To Combat the Obesity Epidemic, Rutgers Researchers Delve Into Cravings and Food Addiction

A grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse will support research examining craving’s role in biasing what foods we choose to eat

Rutgers Health researchers receive funding for research aimed at assessing how cravings influence how much people are willing to pay for food and its relationship to overeating, unhealthy food choices, and obesity.

Obesity is a public health crisis affecting about 40% of all U.S. adults and is linked to a range of chronic diseases. These include cancer, cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, and hypertension among many others. While the percentage of adults living with obesity in New Jersey falls below the national average, obesity remains one of the state’s most pressing public health issues.

To combat this problem – and learn more about how we decide what we’ll eat – the National Institute on Drug Abuse has awarded Rutgers Health researchers a grant to study the neuroscience of craving and specifically how craving may bias individuals’ choices toward unhealthy foods.

“In food addiction and addiction research more broadly, a major question is why we sometimes act against our long-term goals, such as seeking out and eating high calorie foods despite understanding the highly negative health consequences associated with such behavior,” said Emma Schweitzer, a Rutgers doctoral student in the neuroscience department at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and the project’s principal investigator.

To uncover how craving may play a key role in facilitating unhealthy eating behavior, she and her colleagues, including faculty mentor Dr. Anna Konova, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Rutgers Health, aim to map how food cravings may co-opt the brain circuits responsible for decision-making.

To do so, she is asking human volunteers how much they are willing to pay for various snack food items in the laboratory before and after they are induced to crave them. To identify how the acute state of craving changes these decisions, she is simultaneously recording participants’ brain activity using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner.

How much we’re willing to pay for something – that is, the cost we are willing to incur to obtain something – is thought to reflect the value we assign to consumer items, foods, and activities, with higher willingness to pay indicating increased motivation to obtain these items or experiences. Schweitzer is hopeful that through this research, we might learn how craving shifts a person’s internal value function for specific, high calorie foods. Further, by simultaneously recording brain activity while participants indicate their willingness to pay, she hopes to shed light on what brain regions elicit craving and the neural processes that make us vulnerable to succumb to that craving. Ultimately, she hopes that an improved understanding of food craving can help people maintain better control over their dietary choices.

Schweitzer thinks that basic science research on craving that brings together ideas from different disciplines, such as economics and neuroscience, is of high importance because of the sheer amount of advertising and marketing that individuals are constantly exposed to throughout their daily lives. Simply watching tv, stepping outside, or looking at one’s phone may expose them to food ads. “The ability to acquire food these days is literally at the tip of our fingers,” Schweitzer said, pointing to Uber Eats and DoorDash as examples. She shared that the dings and other notification sounds from these apps used to alert us when food is delivered or promote food purchases seem to almost mirror the experiments of Ivan Pavlov who famously demonstrated he could train his dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. The psychological experience of craving can be a similarly conditioned response to stimuli associated with tasty foods that can bias us to seek out these foods even when they do not provide nutritional value.

Lastly, Schweitzer wants to stress that giving in to a food craving from time to time isn’t all bad, stating, “The goal isn’t to extinguish pleasurable (hedonic) eating. Rather, by understanding craving and decision-making processes better, we hope to help curb problematic eating behavior.”

She added that on an evolutionary scale and in pre-agrarian times, when our ancestors had less control over food availability and variety, consuming the best tasting, densely caloric food whenever available was strategic and beneficial. The problem today is that food is highly processed and designed to appeal to our pleasure centers while being extremely easy to access.