Am I addicted to sugar or junk food?

The question divides researchers, and that division is part of the answer. The strong claim — that sugar acts on the brain like an addictive drug — has weak support in humans. Westwater and colleagues reviewed the field and found little to support sugar addiction in people. The addiction-like behaviour seen in rats appeared mainly under interrupted, rationed access to sugar and seems to owe more to the palatability of the food than to the chemistry of sugar itself.

That is not the whole picture. Gearhardt and DiFeliceantonio applied four criteria once used to establish that tobacco is addictive: the capacity to drive compulsive use, produce mood-altering effects, reinforce behaviour and trigger craving. They argue that highly processed foods can meet them. The point is that if anything is addictive here, it is unlikely to be sugar alone, but rather the combination of rapidly absorbed carbohydrate and fat in industrially processed food — the kind rarely found in nature.

Fletcher and Kenny set the opposing positions side by side: one that the concept of food addiction is unsupported, the other that food and drugs may share underlying brain mechanisms. Neither side has won.

What remains is genuinely nuanced. Feeling a strong pull toward certain foods is common and real. Whether to call it an addiction in the drug sense is still unsettled, and 'sugar addiction' in particular has the least support of any version.

'Sugar addiction' is a comforting explanation. It moves the cause from hard-to-change habits to a substance, and a substance is something you can simply cut out: the word promises that the problem disappears once the sugar does. Animal studies where rats binge on sugar travel well as headlines, while the caveat that it took rationed access falls away. There is money in the story too. Detox plans, quitting programmes and 'sugar-free' products sell best when sugar is framed as a drug you must break free of. A diagnosis-like label also feels less shameful than 'I ate too much', which makes the myth easy to accept even when the evidence is thin.

If certain foods feel hard to stop eating, focus on the situation rather than the morality of it. Highly processed food is built to be easy to overeat, so it says more about the food than about your character. Keep it harder to reach on impulse, eat protein and fibre that fill you up, and sleep enough, since short sleep raises cravings. If eating feels genuinely out of control and is wearing on your life, it is worth raising with a doctor or a psychologist. That is not a sign of weakness, it is a reasonable thing to ask for help with.