We are getting heavier by the year, and the social, economic and
well-being costs of our obesity grow at a rate proportional to
our expanding waistlines. As researchers strive to understand
why it is we have such a hard time maintaining a healthy weight
some have focused in on the many similarities between the
behaviors of drug addiction and the behaviors of some types of
compulsive eating – and as these scientists investigate, they’re
finding that at the neural level, drug addiction looks quite a
lot like food addiction. As a nation, we’ve never been as obese
as we are today, and the same holds true for citizens from many
countries of the world. By 2009-2010 roughly a third of
Americans (35.7%) were obese and no state in the nation had an
obesity prevalence rate below 20%.1 What is going on? Maybe it’s
increasing portion sizes, a decrease in physical activity
levels, increasing numbers of people working in front of
computers and an explosion in the availability and variety of
processed foods which offer a dr