A new publication on food addiction managed to walk right past a huge warning sign on its way to blaming ultra-processed foods for food addiction.

About halfway through the review article in News Medical Life Sciences, Hugo Francisco de Souza, a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, casually drops a reference that undercuts his whole thesis:

Childhood traumatic experiences (CTEs) are considered a potential developmental risk factor for addiction-like eating patterns, with mediation models indicating that attachment insecurity and emotional dysregulation explain up to 53.5% of the variance in appetite drive.

If childhood traumatic experiences explain up to 53.5% of the variance in appetite drive, why are you blaming junk food?

It’s true that food processing companies engineer foods to be as attractive as possible to consumers. They add ingredients such as sugar, salt, and fat that stimulate the palate and appear to reward compulsive eating. But the majority of people exposed to these products have no problem consuming moderate amounts. If sugar, salt, and fat cause food addiction, why haven’t all of us become hooked?

If you look at why some people become addicted to food and other people don’t, the common ingredient isn’t junk food, it’s chronic stress. Turning to food to displace stress reveals the more likely answer to “the food addiction question”: It’s not the food and it’s not food addiction. It’s the stress and it’s an eating addiction. Compulsive eating is a response to stress, not a response to salt, sugar, and fat.

De Souza provides a source for the prevalence of childhood traumatic experiences (CTEs) in the development of food addiction. It’s an Italian study with 1,014 participants published in the Journal of Eating Disorders last December. That study did not refer to the problem as “food addiction,” using the more accurate term of “addiction-like eating behaviors,” aka eating addiction.

Italian researchers found:

CTEs contribute to addiction-like eating patterns (i.e., appetite drive and low diet control) through attachment insecurity, impaired reflective functioning, and emotional eating.

They further found a sequencing of events that supports their findings. The eating addiction does not come before the trauma but follows it:

[I]mpaired reflective functioning significantly predicted emotional eating, which in turn predicted both appetite drive and low dietary control. The complete mediation pathway was statistically significant, explaining 53.5% of variance in appetite drive and 20.6% in dietary control.

The authors state that this is “the first empirical support for a trauma-based developmental model of addiction-like eating behaviors.” That should be the headline: Not whether ultra-processed foods cause food addiction, but whether childhood trauma and chronic stress cause eating addiction.

The move toward a trauma-based model of addiction-like eating behaviors would be a welcome shift in focus away from the food and onto the stress. A similar model should be pursued with other substance use disorders. More than half the people currently in treatment in the U.S. for substance use disorders are victims of sexual abuse. 

Maybe it’s time we treated all substance use disorders and behavioral disorders as stress management disorders? That would lead to a greater emphasis on reducing chronic stress rather than waiting for it to metastasize into a difficult-to-treat addiction. We’ll have more to say about addiction and stress management in the near future here at AddictionNews.

Written by Steve O’Keefe. First published June 10, 2026.

Sources:

“Food Addiction Debate: Symptoms, Causes, and Treatment,” News Medical Life Sciences, May 31, 2026.

“Childhood traumatic experiences and addiction-like eating behaviors: the mediating roles of attachment, mentalization, and emotional eating,” Journal of Eating Disorders, December 23, 2025.

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