Federal Initiatives

National Institute of Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health

      This quote from the website for the National Institute of Drug Abuse gives the following insight into the interest of the Institute in food addiction.

      At the 2007 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a component of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Nora D. Volkow will take part in a symposium featuring world-renowned neuroscientists presenting the recent advances in brain-imaging that have revolutionized our understanding of addiction as a chronic disease. The addiction symposium is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, and will be preceded by an AAAS news briefing highlighting key speakers and findings.

      Dr. Volkow will discuss the possible commonalities between drug addiction and obesity. She will compare studies on the brain dopamine responses in addicted subjects to those that had previously been found in food-deprived subjects. Her remarks will highlight the similarities in the responses of the dopamine system of an addicted person and that of a healthy control under conditions of food deprivation. (National Institute of Drug Abuse 2007)

      The NIDA website also contains a press release for this finding “New research performed in rats suggests that orexin, a brain chemical involved in feeding behavior, arousal, and sleep, also plays a role in reward function and drug seeking behavior. (National Institutes of Drug Abuse 2005)

      At a NIDA conference, Daniele Piomelli, PhD presented on the topic of What Marijuana is Teaching Us About Food Intake and Body Weight (Piomelli 2005)

      At the Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, 2004, Barry Levin, MD, presented in the symposium, Obesity: Lessons Learned from Addiction.  His presentation was titled, Genetic, Motivational, and Metabolic Factors Modulate the Neural Drive to Maintain Body Weight. (Levin 2004)

National Institutes of Health Research Grant Program

      The website of Drexel University Medical School reports, “The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases is awarding grants for the study of areas of the nucleus accumbens that are involved in both sweet seeking and drug seeking behavior.” (Drexel University School of Medicine 2008)

President’s Panel on Cancer

      The report of the 2006-2007 President’s Panel on Cancer contains a recomentation under the section entitled: Diet, Nutrition, and Physical: to expand research on: “Mechanisms of food addiction and possible parallels to other addictions.”  The panel has three members of which two are LaSalle D. Leffall, Jr. MD, FACS, Charles R. Drew Professor of Surgery, Howard University,  and Margaret L. Kripke. PhD, Executive Vice President and Chief Academic Officer, Univeristy of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and the third is Lance Armstrong.  (President’s Panel on Cancer 2007)