Hedonic Eating is a term that refers eating for the sake of pleasure. Current research shows that the act of eating for pleasure is fairly common. Many factors contribute to why an individual may gain pleasure from eating including, brain activity caused by eating, environmental conditions, differences in what a person finds pleasurable, social influence and whether or not it has become an addiction for them. The common consensus of all the present research (found for this review) on the reaction within the brain during eating shows that eating pleasurable foods causes electrical impulses to jolt in your brain through the cerebral cortex and to the amygdala. The amygdala is part of the reward system of the brain; it is responsible for associations; memory; pleasure; emotional reactions; aggression; fear, alcoholism and addiction. Stimulation of the amygdala causes your brain to release endorphins, specifically serotonin, which causes the feeling of pleasure to happen within the brain. Because of this release, it causes the amygdala remember what caused that reaction and makes the person want to do it again. However, though the tongue is considered part of the digestive system and is linked to the responses in the brain when eating, the research by Oliveira-Maia, Roberts, Walker, Kuhn, Simon & Nicolelis on Intravascular food reward, suggests that taste itself has nothing to do with the brains reaction to sugars in food. The reaction is independent and takes place in the digestive system and blood stream. This was found during their study using rats, by comparing water bottles filled with different levels of glucose and direct injection of glucose into different parts of the venous system to see how responses changed. It has also... ... middle of paper ... ...dence: shared neural pathways and genes. Journal Of Psychoactive Drugs,42(2), 147-151. Macht, M., Meininger, J., & Roth, J. (2005). The pleasures of eating: a qualitative analysis. Journal Of Happiness Studies, 6(2), 137-160. doi:10.1007/s10902-005-0287-x Oliveira-Maia, A. J., Roberts, C. D., Walker, Q., Luo, B., Kuhn, C., Simon, S. A., & Nicolelis, M. L. (2011). Intravascular food reward. Plos ONE, 6(9), 1-16. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0024992 Pachucki, M. A., Jacques, P. F., & Christakis, N. A. (2011). Social network concordance in food choice among spouses, friends, and siblings. American Journal Of Public Health, 101(11), 2170-2177. doi:10. 2105/AJPH.2011.300282 Pretlow, R. A. (2011). Addiction to highly pleasurable food as a cause of the childhood obesity epidemic: a qualitative internet study. Eating Disorders, 19(4), 295-307. doi:10.1080/10640266.2011.584803
Yeomans, Martin R. "Understanding Individual Differences in Acquired Flavour Liking in Humans." Chemosensory Perception 3.1 (2010): 34-41. Print.
In the essay “Her Chee-to Heart”, by Jill McCorkle, she discusses about the various difficulties she has encountered of being a junk-food junkie and the struggles of overcoming the guilty pleasures of junk food. Firstly, one of the many difficulties she encounters are her feelings, which ultimately overwhelm her into continuing to eat various types of junk foods. Her feelings of nostalgic memories when consuming such goods as a child, the enjoyment and the savory tastes it grants her, are constantly mentioned throughout the essay, directly contributing a major factor into her desires of junk food. Furthermore, while she is quite aware of the consequences regarding the health side effects of consuming such foods and what the food is ultimately
I did not realize I had a taste aversion until I read chapter 7 in Exploring Psychology starting on page 257. Taste aversion is explained as becoming violently ill after eating, tasting or drinking a consumable item
The basic idea behind this is eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re satisfied. Seems easy right? Well for those of us who have struggled with our relationship to food it’s not. Typically we lose touch with what it truly feels like to be hungry or satisfied because we are eating for every reason other than physical
Addiction in itself is very complex, there are many components to comprehending how addiction can affect a person’s well-being and livelihood. There are times when a person is undoubtedly dependent, for example on food and water for survival. There are additional fundamentals in a person’s life they may feel are vital to their survival. Low on the scale of impairment is exercising, a person can become addicted to exercising, but there will not be extremely harmful consequences, unless taken way too far, unlike if the person were to become addicted to a harmful drug such as methamphetamine, that would negatively affect their life in an extreme way. Eventually, the substance becomes the most important object in the person’s life, and it is their
The study presented in this presentation focus on four different aspects of the influence of neurotransmitters that have an influence on eating. The first aspect is a 36 amino acid peptide transmitter known as the NPY. The NPY contains five different receptors; Y1, Y2, Y4, Y5, and Y6. Y2 is specifically geared towards memory. Y5 pertains to eating. Y6 is found in some animals, but not really found in humans. The Y1 and Y5 receptors are specifically for eating. The more NPY found within the body, the more a person would eat. A question, which was presented in this presentation, was if certain areas of the brain could be identified as being responsive to the metabolic action of the NPY. In order to study this idea, and experiment was performed where NPY was injected directly into different target areas. From this, it was shown that there were specific areas of the brain that responded to the levels of NPY differently.
In Wendell Berry’s “The Pleasures of Eating,” this farmer tells eaters how their separation from food production has turned them into “passive consumers” who know nothing about the food they eat, or their part in the agricultural process (3). They are blindsided by a food industry that does not help them understand. Berry argues that the average consumer buys available food without any questions. He states consumers that think they are distanced from agriculture because they can easily buy food, making them ignorant of cruel conditions it went through to get on the shelf. Humans have become controlled by the food industry, and regard eating as just something required for their survival. Berry wants this to change as people realize they should get an enjoyment from eating that can only come from becoming responsible for their food choices and learning more about what they eat. While describing the average consumer’s ignorance and the food industry’s deceit, he effectively uses appeals to emotion, logic, and values to persuade people to take charge, and change how they think about eating.
Not only are today’s families far less active, but easy access to rich-tasting, cheap food can be addictive. The fast food industry knows this and uses this information to make foods which make the brain crave more. In his book Salt Sugar Fat, author Michael Moss discussed this in an interview with food scientist Steve Witherly.
A common saying goes, “we are what we eat;” but what exactly that makes us eat in the first place? What are the factors that influence our eating behaviors? If the food that we eat defines our personality and being as a whole, it should then be vital to identify the factors that push us to eat certain kinds of food. I think that social psychology has the answer. As broad as this field may seem, yet this science of explaining human behavior takes it reference on the influence of the environment, people, the media, and almost about anything that can contribute to how people think, feel, and act. In this paper, we will explore the factors that influence our eating
Joranby, L., Pineda, K., & Gold, M. S. (2005). Addiction to Food and Brain Reward
Wise, Roy A. “Role of dopamine in food reward and reinforcement”. National Center for Biotechnology Information. U.S. National Library of Medicine, 15 June 2006. Web. 24 Apr. 2014. .
Overall, our bodies are a battle ground in which we fight off or surrender to society's projection of what beauty is. We eat for either nutrition, to socialize, to control our bodies or to explore worldly cuisines. The way I ate is highly influenced by the way in which society flows around me.
First, the physiological aspect will be explored. Assuming that eating regulation is controlled primarily by the brain, disturbances could exist in several places: (1) the br...
#Try to identify the underlying need. If you are eating emotionally, there is some need being left unfulfilled. Take a moment to assess your current feelings. Are you lonely or missing someone? Did you have a hard day or receive some bad news? Maybe you have an impending deadline that is freaking you out and you turn to food to cope with the stress. Whatever the emotional cause is for your eating, you must acknowledge it in order to change the
As we know chocolate is an unhealthy food option most of us have, it also is in one of the most popular food group, junk food. Everyone has some “junk food” in some point of their life these days; though its consumption is even more popular in the United States. Many Americans are becoming more and more obese over the last century partially due to that fact. According to Dr. Jeffrey Fortuna, author of the article The Obesity Epidemic And Food Addiction: Clinical Similarities To Drug Dependence, “As of 2010 nearly 70% of adult Americans were overweight or obese. Specifically, 35.7% of adult Americans are obese, and this is the highest level of obesity in the recorded history of the United States” (Fortuna, p. 1). I began to wonder if it could be possible that these people have become addicted to the junk food that they crave leading to these unsettling statistics. From the same article, The Obesity Epidemic And Food Addiction: Clinical Similarities To Drug Dependence, I learned that food does possess addictive qualities. There were biological and psychological factors that were similar to those of drug addictions. “They are: (1) cravings for specific drugs and palatable foods exist in many of the same neural path-ways, and; (2)...