Do you often find it hard to stop eating certain foods once you’ve started—especially foods high in sugar, salt and/or fat?

I know I've often found myself on the losing end of one of those “bet you can’t eat just one” wagers when it involves sweets, chips, sausages or something similar. If you're in the same boat, your brain just might be addicted to junk food.

This is especially likely if you happen to be a rat, according to recent research reported in this article from HealthDay. If you’re a human, using the word “addicted” may (or may not) be a little strong, but this research definitely does add another piece to the puzzle of understanding why it can be so hard for many people to “just say no” to overeating certain foods.

Although this research (published in the March 28 online edition of Nature Neuroscience) only studied rats, and the findings can’t be directly applied to humans, the description of the rats’ behavior sounds painfully familiar, at least to me. When rats raised on a normal, healthy diet were given unlimited access to a diet of bacon, pound cake, candy bars and other junk food, they rapidly gained weight. And the more they gained the more compulsive they became about eating—even to the point that they kept on eating even though they knew they would get a painful electric shock if they continued. Sort of the way I kept on eating even though I knew I was causing myself lots of short and long term health problems.

On the other hand, rats fed the equivalent of a healthy human diet with limited access to the junk food didn’t gain much weight, and stopped eating when they got the cue that they’d be shocked if they continued. When the junk food was taken away from the newly obese rats and replaced with their regular food, the rats went into “voluntary starvation,” hardly eating anything for two weeks.

I don’t know if this behavior sounds familiar to you, but it sure sounds like my eating patterns during my days of yo-yo dieting, when I lost large amounts of weight many times, only to regain more. I can’t say whether the chemical reactions to junk food in my brain were the same as those of the rats in this study (which are very similar to the changes observed in humans addicted to cocaine or heroin).

And I suppose it could just be coincidence that one of the main keys to my success at losing 170 pounds and keeping most of it off for the last 6 years, was drastically reducing the amount of sugar, saturated fat, and processed food in my diet on a permanent basis. But I don’t think so. It’s definitely much easier to maintain a normal level of calorie intake when I’m minimizing added sugar, saturated fat, and junky carbs like chips and fries—I just don’t feel the same compulsion to eat when those foods aren’t a big part of my diet.

Whether any of this means it’s reasonable to use the word “addiction” in connection with foods high in sugar and fat I don’t know. I imagine scientists will eventually be able to tell us whether some human brains react to some foods in the same way that drug addicts react to drugs. They may even find ways of identifying in advance who might be susceptible to this problem and who isn’t, and how to manage it effectively. But, as you can see from this this report from a recent scientific convention on food addiction,there are still a lot of questions to be answered before anyone can say that food can be addictive for humans.

I do know it’s not easy for everyone to make a big change in diet, especially if you’re significantly overweight and have become conditioned to those junk foods. It can be just as hard as a smoking or alcohol quit.

But it can be done, and it gets a little easier with each day and each pound lost. One of the differences between humans and rats is that we can consciously recognize our difficulties and figure out ways to cope with them, one day and one decision at a time—and how to get help when we need it.

Maybe the real test of whether “junk food addiction” is a meaningful concept is whether it helps you recognize a problem and take steps to cope with it, or just leaves you feeling powerless and helpless.

What do you think?