Food addiction features are related to worse academic performance in adolescents.

Abstract

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 signifcance of food addiction (FA), both as an independent mental disorder or as an addictive behavior (Lemeshow et al., 2016). To diferentiate 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 defned 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 structura l brain connectivity in several regions like the insula, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (Peng-Li et al., 2020) In humans, highly processed foods (e.g., pizza, chocolate) have been related to FA in a greater extent than minimally processed foods (e.g., fruit, vegetables) (Schulte et al., 2019). High fat and high sugar foods lead to alterations in brain regions involved in learning, memory, and behavioral control, which seem to be especially profound in the immature brain (Boitard et al., 2016; Gainey et al., 2016). In this regard, specifc problems with any of these highly palatable foods could be also involved in alterations of cognitive performance; unfortunately, to our knowledge, there are no previous studies that have evaluated these aspects. Therefore, based on the hypothesis that adolescents with FA may present an impaired cognitive functioning, the aim of the present work was to evaluate and characterize the association between FA diagnostic and its associated symptoms with academic performance. Moreover, as a secondary objective, we aimed to identify those foods with high addictive potential that could be related to academic performance.