Conclusion to Research

    This section of the Refined Food Addiction (ReFA) Research Foundation website shows that a wide range of research is being conducted into food addiction around the world at private and public research institutes and universities, as well as at the National Institutes of Health.  The evidence presented also shows that this vibrant and diverse community has developed consensus that food addiction exists, and has undertaken to further develop the field by researching such issues related to sensitivity to stimuli, density of foods, degree of addictivity, and specificity of neuropathways to particular foods.  By showing the large number of review articles published both on food addiction and on the eating and drug addiction research leading up to the food addiction review articles, the Foundation has attempted to show that a wide range of scholarly publications have embraced food addiction research and have published extensively on it.

      The development of the neurocircuitry food addiction literature may stimulate overlap studies in other fields such as physical, behavioral, mental, and emotional consequences, treatment by abstinence, identification of psychoactive substances, polysubstance abuse and dependence, environmental influences of advertising, pricing, and availability, cueing, dependence, abuse, and harmful use diagnoses, demographic similarities, etc. The Foundation strives to fill critical gaps in the research literature including the development of a tool to identify the disease in humans using a screening questionnaire, methods to distinguish addictive from non-addictive foods, and methods to assess environments for their conduciveness to the development of refined food addiction. It is hoped that the strong results of the Foundation’s research combined with the extensive literature presented in this description of scope of the field of food addiction is deemed more than adequate to begin to address the consequences of food addiction.