This Is Your Brain On Cheesecake
What if there’s no forbidden fruit? What if you think about eating to take care of yourself? In episode two, Juna describes the judgments she and others impose on themselves and their food choices.
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Michael Pollan is an author and journalist known for his books on the science of psychedelics and the effects of eating on the way we live.
In Defense of Food | Books | Twitter
Dr. Paul Kenny is a professor and Chair of Neuroscience at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who specializes in the neurobiological mechanisms of addiction and obesity.
Profile | Publications | Twitter -
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Producer [00:00:29]We're rolling. [0.2s]
Juna: Guys, yesterday I opened a pack of M&M Peanuts, and it said a pack was three servings. It was like small enough that I could eat the whole thing.
Eddie: Have you seen on the ice cream how they've corrected for the size of servings? It used to say like it was a quarter cup for a serving?
Juna: No, what do they say now?
Eddie: Now they realize that people eat like two thirds of a cup. So…
Producer [00:00:48]OK, we're running late, so let's go. [1.6s]
Eddie All right, you just heard that. All right, go.
Juna: OK, so first, I just want to talk about this blondie from Applebee's that me and my sister have been talking about.
Eddie: I love that singer.
Juna: Super old singer! Wow you just dated yourself. All right. So I want to start off describing to you something that I think about ever since I was probably 11. I think it was the first time I got it. You're brought out this skillet and you hear the sound first and it's "tsssss." Because something is on it. "What could it be?" You ask yourself. "Is it fajita veggies? Is it a quesadilla?" No. It's a little blonde cake. And on this blonde cake are some toasted pecans. And on the pecans is some cold ice cream. And then next to it is a little boat of this maple cream cheese glaze. I don't even know what to call it. And then you pour that over and like, the ice cream is dripping down. But as it hits the skillet, it goes "tssss" because the skillet is still super super hot.
Eddie: You could do the commercials for them.
Juna: [gasps] I cannot forget the experience of eating this blondie.
Eddie: So it just sounds like this blondie has made an impact on your brain.
Juna: Yes, it has. So once again, I'm just saying Food, We Need To Talk.
Eddie: That's also the name of this podcast. I'm Dr. Eddie Phillips.
Juna And I'm Juna Gjata. And today we're talking about food addiction or --
Juna and Eddie: This is your brain on cheesecake.
Juna More accurately, how food acts similarly to a drug, which is something I think we've all experienced. I mean, for me it has been the blondie, but I mean, it's been a million other foods. Like potato chips, where you open the bag and then you eat a chip and then you blink and then everything is gone, like you're surrounded by a pile of crumbs and a pile of regrets. It's insane.
Eddie: Which one's bigger?
Juna: Depends on how much you ate. Eddie, is there anything that you think of when I say "food acts like a drug"?
Eddie: So if you get me a nice bowl of coffee ice cream and it's got to have nuts and little pieces of chocolate chips are fine. It takes me back to, you know, before I got to medical school and I thought that the four basic food groups were crunchy, chewy, chocolate and alcohol.
Juna: [laughs]
Eddie: So maybe like, add a little Kahlua to that and some fudge, and you really have the kind of thing that makes my mouth water.
Juna: Well, at least a lot of the things you mentioned, like the nuts and the coffee and stuff are real food. Because Michael Pollan, the super famous and well published author, argues that a lot of the stuff we eat today, and especially the stuff we buy in the supermarket, isn't even real food.
Michael Pollan: Most people assume everything in the supermarket is food. But I'm making the case that it's not. That there are a lot of things that we should call "edible food like substances." These are very novel creations of food science that look like food but aren't really food. I don't think a Twinkie really should be dignified with the word food. I don't think a soda should be dignified with the word food.
Juna: And it's not that these foods are just devoid of nutrients. So like obviously, that blondie probably doesn't have that many beneficial vitamins and minerals. But Michael Pollan says it's that these foods are literally designed to be addictive. Like that blondie has been created to be addictive.
Michael (?): Well, processed food has been engineered specifically to press our evolutionary buttons. So, for instance, the combination of salt, fat and sugar in the same food. That doesn't happen that often in nature. When it happens, we just can't stop eating it. And so it's designed to be addictive. They use terms in the industry like "craveability." They're manipulating us to eat more than we should.
Eddie: It's so interesting. The words we keep on hearing are, “the addiction”, “the craveability”. And it really makes it sound like something is really evil about the food industry. And I guess I'm getting on my little soapbox here because they say, you know, that word we’re all about a nanny state. We're supposed to restrict people from eating the things they want to eat. But you know what? Maybe it's the food industry that's really setting us up for failure. They're pushing our evolutionary buttons, just like Michael Pollan talks about.
Juna: That's why I thought I would talk to an expert on substance abuse, which we usually think of as drugs of abuse like heroin and cocaine, but someone who also focuses on obesity.
Dr. Paul Kenny: Yeah, my name is Paul Kenny. I'm the Ward-Coleman Professor and Chairman of the Department of Neuroscience here at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Juna: So I guess the first most obvious question I had for Dr. Kenney is, is food addictive?
Dr. Paul Kenny: Addiction itself is such an ill-defined, unclear term. But what I do believe is that there's reward mechanisms that motivate food consumption the same way as reward mechanisms that motivate drug use.
Juna: So food and drugs have something in common in the way they act on the brain. Here's what he says about why that might be.
Dr. Paul Kenny: A feature that all addictive drugs appear to share in common is their ability to stimulate dopamine transmission in the brain, and eating seems to do the same thing.
Juna: Of course, there are a ton of things that you could do that would give you a rush of dopamine, though, right Eddie? So like doing anything pleasurable…
Eddie: You could have sex, you could exercise, there's lots of things you could do.
Juna: You could do all those things that give you dopamine, but eating food when you're hungry gives you a huge dopamine hit. Or eating hyper palatable food, which is super tasty junk food whenever– if you're hungry, if you're not hungry, doesn't matter, also gives you this giant dose of feel-good chemicals in the brain. So I asked Dr. Kenny, I was like, "Yo, if I showed you a brain scan and I was like, look at this brain scan, is it heroin or is it me eating the blondie? Would you be able to tell which it was?"
Dr. Paul Kenny: It's really, really difficult to be able to tell the difference. I mean, to be able to look at these incredibly complex patterns of brain activity in real time. There's a ton of information being processed, so it's very difficult to make a direct comparison between different drugs or between drugs and food and say this is the pattern of activation that tells us that this is addictive. And look, we can see it for food too.
Eddie: So, someday we'll have the scan that can actually distinguish. But for now, it's looking like drugs.
Juna: The scariest part is that Dr. Kenny has shown in his research that having those types of food actually changes your brain. There is this experiment that Dr. Kenny runs where he'll give mice this really like standard…
Dr. Paul Kenny: standard chow that's nutritious and healthy, but pretty bland. I presume, I've never eaten it. It looks pretty bland, smells pretty bland.
Juna: And the mice do pretty well when they're eating it.
Dr. Paul Kenny: Good body weight. They eat normally.
Juna: But then he'll give them some other more tasty food…
Dr. Paul Kenny: Like cheesecake or bacon, etc.
Juna: And then basically all hell breaks loose.
Dr. Paul Kenny: They very quickly shift preference. And they will devour a high fat, high calorie stuff at the expense of the healthier option.
Eddie: So, this is really something. This hyper-palatable, what are we calling it now? You know, craveable food comes along, and now they can't control their weight.
Juna: Right, and these mice have access to as much food as they want. When it's the healthy stuff, they stop at a normal time to stop and their weight stays at a regular, healthy range. But, when they have unlimited access to the unhealthy stuff, the hyper palatable food (a.k.a. cheesecake and bacon) they basically just won't stop eating and they become extremely overweight. And it really doesn't help that this type of food…
Eddie: Is everywhere.
Juna Exactly. That's exactly what Michael Pollan says.
Michael: Any business meeting now there's food. That didn't used to be true. You would have breakfast, then you'd wait till lunch. But no, at a business meeting or conference, there'll be a plate of bagels and muffins left out at 11 o'clock, as if people couldn't get from like eight o'clock to noon without having 1000 more calories. You walk into a store and there's a dish of candy, not just at Halloween, all year long. So we're in a very toxic food environment where food is being put in our face constantly.
Juna: And this idea of our food environment being drastically different nowadays is kind of analogous to what happened to Dr. Kenny's mice when he introduced the cheesecake.
Dr. Paul Kenny: As you consume that food, you're basically training the brain. And of course, the brain is a quick learner, and it undergoes plasticity such that food is what is prioritized.
Eddie: So the plasticity, Juna, is actually maybe where there's some hope here. Plasticity means that you can change, you can morph your brain and hopefully we can go back and sort of kick the drugs.
Juna: I mean, OK, I like that you're being hopeful and stuff, but I don't think it's that easy because let me ask the question, are you ready?
Eddie: Yeah.
Juna: So you have mice. They've become overweight because they've eaten a ton of cheesecake and you only give them access to regular food. Do you think that these mice will continue to overeat food or do you think that they'll start eating normal amounts again?
Eddie: I would hope that they would go back to eventually eating the normal amounts of normal food.
Juna: So that's actually not what Dr. Paul Kenny found. He actually found that the mice will starve!
Dr. Paul Kenny: They would choose to volitionally starve themselves, than to eat food that they presumably didn't find pleasant and rewarding. I interpret that finding, which we've replicated over and over again, to reflect obesity being related to a really dramatic shift in food preference. You like the food that you like and you want it at the expense of anything else.
Eddie: So we've just discovered the ultimate mouse trap.
Juna: Eddie! That is not the point!
Eddie: I know that. But seriously, though, being overweight, being obese, it's not just like a sort of a food quantity, it's really about food preference. I mean, they're showing this as hard science, at least in the mice.
Juna: Exactly. So, Dr. Kenny says, with these choices of cheesecake instead of bland food over and over and over again…
Dr. Paul Kenny: Those choices get stamped into the brain really strongly. I think that's what we see in terms of people struggling to lose weight and essentially relapsing. Their brain tells them, "this is what you should eat, consume that."
Eddie: The idea that our brain is kind of like turning against us, I mean, this sounds like everything that I know about addictions just sounds like a playback of it. I mean, people get addicted. They know that it's not good for themselves, but it's a neurological illness. It's your central nervous system that is conspiring against you. It's not helping, but your brain needs this. You want this and you keep on taking those substances at your own peril.
Juna: Yeah. And that's what made me wonder, can a neural pattern like this ever be reversed? So I asked Dr. Kenny.
Dr. Paul Kenny: It's really hard to say. I mean, that information is kind of wired into the brain pretty strongly. But I think that as plastic organisms, with the amount of resources that we have, I think we can learn new behaviors, you know, we can adapt and try and override, if you will, what we have done a good job in learning.
Eddie: So I'm going to strike another optimistic pose here to say that as horrific as the opioid crisis is, there are millions, tens of millions of people who are living successfully in recovery.
Juna: That's true.
Eddie: And as long as you realize that this is a chronic illness that these folks are going to be sort of battling forever, they can live without the substances which would otherwise be destroying their lives or often leading to their own demise. So, you know, what would it take for us to do it with food? One thing that I'm always struck with –I'm taking care of my veterans in the hospital, and time and again, when I come up with the subject of, you know, maybe a little less weight might help your knees, might help your back, you might feel a little better. When I turn to the subject of, you know, what kind of guidance do you want? You know, I could give you a dietitian. I could help you. I could send you books. And time and again, these guys will turn to me, go like, “I'm good”. What do you mean, you're good? And they're like, "I know what to eat. I'm not going to eat crap." So it sounds like the answer is not easy, but it may be simple. Juna, while we let that sink in, let's take a quick break.
Juna: Great idea Eddie.
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Eddie: So Juna, we were talking about how one way to avoid food addiction may be simply avoiding the junk food. It's simple, but not easy.
Juna: I mean, simple but not easy is the worst thing you can get because then you know it and you just have to execute. That's what Michael Pollan said. I asked him, like, what do you tell people who are just like, "dude, fruits are not as good as a blondie. Like, I don't want fruit or I don't like vegetables."
Michael: Give them a perfectly ripe peach in August, and I challenge them to think that a soda or a candy bar or a Twinkie is better. One of the problems is that a lot of the produce we eat is not of very high quality, and we eat things out of season, and we eat things that aren't fresh. But to the extent that you can expose people to vegetables picked at the peak of ripeness, fruits in their season, there are very few people who prefer processed food to that.
Juna: And one crucial thing to add to that is the importance of availability, as Dr. Kenny says, to stop yourself from relapsing, as it were.
Dr. Paul Kenny: Availability is really a key factor that influences dependencies. If the drug is not there, you're less likely to use it. And when drug availability increases, we generally see a big increase in drug dependence problems. I think the current opioid abuse epidemic is really reflective of that.
Eddie: So this sounds exactly like what you do with someone who's trying to quit smoking. They switch cars with their spouse if they are not used to smoking that way. They don't drive a regular path home because there's always a trigger to start smoking. They sometimes have to cut back on their alcohol if they always smoke with their alcohol. So cutting back on the availability and not having that bowl of candy out, I think could make a big difference.
Juna: Yes.
Eddie: And if you want to have Oreos, well, maybe get one of those single packs of a couple of Oreos. And if you're going to have them savor them, enjoy them. And then, you know, clean up all the crumbs, along with all the guilt, you know, and put it away and enjoy it. So maybe cutting back on the availability, switching up your routine may be a place to start.
Juna: The other really important thing that Dr. Kenny said we have to do is,
Dr. Paul Kenny: Practice under circumstances when food would be comforting, to exercise control over the desire to consume the food, which I know is probably easier said than done. But I think it's like any muscle. If you begin to exercise, it gets stronger and the ability to control becomes greater.
Juna: So with any new skill that you're trying to learn or to master, one of the most important parts–actually no– I’m going to go back. THE most important part that you can do is really practice.
Eddie: So we're back to the concert pianist practice, practice, practice.
Juna: Exactly.
Eddie: I like another message that he's giving us, which is that there is an innate sense of what's good.
Juna: Yes.
Eddie That we actually can go back to those foods. And what's good is that the culture is starting to shift. Those foods are more available. I mean, just as an experiment, if you go into a fast food joint and you ask for salad, you'll find it these days.
Juna: That’s true.
Eddie: You can get water and you can also get the salad without the dressing on it.
Juna: And when I go back to Harvard Square now, all the new places that are opening are all like the healthy build-your-own-bowl type places that make like really big filling salads instead of like fast food. I think vegetables especially are becoming so much more like ubiquitous and people are making them in really interesting, delicious ways. So I think they're becoming a lot more available to us, and that availability is always a good thing.
Eddie: Yes. So Juna, having heard all of this, what do you make of that blondie that you were enraptured by just a few minutes ago?
Juna: You know, I'm starting to see it in a little bit of a different light over here. I'm starting to think that this entire experience of the sizzling and the hot and cold, and then when Michael Pollan was talking about the fat with the sugar because it's like there's fat in the cream cheese and there's sugar everywhere and it's a crunchy and cold and hot.
Eddie Yeah, yeah.
Juna: I'm starting to think that it was all created in such a way that,
Eddie: It's emblazoned in your brain.
Juna: Still emblazoned in my brain. And I think no matter how much blondie I eat, it's so hard for me to ever feel full. Like I can't trust my natural signals of fullness because the blondie isn't a food that my body…
Eddie: It's not a food.
Juna It's not a food! Poor blondie. It used to be such a nostalgic, beautiful memory, and now it's so sinister and evil.
Eddie: And you know, Juna, even if you do take that first bite. Maybe just savor that one, because that's where all of the reaction is in your brain and in your palate, you know? But the second one is you're just chasing.
Juna: OK, but you're going to have to take it away from me.
Eddie: OK.
Juna: But I can have one, and then you take it away.
Eddie: If you choose.
Juna: If I so choose.
Eddie: Right, I mean, another just kind of reflection is that we've talked about sort of the mindful eating.
Juna: Right.
Eddie: You know, maybe the first thing to do before we go into the mindful eating is look and see, is this a food?
Juna: Is this a food? Yes or no?
Eddie: Food like substance?
Juna: Yeah, it should be the litmus test for every time you eat. Is this food? Yes or no?
Eddie: So I think that leads to maybe the next question for us to wrestle with, which is, OK, so what should I eat?
Michael: Eat real food, avoid edible food like substances.
Juna: So we're finally going to get down to the real nutrition aspect.
Eddie: We'll get there.
Juna: If you're looking for your next fix of Food, We Need To Talk, then head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe. Simple and easy. And please don't forget to leave us a review because it helps us reach more listeners.
Eddie: And if what you've heard leaves you with a burning question, send a voice memo to foodweneedtotalk@gmail.com and we'll try to answer you in future episodes.
Juna: And if you want to see Eddie try the infamous blondie, the very same one that we talked about on this episode, follow us on Instagram @FoodWeNeedToTalk because we post all the time.
Eddie: Thanks to our guests Paul Kenny and Michael Pollan. Food, We Need to Talk is a production of WBUR.
Juna: Our editor and producer is George Hicks.
Eddie: Our final arbiter and editor is Elisabeth Harrison, our founding godmother as Carrie Goldberg.
Juna: I'm Juna Gjata.
Eddie: And I’m Dr. Eddy Phillips. See you next time.
Juna: Not if I see you first, Eddie.
