Hey there, it's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and I think this is the vlog that a lot of you have been waiting for. It is the update on the huge international effort to get food addiction into the ICD. The ICD is the International Classification of Diseases. It's the World Health Organization's big manual of Mental and Physical Disorders and diseases that's used by doctors around the world. There's also the DSM in the United States, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that doesn't really catalog physical diseases so much as mental disorders. These are the two books, the two reference manuals that we are trying to get food addiction into. Ultra-processed food addiction, sugar addiction, whatever you want to call it. We're trying to get them into these manuals as an official diagnosis because there's thousands of studies now verifying that these conditions are real and that certain foods hit the brain like drugs of abuse. We've got brain scans showing, oh my gosh, this looks like cocaine addiction. It looks like alcohol addiction. As a matter of fact, the very first studies on the dopamine pattern of the development of addiction in rats, those studies were done not with alcohol, not with cocaine, not with opiates. They were done with glucose. Those very first studies, the early ones, decades and decades ago, we've known forever that these foods are addictive, these refined carbohydrates, I like to say sugar and flour. We've known forever that they're addictive, and the medical and scientific communities have been slow to formalize it as a diagnosis. Why? Well, I mean lots of reasons.
One good reason is that there have not been very many studies on treatment. It's hard to publish studies on treatment when there's no official diagnosis for a disorder. So, there aren't treatment centers, right? Well, that's a chicken and an egg problem right there if I ever heard one. Also, there's a lot of lobbying on the other side. Big food does not want this disorder. In those manuals, big food is thinking, "Hey, a calorie is a calorie, and all things in moderation." There's also the eating disorder community that's saying, "Hey, all things in moderation." As soon as you say those foods are addictive, then you start to talk about abstinence and they think that's bad for eating disorder people, that it's just going to cause more eating disorders. There's a lot of, still a lot of bruhaha about this, but things are getting a lot clearer, and we are marching forward, and right now we are at a critical juncture. It's very, very exciting, and there is something you can do to meaningfully help. It's not financial, it just takes a little bit of time. You can go in and let the ICD know that you support this diagnosis. Right now, they're asking, "What do y'all think? Yay or nay?" And you could go in and say, "Yay, I agree." I'm going to explain that how you can do that. I just did it myself. I just left my comment. You can do that too.
Let me give you a little bit more backdrop. About a year ago, I was talking about having just come back from London from the first ever International Food Addiction Consensus Conference, and the backstory to that was in 2021, a group of researchers, I wasn't in that group, they consulted me right afterwards, but I didn't even know it was happening when they put this together. But in 2021, a group of researchers, they weren't actually researchers, they were mostly just, I guess some therapists and some concerned individuals who had food addiction themselves, and some folks, I guess some folks put together an application to get food addiction into the ICD. So again, this is the World Health Organization's manual, and they put it in sort of at the beginning of 2021. By the end of 2021, they'd gotten a rejection. The medical and scientific advisory board of the World Health Organization reviewed it. They gave a very, very thoughtful rejection. It was detailed about here's specifically why we're rejecting it. Their rationale had to do with, we don't think there's enough research on treatment. That's fair. We think that this cluster of symptoms that you're describing as adequately accounted for by the diagnoses that already exist on eating disorders and weight concerns, obesity type concerns, that's not fair. The reality is that the way people use food looks like an addiction, not like an eating disorder and not like a weight management issue. The weight might be a side effect of the way people are using food, but the pattern of use itself is addiction. It walks like a duck. It talks like a duck. It's very much a duck and take it from a recovering crack addict. I'm telling you, I didn't just have an eating disorder. The eating disorder came in afterwards to try to manage the food addiction. What I had was an addiction. I was using food for sure, but that's what they said. We've already got plenty of diagnoses related to disordered eating behaviors and we're covered basicallyThen they kind of said at the end, and we think that this diagnosis would just introduce more confusion, really not needed. Our bases are covered. Okay? The committee, oh, oh, oh oh important, they also said, there is not sufficient agreement or consensus about this. Okay, that actually was fair too. That was fair.
So, the ball got kicked back to us, and what happened was the people who originally put together that document that application to the ICD said, "Why don't we handle this consensus issue" There are formal processes for forming widespread consensus. Why don't we pull together all the experts that we know who are in this field and go through a consensus building process and with an aim to come out the other end with what should the disorder be called and what are the salient features of it, and is it really a disorder? Is there enough evidence to be sure about that and so forth.? They got themselves together for a little bit, and then over the course of one full year, 2023 to early 2024, sort of that span of a year, they did a consensus building process. Now, I was one of the 50 or so international experts that they invited. 40 of us agreed to participate. 38 ultimately ended up giving agreement with a consensus, and that document got published in "The Journal Frontiers in Psychiatry" just recently. You could look it up. It's about the consensus that was reached, and we did reach consensus, and we decided that it should be called Ultra-Processed Food Addiction. In the case of the ICD, it's like ultra-processed food use disorder just to meet the same languaging. They don't talk about addiction in the ICD, even with heroin or cocaine or alcohol. They talk about substance use disorders. So, it would be ultra-processed food use disorder to fall under that category with their language. Fine. That's great.
Then we talked about some of the salient features of it, that abstinence would be helpful for a lot of people who have this condition and so forth. I shot a vlog about this a year ago. The culmination of that consensus building process was very, very satisfying, and we held a big conference together in London last year to celebrate that consensus to announce it to the world, and that was the first ever Food Addiction Consensus Conference. Now, they have continued that conference. They've changed the name a little bit. The consensus has already been reached, so now it's the same initials though. They're so smart. It was IFACC, I-F-A-C-C, the International Food Addiction Consensus Conference. Now it's the International Food Addiction and Comorbidities Conference. So, they're looping in studies on how food addiction relates to diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etc., other conditions and the, I mean, spoiler alert, it's correlated with all of those. When you eat lots of crappy foods, you end up being way more likely to have heart disease, cancer, diabetes, all the things. I'm sure that's not shocking to you.
I just got back from London for the second international IFACC, and the exciting news is that the reapplication to the ICD has been made, and right now their scientific and medical advisory board is reviewing the application to include food addiction as ultra-processed food use disorder to include that into the ICD in the substance use disorder category, which is right where it belongs, right next to the other addictions. There is a website where they're asking for feedback. They are literally asking, "What do y'all think?" So, I just went online and I submitted my feedback. Now it's a little bit of a to-do. You got to create a profile on their website and you got to go to the right website. So, what I'm doing is I'm putting all the instructions for how to do it into a PDF, and I'm attaching it down at the bottom of this vlog. So, wherever you're watching this vlog look down either in the first comment or right below the vlog somewhere, there's going to be a link to a downloadable PDF that you can access, and then you can go through the steps yourself, and I'll describe it a little bit for you briefly. It really didn't take long. I would say it took five minutes. It's not nothing, but it's not a big deal.
The first step is you have to go to the ICD website. That's the first thing is I give you, that link and look in the top right and just create a profile. You have to register and that just involves your email address and creating a password. Then you got to go check your email address and say, "Yep, this is me," and click on that link. Well, then you've got to go back to that same website and now log in with the credentials you just created. Now, you log in, and then once you're all logged in, you've got to create a bit of a profile. You don't have to say much there. You can say, I don't know anything about the ICD, and you don't have to say much. If you try to put your LinkedIn just a warning, if you try to put your LinkedIn profile, it won't work. It didn't work for me. It didn't work for anyone on my team. For some reason, their LinkedIn field is broken, but luckily that's optional. A lot of the things below there are just optional, but you got to create a little bit of a profile and then I give you the link to go leave your feedback. Once you get to that website. There's a lot of things to agree to. What I did was I agreed to just about everything. I went through all the comments that are there already, and I clicked agree to them. We're trying to get 500 comments.
I haven't told you about it yet, and I'm just saying there aren't that many comments yet. I think there's like 20 or 30. What do you think? Bright Line Eating® team? Can we blow them out of the water? Could we just show them what kind of muscle we have? I'm thinking that I'm going to come home tonight after dinner with my family, and I'm going to just email this PDF that I've created for you to just a couple dozen people that I know have been following me as friends, friends, family, people that I know would take five minutes as a favor and go log their support for the concept of food addiction. They know it's real, so you don't have to be a professional to write a comment. You can just be someone who believes it, someone who has lived experience, or someone who knows people who've been affected by food addiction. All of those types of comments would be fine, so I agreed to all the comments. Then at the bottom, there's a little place where it says, leave a comment that's at the very bottom of the comments in the corner. I believe it was like a little gray box, and it said, "Leave a comment." That's where you click to leave your own comment. Other than that, there's a few statements at the bottom.
Now, I agreed with all of them, except I didn't like the idea of carbohydrate addiction as being a synonym. If they'd have said refined carbohydrates, yes, but I do not want people thinking that apples and bananas and carrots and oatmeal are wrapped up in the bucket of addictive, highly addictive foods. I don't like the idea of carbohydrate addiction. I'm not on board with that personally. Now, if you find that those foods I just mentioned send you into the stratosphere of binging or overeating or addictive eating and that's your lived experience, then absolutely click agree. If, for you, it really feels like it is carbohydrate addiction, then agree to that. If not, you could click disagree to that one. Then the rest I clicked agree to. I liked all those synonyms. I liked everything else, and I didn't spend a lot of time planning my comment or thinking about it. I probably could have done a better job, but in this case, I really think done is better than perfect. Just get your support up there. I really think numbers here matter and passion.
One of the main arguments, I think that we really need this food addiction diagnosis. There's a couple big reasons. One is because without it, we're going to be missing the notion of abstinence from certain foods in treatment protocols. There's no justification for recommending abstinence from certain foods unless these foods really are addictive for some people, and for some people, you're just floundering your whole life unless you understand that abstinence is going to make it easier for you. I think that is a big, big reason why we need this diagnosis. I think another reason is that we need more treatment. We really do. I think a third good reason is that I think addiction is underlying a lot of our global obesity issues. I think even people on GLP-1s, ultimately, a lot of them are not going to be able to eat sugar and get their weight where they want it to be, even on a GLP-1. Anyway, those are some of the reasons, but whatever you want to say about it, I have lived experience. I know other people who've had this. It's very clear to me that certain foods are addictive. That would be great to say.
Anyway, this is our opportunity. It's not that often that you get to make a difference worldwide. People are still suffering with their food so much, and we are living in the relative dark ages in the world right now when it comes to global understanding about this. But it's fun, isn't it? To be among the people who see and to watch the dawn happening. We're watching it right before our eyes, and it's such a privilege. It's such a privilege to be a part of the awakening of humankind when it comes to this issue. Thank you for being in the vanguard with me. Thank you for being at the forefront. There is a PDF down below that gives you instructions for adding your voice to the mix. We just have a couple dozen comments right now. If we could get 500, that would be incredible. Consider passing this vlog around, or even just passing that PDF around and saying, "Hey, as a favor to me, would you take a few minutes? If you think food addiction is really a thing, would you take a few minutes and let the World Health Organization know they're considering making it a formal diagnosis right as we speak?" So, history is being made as we speak. We will see how it goes. Thank you for your support. Anything you want to do to support it, I'm just tickled and I just love you. I love you, and I'll see you next week.
