Small, D. M., & DiLeone, R. J. (2013). An introduction to the special issue. Biological Psychiatry, 73
(9), 799-801. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2013.03.007
From the research article’s abstract: “It has long been acknowledged that there are overlapping neural circuits for food and drugs of abuse. In particular, regions of the brain and intracellular signaling cascades implicated in processing the reinforcing effects of food also appear to regulate the consumption of addictive drugs (1–3). What is being ardently debated is whether overlapping substrates imply that food is, or can be, addictive (4,5). This is a critical question because it is attractive to use the addiction framework to jump-start and guide our understanding of how neural circuits of reward and self-control might contribute to understanding overeating and the obesity epidemic. However, the price of adopting an inappropriate framework is high, as it might steer research toward evaluating mechanisms that have been shown to be critical for addiction at the expense of those that are unique to obesity and perhaps key to understanding overeating.”