That’s Why We Call It Junk Food (Newsweek)

MSNBC - That’s Why We Call It Junk Food

Excerpt from Newsweek:

Few foods are more alluring than fine chocolate, with its seductive blend of complex sweetness and velvety texture—and few become the object of such ardent obsessions. “Chocolate is a drug of abuse in its own category,” jokes Dr. Louis Aronne, director of the comprehensive weight-control program at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. “It’s almost as if people have chocolate receptors in their brains.”

That may not be too far off the mark. In a recent book called “Breaking the Food Seduction,” Dr. Neal Barnard of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine contends that certain foods—including chocolate, cheese, red meat and practically anything combining sugar and fat—are just plain addictive.

“These foods will not make you hallucinate or hold up a convenience store,” he says. But they do cause the brain to release its own natural opioids. “It’s not that you lack willpower,” he says. “These foods stimulate the release of chemicals in the brain’s pleasure center that keep you hooked.”