Bart Hoebel, pater familias
Kelly Brownell was the lead speaker on the first day of the conference (“Food Addiction: The Obesity Epidemic Connection”) and billed the keynote speaker, but each day’s lead speaker was a keynote for the day, clearly chosen for his prominence in the field. Bart Hoebel of Princeton led off Saturday, and Mark Gold was the opening speaking on Sunday.
Hoebel is a striking figure, tall and rail-thin with a full head of white hair, and he imparts — or I inferred — an air of patrician authority. But then he speaks, and whatever slight stiffness that suggested itself melts into a good-humored, approachable, grandfatherly guy, a description that arises not only because his daughter brought two of his grandkids to visit for part of the weekend, and he clearly relished his time with them.
Hoebel has been studying obesity for 50 years, since he was an undergraduate, and has been studying the science of sugar addiction for eight years. In December, he reported that he and his team had demonstrated craving, the third and final criterion for substance dependence in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association; he had previously done the same for bingeing and withdrawal.
He said the fourth edition of the DSM declined to use the word “addiction,” but he said he thinks, “the DSM V [due out in 2012] is going to call it addiction. I’ve talked to the people who are writing it.” If that happens, that’s big news, indeed.
In his research, the rats go without sugar for 12 hours — while they’re sleeping. But then they don’t get it for the first four hours they’re awake, either. He drew the analogy of a teenager who skips breakfast, and then has a soda and a candy bar at 10 a.m.
Among the findings he shared:
* The rats like the sugar on day one, but they take progressively more as days lapse, beginning with a large dose as soon as they get access. “There’s something about deprivation, then a binge.”
* Sugar appears to have a gateway effect: If rats can’t get sugar, they’ll drink alcohol. At least once, Hoebel spoke of what happens in humans, but then studiously stepped back, since humans haven’t been studied. “I can’t help making these little translational leaps,” he said.
* Even after sugar is no longer administered, the brain stays changed. The craving never goes away. “Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder,” he said.
* A paradox: Palatable foods release dopamine, but that effect fades over time, while with a drug, it happens every time. But if sugar is combined with a schedule — if food is deprived early in the day — the dopamine response happens every time.
Hoebel made a plea that “we need to do this research on people. Sooner or later, we’ll convince them.” He added that he has no doubt that if caffeine were added to the sugar, “we’d get all these effects and probably more. … You think I ought to ask Coca Cola for a grant?”