Food pharmacies and food addiction: shifting food-drug interpretations in allopathic medicine, psychology, and psychiatry

ABSTRACT

This paper identifies and examines interpretations of the ontological categories of “food” and “drugs” in allopathic medicine, psychology, and psychiatry. I unearth some implicit interpretive modes in these fields to draw attention to emerging patterns of interpretation. I advance two central claims: First, while practitioners in these fields often interpret food and drugs as existing in a dichotomous relationship with one another, there are demonstrable shifts toward interpretations of food and drugs (in both the “medicinal” and “illicit/detrimental” senses of the term) as categories that overlap with one another. Second, practitioners in these fields ought to recognize these interpretations as interpretations, which both shape and are shaped by our collective experiences, in order to develop a greater understanding and more earnest evaluations of different ontological conceptions of the food-drug relationship.

KEYWORDS:

• Food pharmacies
• Food addiction
• Hermeneutics
• Allopathic medicine
• Psychology
• Psychiatry

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Many contemporary psychologists arguing in favor of the plausibility of food addiction appeal to the “dopamine hypothesis of reward.” In the mid-1950s, neuroscientists discovered that the neurotransmitter dopamine plays a major role in regulating reward-related behavior, where dopamine is transmitted to parts of the limbic system. Neuroscientists observed that these transmissions increased during ingestion of both “natural rewards” (e.g., food, water, and sex) and “drugs of abuse.” After ingesting certain substances (i.e., those substances considered to be drugs of abuse) over a period of time, a particular neurophysiological process is taken to occur, and “addiction” is equated and reduced to this process on the reductive model. People operating under a reductive understanding of addiction have employed this model to interpret data as supporting, as well as disconfirming, the plausibility of food (or at least some food) as an addictive substance. If some substances typically considered to be food lead to long-term disruption/desensitization of the neural mechanisms that mediate reward, proponents of a reductive understanding of addiction can plausibly interpret this as evidence in support of the possibility that food can be addictive. When ingestion of substances is not correlated with this kind of neurophysiological response, proponents of a reductive understanding of addiction can plausibly interpret this as evidence against the possibility that food can be addictive.