Food, sex, drugs and more – are we addicted to addiction?

3D illustration of human brain walking between cookies, candies and other junk food. Building addiction on sweets and unhealthy lifestyle concept.

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What links sex, drugs and sausage rolls? Depending on who you ask, all of them can be addictive to the point of harm. But while it is uncontroversial that people can become dependent on heroin or cocaine, the science behind many other supposed addictions isn’t so clear cut.

For sausage rolls, the claim isn’t that the pastry treats specifically can be addictive, but rather certain kinds of foods are high in fat, sugar, salt and other nutrients we crave. In “Food ‘addiction’ should be treated like drug abuse, claim doctors”, we examine this new case for food addiction, and what it might mean for treating people if they have it.

It seems that new addictions are constantly cropping up – you might even say we are addicted to them. Some are calling for urgent action over an epidemic of young people becoming addicted to gaming or using social media, for example, while a few celebrities accused of sexual misdeeds say that they have sex addiction.

At the heart of many of these claims is dopamine, a molecule that surges in the brain when people take some addictive drugs. But while dopamine has become a buzzword relating to anything rewarding – from sugar to social media likes – its role in addiction is incompletely understood. It was once thought that dopamine itself causes pleasure, but we now think it is really a signal that the brain should pay more attention to an unexpected event.

And, perhaps surprisingly, there is no universally agreed definition of addiction. Rather than focusing on the brain, various medical bodies look at how proposed addictions affect behaviour. For instance, someone may be considered to have an addiction if they want to stop the activity but can’t, if they experience cravings and if they tend to carry out the activity more and more. A person with gaming addiction may meet all those criteria, but someone who compulsively overeats seems unlikely to meet the last.

Really, it is unclear whether these definitions actually help. Perhaps, before we continue to create more mental health diagnoses, we should prioritise developing a better understanding of what addiction actually is.