Brain Scans Suggest 'Food Addiction' Might Be Real

Certain carbohydrates seemed to activate neurological centers focused on reward, study found

By Robert Preidt

HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, June 26 (HealthDay News) -- New brain scan research supports the notion that some people have a food "addiction," with foods like white bread or potatoes helping to spur their craving to eat.

Researchers used functional ("real time") MRI to observe the brain activity of 12 overweight or obese men during the crucial four hours after they ate a meal, a period that experts say influences eating behavior during the next meal.

The participants' blood sugar levels and hunger were also measured during this time.

The men's "meals" were two milkshakes that had the same calories, taste and sweetness. The only difference was that one milkshake contained high-glycemic index carbohydrates and the other had low-glycemic index carbohydrates.

High-glycemic index carbohydrates -- which are quickly transformed into sugar in the blood -- are found in highly processed foods such as white bread and white rice. Low-glycemic index carbohydrates are found in items such as whole wheat products and sweet potatoes.

The researchers found that consuming carbohydrates like those found in processed foods can cause excess hunger and stimulate areas of the brain involved in reward and cravings, regions that also play a role in addiction, according to the study published June 26 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

The study might have implications for weight control, the researchers said.

"Limiting high-glycemic index carbohydrates like white bread and potatoes could help obese individuals reduce cravings and control the urge to overeat," study leader Dr. David Ludwig, director of the obesity prevention center at Boston Children's Hospital, said in a hospital news release.

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Woman's Tea Addiction Led to Loss of Teeth, Bone Problems

Extreme levels of fluoride from daily consumption of a concentrated brew caused pain, brittle teeth

By Barbara Bronson Gray

HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, March 20 (HealthDay News) -- Here's a cautionary tale about the value of moderation.

A case study reported in the March 21 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine shows how habitually drinking an extreme form of highly concentrated tea over almost 20 years created a hard-to-diagnose case of severe bone damage in a 47-year-old woman.

Worried that she had cancer, the patient told her primary care doctor in Lansing, Mich., that she was concerned about bone pain she had been having in her lower back, arms, legs and hips for five years. She also had had all her teeth extracted due to brittleness.

Her X-rays showed her bones were unusually dense, but there was no sign of disease. The fluoride level in her blood was also high. She was referred to Dr. Sudhaker Rao, section head of bone and mineral metabolism and director of the bone and mineral research laboratory at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, for a bone biopsy.

The patient's intake of brewed tea was astronomically high, said Rao, who learned that the patient had been regularly drinking a pitcher a day of tea made from about 100 to 150 tea bags, which gave her more than 20 milligrams (mg) of fluoride. She had a fluoride concentration in her blood of 0.43 milligrams per liter, while the normal concentration is less than 0.10 mg per liter, Rao reported.

Fluoride is used to prevent tooth decay and is usually prescribed for children and adults whose homes have water that does not naturally have fluoride in it, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

It turns out that Rao, the author of the case study, came from an area in India where fluoride levels in the water were naturally extremely high, sometimes causing a condition called skeletal fluorosis. He has also recently consulted on a few cases involving high fluoride in the blood, he pointed out.

"Most of us can excrete fluoride extremely well, but if you drink too much, it can be a problem," he said. Brewed tea has one of the highest fluoride contents of all the beverages in the United States, according to Rao. He immediately wondered if the fluoride in the concentrated tea concoction the woman was regularly drinking could be the cause of her bone troubles, he said. "There have been about three to four cases reported in the U.S. associated with ingesting tea, especially large amounts of it," he noted.

When Rao tried to perform the biopsy, the woman's bone was so hard he said his instrument could not penetrate the bone. "It was like steel," he said. "Her bone density was very high, seven times denser than normal."

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Woman's Tea Addiction Led to Loss of Teeth, Bone Problems

Title: Woman's Tea Addiction Led to Loss of Teeth, Bone Problems
Category: Health News
Created: 3/20/2013 6:35:00 PM
Last Editorial Review: 3/21/2013 12:00:00 AM

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Woman's Tea Addiction Led to Loss of Teeth, Bone Problems

Extreme levels of fluoride from daily consumption of a concentrated brew caused pain, brittle teeth

By Barbara Bronson Gray

HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, March 20 (HealthDay News) -- Here's a cautionary tale about the value of moderation.

A case study reported in the March 21 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine shows how habitually drinking an extreme form of highly concentrated tea over almost 20 years created a hard-to-diagnose case of severe bone damage in a 47-year-old woman.

Worried that she had cancer, the patient told her primary care doctor in Lansing, Mich., that she was concerned about bone pain she had been having in her lower back, arms, legs and hips for five years. She also had had all her teeth extracted due to brittleness.

Her X-rays showed her bones were unusually dense, but there was no sign of disease. The fluoride level in her blood was also high. She was referred to Dr. Sudhaker Rao, section head of bone and mineral metabolism and director of the bone and mineral research laboratory at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, for a bone biopsy.

The patient's intake of brewed tea was astronomically high, said Rao, who learned that the patient had been regularly drinking a pitcher a day of tea made from about 100 to 150 tea bags, which gave her more than 20 milligrams (mg) of fluoride. She had a fluoride concentration in her blood of 0.43 milligrams per liter, while the normal concentration is less than 0.10 mg per liter, Rao reported.

Fluoride is used to prevent tooth decay and is usually prescribed for children and adults whose homes have water that does not naturally have fluoride in it, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

It turns out that Rao, the author of the case study, came from an area in India where fluoride levels in the water were naturally extremely high, sometimes causing a condition called skeletal fluorosis. He has also recently consulted on a few cases involving high fluoride in the blood, he pointed out.

"Most of us can excrete fluoride extremely well, but if you drink too much, it can be a problem," he said. Brewed tea has one of the highest fluoride contents of all the beverages in the United States, according to Rao. He immediately wondered if the fluoride in the concentrated tea concoction the woman was regularly drinking could be the cause of her bone troubles, he said. "There have been about three to four cases reported in the U.S. associated with ingesting tea, especially large amounts of it," he noted.

When Rao tried to perform the biopsy, the woman's bone was so hard he said his instrument could not penetrate the bone. "It was like steel," he said. "Her bone density was very high, seven times denser than normal."

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Diet Soda Habit as Bad for Teeth as Meth Addiction, Study Claims

Acid in both can erode teeth over time

By Dennis Thompson

HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, May 23 (HealthDay News) -- Heavy consumption of diet soda can damage teeth as badly as methamphetamine or crack cocaine, a new study contends.

"You look at it side-to-side with 'meth mouth' or 'coke mouth,' it is startling to see the intensity and extent of damage more or less the same," said Dr. Mohamed Bassiouny, a professor of restorative dentistry at the Temple University School of Dentistry in Philadelphia.

Methamphetamine, crack cocaine and soda -- sweetened or not -- are all highly acidic and can cause similar dental problems, Bassiouny said in a study published recently in the journal General Dentistry.

The acid in soda is in the form of citric acid and phosphoric acid, Bassiouny said. Without good dental hygiene, constant exposure can cause erosion and significant oral damage, he said.

In his study, he found that a woman in her 30s who drank 2 liters of diet soda daily for three to five years experienced tooth rot and decay remarkably similar to that suffered by a 29-year-old methamphetamine addict and a 51-year-old habitual crack cocaine user.

The younger man had used methamphetamine for three years, and often downed two or three cans of regular soda a day because the drugs made his mouth so dry. The older man reported an 18-year history of crack abuse.

The woman said concerns about weight gain led her to choose diet soda over regular, and admitted that she had not seen a dentist in many years, according to the study. She also associated sweetened beverages with a higher risk of tooth decay.

Her teeth were soft and discolored, with many destroyed by erosion. She usually sipped the beverage directly from a can or a bottle, and held the soda in her mouth before swallowing, Bassiouny said.

"She also mentioned that when doing so, she habitually leaned on her left side against the arm of the sofa while watching television," he said. The "massive" damage to the left side of her mouth bore this out and resulted in what is called a collapsed bite.

"None of the teeth affected by erosion were salvageable," Bassiouny said. The woman had to have all of her teeth removed and replaced with dentures.

Methamphetamine and crack are known to ravage the mouths of users, and the two drug abusers needed all of their teeth extracted.

Besides exposing teeth to damaging acid, these illegal drugs reduce the amount of saliva in the mouth, providing less opportunity for the acids to wash away. The drugs also cause systemic health problems that affect dental hygiene. Previous studies have linked "meth mouth" with rampant decay.

A group representing soft drink manufacturers said this case study should not be seen as an indictment of diet sodas generally.

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What is Sex Addiction?

Reviewed by Joseph Goldberg, MD

You've probably heard of sex addiction, but you might be surprised to know that there's debate about whether it's truly an addiction, and that it's not even all about sex.

"That's a common misconception," says Rory Reid, PhD, LCSW, a research psychologist at UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. "It is no more about sex than an eating disorder is about food or pathological gambling is about money."

Sex addicts, in other words, are not simply people who crave lots of sex. Instead, they have underlying problems -- stress, anxiety, depression, shame -- that drive their often risky sexual behavior.

"Those are some of the core issues that you start to see when you treat someone with sex addiction," says John O'Neill, LCSW, LCDC, CAS, CART, a certified addiction counselor at the Menninger Clinic in Houston. "You can't miss those pieces."

Sex addiction won't be in the upcoming edition of the DSM-5, which is used to diagnose mental disorders.

That doesn't mean that it's not a very real problem.

"People are going to seek help, and there doesn't need to be diagnosable condition for them to get help," Reid says. "If they are suffering, we want to help them."

Reid and many other experts prefer the term "hypersexual disorder," rather than "sex addiction."

By either name, it's about people who keep engaging in sexual behaviors that are damaging them and/or their families.

As examples, Reid cites men who spend half their income on prostitutes, and office workers who surf the web for porn despite warnings that they'll lose their job if they keep it up.

"Who does that? Somebody with a problem," Reid says.

That problem puts so much at risk: their personal lives, their social lives, their jobs, and, with the threat of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, their health.

Despite the danger, they return to the same behaviors over and over, whether it's Internet porn, soliciting sex workers, ceaselessly seeking affairs, masturbating or exposing themselves in public, or any number of other acts.

"I see in them an inability to stop what they're doing," O'Neill says. "They're preoccupied; their brain just keeps going back to it. It often leads to loneliness and isolation. There's such intense shame and pain."

Frequently, a crisis convinces them to seek treatment, Reid says. They're caught in the act by a spouse, fired from their job, or arrested for soliciting sex from prostitutes. For some people, the crisis brings relief from distress caused by their behavior and constant fear of being discovered. "The world comes crashing down," says Reid, "and some say, 'I'm glad that I got caught.'"

There are no reliable estimates of how many people have the disorder. Some studies suggest that it's more common in men, and gay men in particular, than women.

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Can Excessive Cellphone Use Become an Addiction?

Title: Can Excessive Cellphone Use Become an Addiction?
Category: Health News
Created: 12/4/2012 2:36:00 PM
Last Editorial Review: 12/5/2012 12:00:00 AM

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