Chocolate: A Dangerous Drug? | Nora D. Volkow | Big Think

Chocolate: A Dangerous Drug?

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Scientist Nora Volkow’s research shows links between food and addiction. Food, just like drugs, is linked to dopamine.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nora D. Volkow:

Nora D. Volkow, M.D., became Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) at the National Institutes of Health in May 2003. NIDA supports most of the world's research on the health aspects of drug abuse and addiction.

Dr. Volkow's work has been instrumental in demonstrating that drug addiction is a disease of the human brain. As a research psychiatrist and scientist, Dr. Volkow pioneered the use of brain imaging to investigate the toxic effects of drugs and their addictive properties. Her studies have documented changes in the dopamine system affecting the actions of frontal brain regions involved with motivation, drive, and pleasure and the decline of brain dopamine function with age. She has also made important contributions to the neurobiology of obesity, ADHD, and the behavioral changes that occur with aging.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Are there certain patterns of food consumption that lead to addiction?

Nora Volkow: Oh, yeah, and I do love chocolate. I just actually have found very few people that don't like chocolate. There are certain instances, of course, where you see people that are morbidly obese, where the notion of control of food is basically almost impossible. Where they don't want to be obese, I've never encountered anybody that wants to be obese, so I've been intrigued. That was the first question in my brain when I was saying, we are seeing these changes in the conditioning responses, in the ability to control in people that are addicted, but the behavior is similar to that, that you see in people that are morbidly obese. And so I've started to actually, systematically, that's how I started to use imaging to understand the brain. And again, dopamine is very important. Dopamine drives the motivation to it. In animals you can actually predict how much an animal is willing to press a lever in order to get the food on the basis of how much that stimuli is releasing dopamine. So the more it releases dopamine, the more the drive to get the food.

Now, why is it that some people are more sensitive to food versus something else or more sensitive to chocolate versus french fries? Well, again, food is more complicated than drugs. Because in drugs, where abuse start with is the rewarding responses. With food, what drives eating behavior is chemical signaling that are aiming at maintaining a balance of calories of energy requirements that responds to chemical signals that are just all throughout the body. That's one. And then the other one, pleasure and reward. Food can be very, very rewarding and reinforcing. And I would put the concept forward that most people that overeat, and we all overeat here or there, do it because food is pleasurable. And also, because food can decrease anxiety. So in a stressful situation, you can eat and that will decrease stress responses in your body. So food has the function of maintaining energy to activate reward and to also decrease stress. So it's not absurd that we have coined these term of comfort food, because it does decrease stress responses.

Now, when we are associated, normally and where glucose signals are saying you have enough energy, you can overcome the normal satiety response by putting food that you remember and you know tastes very, very good. So it's again, I don't think that it's satiety, that you have desert, and desert, one of the deserts is chocolate, right? Because you may be satiated, and there's no more dopamine that's going to be triggered by seeing a piece of chicken at that point. But may be triggered by a conditioned response that you have with that particular chocolate.

So just like we were discussing with drugs, where you've got condition, even if you are satiated, if you bring a stimuli that's salient enough, because you've had it in the past and it tastes very, very good, that will trigger the release of dopamine that will drive you to eat it.

Why do some of us fall into compulsive patterns and others do not? Many factors are going to be playing roles here. Again, aspects of vulnerability. But also, conditions. Look around yourself when you're in an airport and they cancel the flights.

Read the full transcript at