Obese people are ‘hardwired’ to crave food, like junkies hunger for a fix

Fat people crave greasy, high-calorie food in much the same way drug addicts crave their fix, scientists say.

Scientists tempted obese people with buffet-style snacks, then scanned their brains with magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans as they looked at photos of the food they had just eaten.

Looking at the images fired a connection between two specific brain areas – the dorsal caudate and the somatosensory cortex – neural changes similar to those seen in drug addiction.

Further research showed that 11% of weight gain in obese individuals over a period of three months could be predicted by the presence of higher dorsal caudate – somatosensory cortex connectivity.

Lead researcher Dr Oren Contreras-Rodriguez, from the University of Granada in Spain, said: ‘There is an ongoing controversy over whether obesity can be called a ‘food addiction’, but in fact there is very little research which shows whether or not this might be true.

 ‘The findings in our study support the idea that the reward processing following food stimuli in obesity is associated with neural changes similar to those found in substance addiction.

‘These findings provide potential brain biomarkers which we can use to help manage obesity, for example through pharmacotherapies and brain stimulation techniques that might help control food intake in clinical situations.’

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