A great deal has happened since the 2014 publication of Food Junkies: The Truth about Food Addiction.
Initially, I wrote the book to draw public attention to the issue of food addiction. The press was already talking about the addictive nature of sugar: Remember the study of the rats that preferred Oreo-chow over cocaine? The pictures of people eating Nutella by the bottle and the medical statistics documenting how soda pop brought on diabetes?
Still, there continues to be a bemused attitude towards the concept of people actually being addicted to food. “Really? How can you be addicted to food? You have to eat.”
Food Junkies came out in December 2014. Thanks to the publicity team at Dundurn, I was asked to speak on a number of CBC radio morning shows. It was on one of these call-in shows in early January that a woman — who had suffered years of food addiction — called from her car. She had pulled her vehicle over to the side of the highway and shouted into her phone, “It’s real! Thank you for talking about this — finally. It is not a joke.” She sent a large donation to the treatment centre where I worked. We were going to open a food addiction program.
