Office Hours: Breaking Free from Food Addiction

Welcome to office hours. This is our dedicated one on one space to go deeper, get clear, and explore what truly moves the needle for your health. I'm doctor Mark Hyman, and each week, we're gonna pull back the curtain and share the insights, the research, the lessons that don't always make it into our conversations with guests. Because at the end of the day, you are the CEO of your own health. And for many of you, your family's health too. And you might not feel it all the time, but you have far more power and agency than you realize. I'm glad you're here. This episode is brought to you by Function Health, empowering you to live one hundred healthy years with over 160 lab tests at just $365 a year. Sign up today at functionhealth.com/mark and use code mark twenty twenty six to get $50 towards your membership. You ever wonder why we can't just see one chip or stop after one cookie? It's not a lack of willpower. It's a science of food addiction. Addiction that's engineered into your food. I mean, no one's gonna binge on a bag of avocados, but you'll eat a whole bag of cookies, and that's not an accident. So food addiction, and I don't mean just metaphorically, I mean biologically, is a real measurable thing. In fact, according to the Yale Food Addiction Scale, the global assessment of the population is that fourteen percent of adults are biologically addicted to food. Not just a little craving here or there, but, like, seriously addicted like alcohol. And And what's even more concerning is that fourteen percent of kids are addicted. Now just to put that in context, about fourteen percent of the adult population is addicted to alcohol. So it's a big deal. Now big food is very smart. They use neuroscience, including functional MRI imaging and lots of other dirty tricks, to design foods that override our normal hunger signals, our normal feeling full mechanisms, which we call satiety. They trigger dopamine spikes in the brain and light up the same area in the brain as cocaine, heroin, or nicotine. And that, my friends, keeps us coming back for more and more and more. How does anybody end up getting to be three or four or five hundred pounds? It's not because they wake up and they say, I wanna be overweight or I wanna be fat. They're literally hijacked, addicted. So I talk a lot about what's wrong with our food, our food system in my book, Food Fix, and the updated version, Food Fix Uncensored out February 26 is a powerful indictment of the food industry explaining exactly how this works and why we are in such a pickle. I wrote a book called the ten day detox diet also talking about the biology of food addiction, and the science has only gotten better since then. So I want you to understand, it's not about willpower. It's not …