Series 2, Episode 11 - Facing up to the reality of food addiction, with Professor Ashley Gearhardt, University of Michigan

As of 2022, the World Health Organisation estimated that More than 1 billion people worldwide are obese – 650 million adults, 340 million adolescents and 39 million children. Given that there are approximately 8 billion people on the planet that is equivalent to 12 and a half percent of the global population. This situation is made all the worse by the seeming impossibility in many developed countries of avoiding cheap, processed which is high in calories, salt and sugar, while also being incredibly low in nutrition.At the same time, evidence linking obesity and substance use disorders continues to grow, which has led to increased interest in the role of an addictive process in problematic eating behavior. To find out more about the challenges of food addiction we were delighted to be joined by Professor Ashley Gearhardt of the University of Michigan.Ashley Gearhardt is an Associate Professor of Psychology in the Clinical Science area at the University of Michigan. While working on her doctorate in clinical psychology at Yale University, Dr. Gearhardt became interested in the possibility that certain foods may be capable of triggering an addictive process. To explore this further, she developed the Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS) to operationalize addictive eating behaviors, which has been linked with more frequent binge eating episodes, an increased prevalence of obesity and patterns of neural activation implicated in other addictive behaviors. It has been cited over 800 times and translated into over ten foreign languages. Her areas of research also include investigating how food advertising activates reward systems to drive eating behavior and the development of food preferences and eating patterns in infants. She has published over 100 academic publications and her research has been featured on media outlets, such as ABC News, Good Morning America, the Today Show, the Wall Street Journal, and NPR.Further information on Ashley's research and the work of the Food and Addiction Science and Treatment Lab is available on their website: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/fastlab/

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