Food Addiction Features Are Related to Worse Academic Performance in Adolescents

Although it has not yet been included in the Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) (Cooper, 2014), there is still a debate about the real significance of food addiction (FA), both as an independent mental disorder or as an addictive behavior (Lemeshow et al., 2016). To differentiate between a pleasantness and an addictive conduct, it is necessary a loss of control associated with such conduct, which is maintained despite negative consequences (Wise & Koob, 2014). Therefore, FA was defined as hedonic eating behavior involving the consumption of highly palatable foods in quantities beyond homeostatic energy requirements (Gold & Shriner, 2013). An important question arises from these statements, and that is, can certain foods take over the brain in ways like drugs of abuse and alcohol? To reinforce this hypothesis, previous works have described common neurobiological alterations in subjects with FA and substance abuse. For instance, both addictive behaviors increase extracellular dopamine while there is a decrease in D2-receptor in the mesolimbic dopaminergic circuit (Avena et al., 2008), and a downregulation of opioid receptors and acetylcholine release in the nucleus accumbens (Berridge et al., 2010). Although many reports have previously described an inverse association between the use of drugs of abuse and cognitive performance (Bjørnebekk et al., 2019; Gouzoulis-Mayfrank & Daumann, 2009), few studies have related cognitive performance and FA (Franken et al., 2018), and to our knowledge, no previous studies have been conducted on adolescents and academic performance; however, a recent report has shown that individuals with elevated FA symptoms have lower structural brain connectivity in several regions like the insula, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (Peng-Li et al., 2020).