Loretta Graziano Breuning, PhD, shares how food holds value and produces serotonin and endorphins in your brain. Children sometimes fight over food the way monkeys do. By the time we reach adulthood, we learn to restrain that impulse, but the longing for power doesn’t stop when you stop grabbing other people’s bananas. We look for ways to stimulate that one-up feeling, and food often gets involved. Your mammal brain finds ways to be special and fill your belly at the same time.
Triggering Addiction and Weight Gain with Unhealthy Foods
Overweight and obesity affect two-thirds of the American population, and the abundance and accessibility of calorie-dense, low-micronutrient foods is a major contributor to this problem. Many people have difficulty stopping when consuming these foods, eating well past the point of being satiated or even physically full. However, the idea that food can be addictive is still controversial. Triggering addiction and weight gain with unhealthy foods will be explored.
The Key to Weight Loss
How often have you eaten something that you know is going to put weight on you, and you tell yourself that it doesn’t count? Do you have any idea how many calories you actually consume in a day, and how many you need for weight loss or to maintain weight? Is it possible that you think you are not eating much but are actually eating far more than you need?
Oxytocin and Food Anxiety: Part Three
Whatever triggered your oxytocin in youth built a pathway that turns it on today. Food anxiety is usually linked to that circuit because it’s linked to your early social experience. If you enjoyed social trust around a table in youth, that will activate your sense of safety today. If your table was full of conflict, you have some different associations. Most of us have a combination of positive and negative associations for shared meals, which is why food can evoke social pain and the joy of belonging at the same time.
Probiotics – Digestion and Immune System Support
Myths of Eating a Wholegrain Plant Based Diet
Digestion and Immune System Foods
Wholegrains Strengthen the digestive system – It is a well-known fact among my family and friends that I do love to dispel a myth or two. I adore teaching clients and students the foods that aid in digestion and are amazing for immune system support.
The myth about wholegrain being very difficult to digest alongside people claiming that it is the cause of constipation or how expensive it is to eat a healthy diet have to be at the top of my list.
Foods to strengthen the digestive system are of paramount importance in achieving a healthy intestinal tract to allow optimum food absorption particularly when introducing wholegrain into your diet.
Dopamine and Food Anxiety: Part Two
The joy of food is one of your first experiences in life. A newborn baby enjoys a surge of dopamine when it first tastes milk. The baby doesn’t know what milk is, or what nutritional needs are, but the brain releases dopamine when milk relieves low blood sugar. That builds a pathway that says, “This is the way to feel good! Get me more of this!” But a baby doesn’t know how to get it. The next time it is hungry, it surges with cortisol and crying is its only way to “do something.” Then it hears a sound. Suddenly, its dopamine is triggered because that sound was heard during a prior dopamine release. So, at one day of age, a brain is already drawing on past experience to feel good.
Understanding and Ending the Obesity Crisis
We live in an obesogenic society filled with mental, emotional, and physical cues that make us the most overweight population in history. This is not sustainable, and our fragile healthcare system will soon collapse under the stress of this immense disease burden. 42.4% of Americans are obese, this number is expected to increase to 50% by 2030. There is good evidence that 87.8% of adults are metabolically unhealthy, a term that identifies how excess fat mass exacts a heavy toll on health. Metabolic dysregulation, typically due to obesity, is causing an explosion of chronic disease – type 2 diabetes, cognitive decline, heart disease, autoimmunity, and cancer. Obesity has surpassed smoking as the number one preventable cause of death. There are a staggering 900,000 lifestyle related deaths a year just in the USA. Our obesogenic environment is a despicable hate crime being perpetrated on our fellow citizens. It is exacting a horrific toll of unnecessary mental, emotional, and physical suffering. Understanding and ending the obesity crisis must become a national priority.