Emotional eating, binge eating and comfort eating- why do we do it?
This blog post takes a number of articles and pulls together a few thoughts from them.
If losing weight wasn’t hard enough……a study from researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research in the USA reveals that we’re rewarded twice when eating. We are talking here about DOPAMINE.
What IS dopamine and why is it relevant to me?
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter – a chemical messenger that plays a key role in the brain’s reward, motivation and pleasure systems. It helps to regulate mood, attention, learning, and motor control.
What does it do?
- Motivation and reward. Dopamine is released in response to pleasurable activities, reinforcing behaviours like eating, socialising, and exercising.
- Motor control. It helps to regulate movement, and a dopamine deficiency is linked to Parkinson’s disease.
- Cognition and Learning. Dopamine influences attention, problem- solving, and decision- making.
- Mood regulation. Imbalances in dopamine levels are associated with mental health conditions such as depression and schizophrenia.
Your dopamine levels can be influenced by diet, sleep, and social interactions.
So- in relation to dopamine and eating, the first dopamine kick occurs when tasting food; the second, when the food reaches your stomach.
Making this process even more confusing, studies indicate that the more you crave the food, the less dopamine is produced by your stomach, which the researchers believe might lead to overeating.
Previous research has shown that even thinking about food starts the process of salivation by releasing a protein enzyme (amylase), which helps break down food before it reaches your stomach. Interestingly, if you head to your favourite restaurant and they’re out of the dish you’ve been craving, the emotional discontent is real. Your brain has been tricked—well, your brain tricked itself.
For this study, the researchers write that pleasant taste and nutritional value are both reinforcers for consuming certain foods. Yet the desire for a taste -pleasing experience overrides health concerns. They point to research highlighting the brain’s “dopaminergic” system as a key trigger in overeating. In simple terms: If we like it, we eat it, and keep eating it beyond the point of feeling comfortably satisfied.
As the research team puts it: “Highly processed food with added fat and sugar is known to include higher food wanting and overconsumption”.
In evolutionary terms , sweet treats and fats were rare throughout most of our history. When our ancestors discovered them, they absolutely gorged on them! Now, at a time when the entirety of taste profiles and nutrients are literally a few swipes on your phone away, plus, these items are cheap and easy to get hold of, the dopaminergic system hasn’t caught up to the news that we don’t need all those tastes all the time. Dopamine keeps us going out for more.
To test the physiological reasons for this, the team at Max Planck recruited 12 normal-weight male volunteers (average age, 56) to drink either a milkshake or a tasteless chemistry experiment in a glass. They then performed PET (positive emission topography) scans on their brains. Lead researcher, Marc Tittgemeyer, explains the results:
With the help of a new PET technique we developed, we were not only able to find the two peaks of dopamine release, but we could also identify the specific brain regions that were associated with these releases.
The first release, as expected, occurred in the reward system of the brain. They identified dopamine release in certain areas of the brain which are linked to memory and inhibition control. This complex interplay of these regions in the brain connects desire with continual consumption, especially in the hippocampus and lateral ventral anterior nucleus of the thalamus. (Don’t worry too much about this- what you need to take from this is that we have areas located in our brain , especially in the emotionally- driven parts called the lower brain/ primitive brain etc which have been with us since we have been in existence and are all about our survival, instinct, safety and are NOT in any way logical. )
The second dopamine release occurred 15-20 minutes later, when the milkshake was in their stomachs. These reached the higher cognitive function regions of the brain.
Basically, the brain was being told that a) everything is all good and b) I like it.
The strangest result was the fact that the more a volunteer craved the milkshake, the less dopamine was produced in the second stage.
What does this mean?
On one hand, dopamine release mirrors our desire to consume a food item. On the other hand, our desire seems to suppress gut-induced dopamine release.
The researchers agree that this might be the physiological reason we overeat. Basically, we desire the feeling we originally received when first consuming the food. The stronger the desire, the less effective it is. Our response is to keep returning in hopes of chasing down that initial feeling. Of course, 12 men drinking milkshakes is just the beginning of this research, but fascinating at that. The more we understand why we overeat, the closer we are to finding solutions.
The higher and lower brain and why it is helpful to know how they impact on eating and pleasure. Which part of the brain, the higher brain (the logical centre) or lower brain, (primal, habitual, instinctual, and pleasure-seeking) is involved in normal eating?
Below is a brief excerpt from a more comprehensive discussion but hopefully it will provide you with some information, and some of you might like me to cover it more thoroughly in my evening sessions, which take place on a Tuesday evening at 7 30pm on a monthly basis.
There are many resources for you to read and listen to where you can learn more, because this issue can be nuanced.
The Higher and Lower Brain and Eating
The more primitive part of the brain (that I call the lower brain) has a fundamental role in eating, and when it’s functioning properly, we should be able to trust it to regulate our appetite and steer us toward pretty good food choices—based on our taste preferences and physiological needs. However, when restrictive dieting and binge eating/ comfort eating/ compulsively overeating become involved, the lower brain becomes dysfunctional, driving you toward large amounts of food, as if that’s imperative for survival. To overcome this, it’s necessary to use the rational higher brain to override the lower (primitive) brain’s (temporarily) faulty programming.
When you are no longer emotionally overeating / binge eating/ comfort eating etc, you are not “banishing” the lower brain. You are instead returning it to its normal role in regulating hunger and fullness and the desire for pleasurable food. However, in today’s modern food environment, I don’t think we can rely completely on the primitive, lower brain to guide our eating. There are so many unnatural and over-stimulating foods that our appetite regulation system and our lower brain’s reward system weren’t meant to deal with. What do I mean? Highly processed, or sugary, or uber- palatable foods that are developed to make us want to eat more for example. There is a reason why when you “pop” you can’t stop!
This does not mean we are powerless against those foods, but it does mean we need our higher brain to override any excess or problematic cravings.
Eating is never a purely rational experience, nor should it be. But in today’s world, I don’t think eating can necessarily be a purely primal-brain-driven experience either.
