Brief Summary Of Katherine Harmon's Article Addicted To Fat

The article “Addicted to Fat” by Katherine Harmon dealt with the possibility that overeating may actually affect the brain in a similar way as taking drugs does. When a person overeats, dopamine gets released and that is the same chemical that gets released during drug use or sex. To test the theory that overeating can affect the brains reward system an experiment with two groups of rats was conducted. One group had unlimited access to high fat food and the other group only had access to that food one hour a day. The group with unlimited access ate double the amount of the one hour group. However, the one hour group ate 66 percent of their daily calories within that one hour allowed to them. Genetics seem to play a role in whether a person

However, in class it was mentioned that our bodies have not changed since the times of our ancestors. The same was mentioned in the motivational psych class I took. Our ancestors were not obese, that might have been in part of all the physical activity that they had to perform. They tended to eat more fatty foods under stressful situations but they had to deal with the threat of famine. So maybe people are eating more due to a genetic component but another important factor could be the fact that food is so much more accessible than it used to be. The article also did not mention something that I thought was very important which is motivation. As was mentioned in lecture people do not always eat because they are hungry there are several underlying reasons. The situations or environment that someone is in can also factor in to motivating whether a person eats or not. There is also mention that eating releases a dopamine that influences the reward system of the brain. Therefore, making people feel good when they eat, which leads to overeating. On the other hand there is also another theory that overeating could be more of a impulse or compulsive disorder and if that is the case it is not due to the dopamine system of the brain, but due to inhibitory controls(Salamone and