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PSYCHIATRY

Obesity and addiction

Nature Human Behaviour volume 4, pages 10–11 (2020)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 18 November 2019

This article has been updated

There is a consensus that obesity and addiction are similar, showing overlap in cognition, neural activity and personality traits. A new study using a more nuanced approach for analysing traits reveals how obesity and addiction are less similar than previously thought, while the construct of uncontrolled eating is closely related to addiction.

Over the last few decades, it has been shown that feeding control and substance abuse share, to a large degree, the same behavioural and neural systems3 Cognitive tests, personality questionnaires and brain imaging studies have also pointed to a shared neurocognitive basis for vulnerability to drug use, uncontrolled eating and obesity4. Ultimately, this leads to the question of whether obesity should be treated similarly to other addiction pathologies such as alcoholism or other substance abuse disorders. Specifically, the intriguing question is, what exact component is the common driver for those diseases. So far, no consensus has been reached on an explicit mechanism linking obesity and addiction. To address this question, Vainik and colleagues focused on the personality traits underlying uncontrolled eating, obesity and addiction. Uncontrolled eating can be generally characterized by excessive appetite along with a lack of self-control, is closely related to obesity, and has been previously shown by Vainik and colleagues to be a common factor underlying a number of different eating-related behaviors5. In the current study2, the authors analyzed a large dataset consisting of personality assessments, to test how closely uncontrolled eating, obesity and addiction depend on the same traits. In contrast to previous studies, the authors took smaller subcomponents of personality traits into consideration to achieve a more fine-grained picture of the relationships between obesity, uncontrolled eating, addiction and other related psychiatric disorders.

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Decision Neuroscience and Nutrition, German Institute of Human Nutrition Research, Potsdam-Rehbruecke, Germany

    Elliot C. Brown & Soyoung Q. Park

  2. Deutsches Zentrum für Diabetes, Neuherberg, Germany

    Elliot C. Brown & Soyoung Q. Park

  3. Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, corporate member of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Berlin Institute of Health, Neuroscience Research Center, Berlin, Germany

    Soyoung Q. Park

Authors
  1. Elliot C. Brown
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  2. Soyoung Q. Park
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Correspondence to Soyoung Q. Park.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Brown, E.C., Park, S.Q. Obesity and addiction. Nat Hum Behav 4, 10–11 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0622-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0622-6

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