwise would.

As an example, to understand some of the basic processes behind Coca-Cola and other fizzy drinks, he suggests an experiment. Take a glass of tap water, add sugar to it and initially this becomes less, not more, palatable. But if you add a drop of phosphoric acid, make the drink bubbly and cold, and then add a tiny bit of any flavour from citrus juice to vanilla extract, you can mask a dose of sugar that your body would normally reject.

“Your tongue is a way of your body saying, ‘Whoa, this is more sugar than my pancreas can handle, it’s going to be too sweet’,” says van Tulleken. “So you would spit out a glass of water that had nine spoonfuls of sugar in it. But when you also have phosphoric acid, which is sour, and caffeine, which is bitter, add some flavour, and then have the weird tactile sensation of the bubbles, suddenly you can deliver this abnormal dose of sugar that seems to be driving the reward pathway.”

But it isn’t just the underlying ingredients. Dr Tarman refers to a phrase coined a decade ago by the investigative journalist Michael Moss, “the bliss point”. From appealing packaging and cartoon characters on cereal boxes, to the sensations they create within our mouths, the combined experience is crucial to how ultra-processed foods hack our brain chemistry.

“It’s not just the sugar and the flour, it’s the crunch of the food, it’s the visual look, it’s the additives that create the mouthfeel, and all of these characteristics are hitting a brain chemical called dopamine on multiple levels,” says Dr Tarman. “The processed food industry probably understands more about the brain and how to make foods extremely enticing than anyone else.”

The signs you’re addicted

While most is known about anorexia and bulimia, by far the most common pattern of disordered eating is binge-eating disorder which has been estimated to affect one in 50 people in the UK. Some believe that this in itself is a sign of addiction to ultra-processed foods.

As an example, when Dr Agnes Ayton, the chairman of the faculty of eating disorders at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, examined a group of patients with binge-eating disorder, she found that all of them binged entirely on ultra-processed foods. It’s a discovery that van Tulleken feels is highly telling, especially as he himself has battled with episodes of bingeing in the past.

“We don’t recognise food addiction,” he says. “Personally I’m addicted to shovelling particular foods into my mouth as fast as I can, and then often throwing them up afterwards, because I’ve consumed to wild excess. This is not a huge problem for me, [but] it was sort of previously, so it’s a very real thing. A great number of us have an addicted relationship with these foods.”

However, you don’t necessarily have to be repeatedly bingeing and then purging on ultra-processed foods to have a food addiction. It is a spectrum that many of us will experience in much smaller ways such as repeatedly polishing off a tub of ice cream in a single sitting or a multipack of crisps. However, Dr Tarman feels that the line between snacking and being addicted to ultra-processed foods is the point where people become actively dependent on these products as part of their daily life.

“Everybody likes snacking because the food industry makes snacks palatable,” she says. “But I feel it’s that line where you go from eating for pleasure, to not being able to stop otherwise you feel agitated and unsatisfied. For some people, it can get so extreme that they can’t go to sleep at night unless they’ve had their fix.”

What you can do about it

Unfortunately, the only known way to curb food addiction is to completely cut or significantly curb your intake of processed foods, which is far from easy. For example, studies have even found that people can experience a plethora of side effects when they try to reduce the number of foods containing added sugars in their diet, from fatigue to mood changes, headaches, dizziness, anxiety, brain fog and cravings.

As a first step, Dr Tarman recommends trying to avoid all products containing sugar, including soft drinks, along with foods made from very refined flours such as biscuits and cakes.

Van Tulleken says that for many people, quitting ultra-processed foods is an impossibility both for practical and financial reasons. “We know that abstinence is important for addiction, but it’s very socially complicated for the majority of people to quit these foods,” he says. “They’re everywhere you turn, every hour of every day from the ads on television to the apps that can deliver them to your house in five minutes for very little money. So it’s just socially hard to quit.”

As a result, he predicts that it will take major policy changes from governments to make a genuine difference to the problem of junk food addiction. Van Tulleken is not alone in feeling that the UK needs to follow the example of several Latin American countries, including Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Chile, where governments have begun to push back against ultra-processed foods in recent years.

In Chile, food labels have been introduced to warn consumers away from products containing high levels of saturated fat, sugar and salt, while adverts featuring ultra-processed foods have been banned during TV slots aimed at children, and at cinemas.

While the UK has been taxing all soft drinks containing added sugar since April 2018, experts feel that the Government needs to do far more to warn consumers about the dangers of the many highly processed and hyperpalatable foods that proliferate in our supermarkets.

“We need the Government to support industry to provide food environments that resemble our nutrition recommendations through comprehensive food policies and regulations,” says Prof Vogel. “While some progress has been made by the Government to curb marketing of unhealthy foods, there is insufficient support for effective enforcement.”