I agree with you that emotional eating is driven by physiological factors. Hormones driven out of whack by poor food choices leads to out of control hunger.

In addition, I also believe that our (chock full of chronic stress) lifestyles affect another group of hormones – adrenalin, cortisol, etc

This imbalance also contributes to overeating as we seek out serotonin boosting foods in order to balance out our happy/sad hormones.

I won’t even try to describe the mess that occurs when a lifetime of poor eating choices reinforce neural pathways that encourage even more disordered eating.

Stress, poor eating, bad lifestyle choices and lack of mental discipline have combined to create a perfect storm of obesity & chronic disease

http://www.dhslides.org/mgr/mgr060509f/f.htm

One plus is they have Taubes’ slides in a separate window.

I’d like to see the study that shows “emotional eating” in a population that isn’t eating a predominantly processed or industrial food diet.

I don’t know for sure, but I bet that “emotional” eating is really physiological and is more about out-of-whack brain chemistry. Feelings are just a trigger.

And to elaborate on the point, here are some quotes to ponder:

“Even those people who are properly informed and anxious to exercise voluntary control, frequently fail in the prevention of overweight. Evidently, it is not an easy matter continuously to overrule persistent impulses. Unfortunately we cannot in most cases correct these impulses by attacking their source, namely, the anomaly of the regulatory mechanism; and so long as man has to rely on his will power to suppress persistent impulses, prevention of obesity will remain a relatively rare accomplishment.” -Hugo Rony, 1940

“Positive caloric balance may be regarded as the cause of fatness when fatness is artificially produced in a normal person or animal by forced excessive feeding or forced rest, or both. But obesity ordinarilly develops spontaneously; some intrinsic abnormality seems to induce the body to establish positive caloric balance leading to fat accumulation. Positive caloric balance would be, then, a result rather than a cause of the condition.”

““Obesity, too many people believe, is explained by overeating; actually it should be recognized that this is simply restating the problem in a different way, and reaffirming (somewhat unnecessarily, more than a century after Robert Mayer and Joule) ones faith in the First Law of Thermodynamics,” writes Jean Mayer in 1954. “To ‘explain’ obesity by overeating is as illuminating a statement as an ‘explanation’ of alcoholism by chronic overdrinking.” -Jean Mayer

“Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.” -Susan Sontag

I am going to have to set aside some time (71 minutes???) to watch this.

Thanks for the link Shadowduck

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=4362041487661765149&hl=en&fs=true

I’m not at all convinced by everything he says, but some of his points are quite convincing! I know from experience that if I put on weight I need to eat better and exercise more and that’ll bring it down, and that’s probably true for most people. Maybe not everyone, though?

Addictions need to be identified and treated as an addiction. Creative strategies do not work, because they depend on the addict to do them.

It’s not pretty, but we are faced with ugly necessities.