Re-Evaluating “Food Addiction”: Why It’s Time to Change the Conversation
The term food addiction is everywhere—used casually in conversations, promoted by health gurus, and even built into clinical programs. Sugar gets compared to cocaine. Snacks are labeled “triggering.” Whole food groups are moralized. But this narrative isn’t just simplistic—it’s harmful and coercive.
As we unlearn outdated models of drug addiction, we must also reject those same flawed frameworks being repackaged and applied to food especially when they reinforce shame, restriction, and disconnection.
Addiction Isn’t What We Were Told
Traditional models frame addiction as a loss of control, a moral failing, or something to be conquered through willpower. But addiction—substance or otherwise—isn’t about weakness. It’s often rooted in trauma, disconnection, and coping.
“There is no addiction without trauma.”
Gabor Maté
Addiction-based frameworks for food often mirror and reinforce eating disorder logic. They are rigid, moralistic, and shame-based. They pathologize hunger and pleasure, discourage flexibility, and teach people to view their appetites as untrustworthy. For those already navigating disordered eating or a complicated relationship with food, these models don’t offer relief—they deepen the distress. Rather than promoting healing, they risk further entrenching fear, avoidance, and control as substitutes for care and connection. Food is not a substance we are powerless over. And control is not a cure.
“The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety—it’s connection.”
Johann Hari
Food Isn’t a Drug. It’s a Need.
Food is essential. You cannot be addicted to something you need to survive. Sugar – in the form of glucose – is a primary fuel source for every cell in the body, especially the brain. Eating is not more suspect when it is pleasurable and soothing. This kind of pleasure mimics how the brain responds to music, love, or being held.
Normal human stuff.
Studies that claim “addiction-like” behavior around food consistently ignore the most obvious variable: restriction. Bingeing and fixation are often direct responses to being told we can’t have something. The more we moralize and limit food, the more powerful it becomes.
The Pattern Isn’t Addiction. It’s Deprivation.
Many people feel out of control around food, not because they’re addicted, but because they’re living in a cycle of restraint, guilt, and secrecy.
The idea of “powerlessness” around food, popularized by 12-step models, reinforces this cycle. What’s needed instead is permission, consistency, and compassionate attunement. And food. People need food.
You are not powerless to food. But you might be under-resourced, over-restricted, or disconnected from your own cues after years of trying to “get it right”.
When “Wellness” Misses the Mark
Many modern health movements, including what we might call the “MAHA” movement, double down on the food-as-medicine philosophy—but with a twist of nutritionism, wellness elitism, and whitewashed standards of “good” eating.
This model prioritizes organic produce, “clean eating,” and lifestyle purity—without acknowledging systemic barriers or the reality of eating disorders. It pathologizes cultural foods, demonizes convenience, and upholds a white, classed, able-bodied ideal of what “healthy” should look like.
It also ignores the widespread prevalence of disordered eating and the very real harm caused by chronic dieting and food restriction.
People are praised for “control” when it looks like orthorexia. They’re applauded for cutting out sugar or carbs—even when it’s rooted in fear and anti-fat bias. But obsession isn’t wellness. And rigidity isn’t health promoting.
So, What Now?
Food isn’t a threat. Pleasure isn’t dangerous. The healing path isn’t through more vigilance or harder rules. It’s through nourishment, flexibility, community, and care.
The opposite of bingeing isn’t restriction.
It’s accessible, flexible eating.
If you’re a practitioner, you’re ethically bound to do no harm. That means unlearning what diet culture taught you, rejecting pathologizing models, and listening deeply to the real stories of the people you work with.
People don’t need more food rules. They need to eat without fear.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
Re-Evaluating “Food Addiction”: A Body Trust Perspective
(The Body Trust Podcast Episode 18)
The Making of Myths About Sugar
No, Sugar Isn’t The New Heroin
A Little Nutrition Sanity: Rhetoric vs. Reality
Restraining Eating & Food Cues: Recent Findings & Conclusions
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