The Woodstock connection to food addiction
From experience, I can say that people do develop over time, and that what they present today isn’t necessarily how it has always been for them. Even so, it’s easy to imagine that Mark Gold, distinguished professor (that’s a title, not just a description) at the University of Florida, has always been able to light up a room. He led off the half-day Sunday program with a presentation that was at once entertaining, enlightening, humorous, far-reaching, charismatic, and teasingly arrogant, at least when he talked about Florida’s football team.
He doesn’t research only on obesity; one of his slides listed 26 items on his list of current research. He described research, for example, that showed that anesthesiologists have a very high rate of addiction because they are around anesthetic agents all the time, that patients given Propofol and Fentanyl intraveneously exhale active fumes, and that the fumes arise from the trash after an operation. He also said that to talk of “nicotine dependence” is inaccurate, since there are 400 other chemicals in cigarette smoke as well. He said they have to pay people to wear a nicotine patch for studies.
Gold described how he came to link obesity and addiction in his thinking, beginning with Woodstock. Because of all the mud and poor provisioning, little food was available during the festival, but no one noticed. Why? Because they had sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll to keep them busy. Another clue was how drugs of abuse, including cocaine and amphetamine, have been used to suppress appetite; he added that on campus, low doses of Ecstasy have been used for weight loss. He also observed that drug intoxication reduces eating, while drug withdrawal increases eating.
“Drugs of abuse compete with eating for some sort of common reinforcement sites, and if drugs of abuse are on, really on, then food is really off.” But if you remove the drugs, he added, then people develop a large appetite for food and become heavy.
He made the point, perhaps obvious, that what we eat does matter. “We’re not just eating anything. We like good food,” he said. “If you served them cardboard, they wouldn’t go back.” Gold was not the only speaker to pick up on one of Jack LaLanne’s aphorisms of the night before: “If it tastes good, spit it out,” which Gold called a “good motto.” (’Course, you have to take that in context, because my experience, for example, has been that after I removed processed foods from my diet, I came to really enjoy vegetables, especially those roasted in a little oil — parsnips, turnips, peppers, green beans … I won’t be spitting any of them out.)
Gold also illuminated the phenomenon of early onset, which he said explains why so much of advertising is pointed at young people. For example, a 13-year-old who smokes for the first time has been shown to become addicted in as little as two days, but that won’t happen to a 30-year-old. He said the same “critical periods” exist for language, music, alcohol, and food. “If you want to change people, change them early.”
Gold concluded by urging more long-term study on obesity and addiction. He said the focus should be on “things that matter, like portion control, like exercise, like not going out to dinner, like not switching foods like sexual positions — basically, all the novelty only serves to increase the reinforcement.” He said if long-term studies can be done, “I think we’ll find a subset of people who are obese, who meet these criteria, who will benefit from similar interventions [to drug treatment], and … maybe we can develop novel treatments that no one has ever heard of.”