6 Foods That Behave Like Addictive Drugs In Your Body
By Dr. Joel Kahn
July 8, 2014 9:39 AM EDT

So many of my patients struggle with cravings, weight issues, and late night snack binges. Knowing that certain chemicals in foods, called exorphins, can act as addictive drugs may help to develop strategies to improve health.
You need to know a little bit about exorphins because the makers of processed food, Big Food, know all about these chemicals. In fact, they manipulate ingredients to stimulate our appetites and initiate an addictive cycle of overeating and subsequent disease states.
Knowing about these foods can help you control overeating. (And to learn more about how Big Food gets you hooked on junk foods, check out The End of Overeating by former commissioner of the FDA Dr. David Kessler and Salt, Sugar, Fat by journalist Michael Moss.)

Dairy
No food group has been studied more for opioid activity than dairy, particularly milk and cheese. The protein in dairy, casein, is digested into smaller peptides and there are a family of active agents called casomorphins. The desire for cheese can be blocked by the same medicines used to reverse drug overdoses in emergency rooms!
We eat five times as much cheese as a few decades ago, often with every meal of the day. Big Food knows that dairy drives the desire for more dairy and larger sales. My patients who are trying to be vegan tell me that the hardest food to give up is cheese; weaning slowly off this food group like a drug may improve success rates
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Meat
The blood in meat contains albumin, hemoglobin and gamma globulin and all of these chemicals activate opioid receptors. When meat eaters were treated with a drug used to block opiate receptors, ham consumption fell by 10%, salami by 25% and tuna by 50%!

Wheat and rice
Gliadin is a protein in wheat that has opiate activity and is sometimes referred to as gliadorphin. There is also a protein in rice that produces similar effects. If you can't stop reaching for the bread bowl, it's most likely because of this feel-good chemical trap.

Sugar and fat
Headlines worldwide last fall reported on a study in rats showing a preference for Oreo cookies, used for their high sugar and fat content, that was similar to providing the rats cocaine and morphine. Actually, prior studies in humans had already shown the opioid like effects of mixing sugar and fat (think: donut) that could be reversed with narcotic blockers.
Over a decade ago researchers studied what happened when you gave a three-month-old baby a sugary treat while staring in their eyes. When a group of people entered the room including the adult who fed the baby sugar water, the baby scanned and focused only on the “sugar dealer,” demonstrating how early in life sugar addiction can be identified.
Sugar and fat may be the reason that chocolate is a food that has been described to have addictive potential.
 
So what can you do?  
Avoid temptation by not having so many items at home or in the office loaded with dairy, meat, refined wheat, sugar, and fat.
Replace them with blood sugar stabilizing foods like beans, nuts, seeds, whole fruits, and whole grains.
Start the day with a healthy breakfast (with foods low in exorphins).
Rely on support from friends and family to not bring “crack” like foods over can help. As Michael Pollan said, “eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”
Focus on getting endorphins. A glorious sunset, tender family moments, Kirtan music, my dogs licking my face, and a challenging workout are some of the feel good things that I seek out for a natural high. Science has demonstrated that we can produce narcotic-like chemicals in our brain at these moments, called endorphins.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

Which Health Supplements to Take

According to Patrick Holford, the basic building blocks of a good nutritional supplement programme, based on my research at the Institute for Optimum Nutrition in establishing Optimum Daily Allowances.

Theoretically, at one extreme you could take a mega-mega-multivitamin and mineral that has everything you could possibly need in it. The trouble is this would be enormous, impossible to swallow and no doubt give you a lot more than you need of some nutrients. The other extreme is to take one supplement for each nutrient, exactly matching your requirements – but you’d end up with handfuls of pills.

So, instead, nutritional therapists use ‘formulas’ – combinations of vitamins and minerals – that, when combined appropriately, more or less reach your needs. In a typical health supplement programme you may end up with four supplements to take. These formulas are like building blocks.

The essential building blocks are shown in the Supplement Jigsaw below. 

1. Start with a High Potency Multivitamin and Mineral

The starting point of any supplement programme is a high potency multivitamin and multimineral. This should provide the following nutrients:

MULTIVITAMIN A
Good multivitamin should contain at least 7,500iu of A, 10mcg (400iu) of D, 100iu of E, 250mg of C, and 25mg each of B1, B2, B3, B5 and B6, 10mcg of B12, 200mcg of folic acid and 50mcg of biotin.

MULTIMINERAL
This should provide at least 300mg of calcium, 150mg of magnesium, 10mg of iron, 10mg of zinc, 2.5mg of manganese, 20mcg of chromium and 25mcg of selenium, and, ideally some molybdenum, vanadium and boron.

MULTIVITAMIN & MINERAL
You simply can’t fit all of the above vitamins and minerals into one tablet. So good, combined multivitamin and mineral formulas recommend two or more tablets a day to meet these kind of levels. The bulkiest nutrients are vitamin C, calcium and magnesium. These are often insufficiently supplied in multivitamin and mineral formulas. Vitamin C, in particular is best taken separately simply because you’ll never get 1,000mg (the ideal daily dose) into a multi.

2. Add Extra Vitamin C and Other Immune Boosting Nutrients

VITAMIN C This is worth taking separately because the amount you need won’t fit in a multi. The supplement should provide around 1,800mg of Vitamin C. Some vitamin C formulas also provide other key immune boosting nutrients such as bioflavonoids or anthocyanidins in the form of black elderberry and bilberry and zinc.

3. Add Extra Antioxidant Nutrients

The evidence is now very conclusive that an optimal intake of antioxidant nutrients slows down the ageing process and prevents a variety of diseases. For this reason it is well worth supplementing extra antioxidant nutrients – on top of those in a good multivitamin – to ensure you are achieving the best possible ageing protection. The kind of nutrients that are provided in an antioxidant supplement are vitamins A, C, E and beta-carotene, zinc and selenium, possibly iron, copper and manganese, the amino acids glutathione or cysteine, plus phytonutrients such as bilberry extract, elderberry extract, pycnogenol and grape seed extract. These plant chemicals, rich in bioflavonoids and anthocyanidins, are also often supplied in more comprehensive vitamin C formulas.

4. Are You Getting Enough Fat?

There are two ways of meeting your essential fat requirements: one is from diet, either by eating a heaped tablespoon of ground seeds every day, having a tablespoon of special cold-pressed seed oils and/or eating oily fish (such as salmon, mackerel, sardines, trout, herring, anchovies) three times a week; the other is to supplement concentrated oils. For omega 3 this means either flax seed oil capsules or the more concentrated fish oil capsules providing EPA and DHA. For omega 6 this means supplementing a source of GLA such as evening primrose oil or borage oil. Even better is a combination of all three – EPA, DHA and GLA.

These are the basic building blocks of a good supplement programme. I take these every day. Then, there are optional extras – from nutrients that support your brain, your mood and give you an energy boost when you need it, to natural relaxants or hormone balancers.

Patrick Holford.com