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IMPORTANT NEXT STEPS IN EVALUATING FOOD'S ADDICTIVE POTENTIAL
Author(s) -
GEARHARDT ASHLEY N.,
DILEONE RALPH J.,
GRILO CARLOS M.,
BROWNELL KELLY D.,
POTENZA MARC N.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
addiction
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.424
H-Index - 193
eISSN - 1360-0443
pISSN - 0965-2140
DOI - 10.1111/j.1360-0443.2011.03454.x
Subject(s) - addiction , food addiction , psychology , consumption (sociology) , addictive behavior , food choice , medicine , psychiatry , social science , pathology , sociology
efforts should focus on calories [10], fats and sugars [11], refined carbohydrates [12,13] or on industrial processing in and of itself [5,14–16]. If the food industry is to be pushed, by regulation or public pressure, into developing healthier products, the development of clear parameters by which their products will be judged should become a priority of the research community. There is one sense in which reforming the food industry will be easier than the fight over tobacco. Although years of mandatory health warnings proved to be largely ineffective for tobacco, the same is not likely to be true for food products—as long as ‘healthy’ does not become synonymous with ‘unpalatable’. Consumers have a long history of gravitating towards healthy foods when quality has been easily discernable [5], and taxes or subsidies (which would probably be ineffective anyway [17,18]) are unlikely to be necessary. That the food industry uses modern technology to enhance sales is unsurprising. It is tempting to hope that restricting some of their more egregious practices will improve public health, and perhaps it would; but real change will come only when the public health community develops a clear vision of what efficiently produced healthy foods might look like.