By Peggy O'Farrell
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Dr. Neal Barnard says it's not your fault if you can't resist the lure of the Hershey bar, the Krispy Kreme or the T-bone.

You're an addict, laid low by food's ability to produce opium-like chemical responses in the brain.

Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, argues in his new book, Breaking the Food Seduction (St. Martin's Press; $24.95), that sugar, milk, cheese, meat and chocolate are as addictive as cocaine and that consumers need dietary detox.

He talked about the new book and his nutrition theories with the Enquirer:

Question: What's the premise of the new book?

Answer: A 1981 study demonstrated the opiate qualities of certain foods. Eli Hazum (a researcher at Wellcome Research Laboratories in North Carolina) found that cheese triggers casomorphins (opiate-like chemicals produced in the brain). There are tiny traces of morphine in milk. ... Up until now, people thought their need for cheese or chocolate or sugar was willpower. They didn't know these foods are addictive. We now know certain foods trigger an opiate response in the brain, and those foods are sugar, chocolate, cheese and meat. It's not apples or bananas or lentils or vegetable soup. No one ever binges on those foods.

Women tend to binge on chocolate and sweets. Men prefer meats and cheese or what you might euphemistically call "savories." And people blame willpower for these binges when they should really be treated as addictions or ruts or jags or something other than a temporary choice that happened to come out of the blue.

Q: Explain the mechanism behind addictive foods.

A: In one study, doctors used naloxone (Narcan), which is an opiate blocker. Emergency rooms use it to treat heroin overdoses. It blocks the morphine receptors in the brain so the heroin no longer has any effect. If I pump your body full of naloxone and give you 18 different kinds of foods - chocolate, meat, cheese, chips, fruit, vegetables - it has absolutely no effect on the consumption of fruits and vegetables and whole grains, but it cuts sugar consumption, especially for the most addictive forms of sugar, like butter cookies or chocolate, and cheese and most meats.

That doesn't mean that you won't eat to fill up if you're hungry. It does mean that you'll eat only because you're hungry.

Q: In the book, you mention the dopamine (a neurotransmitter that triggers feelings of pleasure) involvement for food addicts, compulsive gamblers and other addicts. What's dopamine's role in addictive foods?

A: It's a domino effect. You taste the food, it sends a nerve impulse that triggers the opiate domino and the opiate domino triggers the dopamine domino, which makes you feel good. Some addicts are dopamine-deficient. ... It's a single gene-trait like brown hair. They have too few dopamine receptors. They feel chronically empty and they spend much of their lives trying to get the feeling of equanimity most of us take for granted, so they smoke, drink, eat to a compulsive degree or gamble.

Q: Are you saying we're all addicted to these foods?

A: If you're only having a chocolate bar now and then, who cares? But if you're having it every day, which is the usual issue, ... and you miss it when it's not available, you might want to set it aside for two to three weeks. You can give anything up for a couple weeks. And what happens is, you reset what I call your "taste bud thermostats." You try the chocolate bar again and it doesn't taste as good because you're not used to it anymore. It's like the adjustment when you switch from whole to skim milk and then try whole milk again.

Q: Do you think "addictive" foods should be outlawed?

A: I think warning labels are occasionally a good idea. Most people have no idea that, say, meat is linked to colon cancer or that dairy is linked to prostate cancer, and sometimes it makes me wonder why we bother to do research.