Hello everyone and welcome back to Ben Kumba Radio so today you're here with me Tom

yes I'm the usual co-host but I have been given the reins to speak about a topic

that I've spoken about a few times before and I've got a few thoughts around so Ben thought it would be useful for me to put those down on the podcast and so you can let me know what you think so today I'm going to be talking a little bit around sugar addiction and probably more broadly food addiction in general because it's a topic that I see come up quite a lot and as always I'm like a dirty fence sitter and I don't take one side or the other.

I think there are good arguments on both sides and I think this is a topic that we can explore

in a way that maybe we'll make you, well, maybe we'll let you guys think about it a little bit differently than you do right now so

Often what will happen when food addiction or sugar addiction specifically is brought up is that people will just completely dismiss the thing out of hand.

They'll just say, oh well, sugar's not addictive, of course sugar's not addictive.

No one's eating sugar out of a bowl with a spoon.

There is one famous nutrition expert who is very famously said that until he sees someone

performing sexual acts for Orioles he will not agree that sugar addiction exists which I suppose is one way you can look at it and

the thing is from a technical perspective I think that's something that we can generally agree with

food addiction probably doesn't exist in the same way as something like a hard drug

addiction would exist, but that doesn't mean that it's not something that bears talking about

because as some people on the other side of the argument will say there are definitely foods that will affect us differently than others

So what I've got here is a research paper called what is the evidence for food addiction systematic review. It was published in

April 2018 in Nutrients the journal. So this article basically looks

over all of the scientific evidence for food addiction because of course this is something

that is research this is something that people look at. If something is an addictive substance, if an addiction exists,

then that is a mental health issue and therefore it will go into the next issue of the DSM

which is a tool that psychologists will use to diagnose people with various different psychological problems.

And so this research does need to be done. Now what this found they looked

over 35 different articles published in 52 different studies and what they found

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