Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. Oh! I'm so excited to finally release this vlog for you. I've been waiting to be able to do this for practically a whole month, and finally, I just got the word that the videos are ready so I can shoot this vlog. Okay, here's what I mean. This is the vlog where I finally get to recap for you my amazing, incredible, fabulous, couldn't have been better time in London last month for the International Food Addiction Consensus Conference, the Ador@BLE conference, and a stay with SHiFT Recovery by Acorn by the Sea in Margate. It was epic. So epic, and what I've been waiting for is the recordings to be ready for the Food Addiction Consensus Conference. There were, I believe, 11 presentations. They were of the highest caliber, and I wanted when I shot this vlog for you to have a link where you could access them, but it took them a long time to edit them, to make them available. It just took a while. It's all volunteers doing this work, and just thank you so much to Ruth and Alexis and Heidi and Jen. So many people are doing incredible work on a volunteer basis to make this happen.
Let me back up and just from the beginning, say, London has always been so good to me. I just love that city, and I was so excited for this trip. It was quite a long trip, not quite two weeks, but almost, and it's a long time for me to be away from my family these days, but this trip was worth it. I flew there initially for the International Food Addiction Consensus Conference, and it was the first annual one. I didn't expect that they would be putting them on year after year, but they plan to. The next one will be in Mexico City, hopefully sometime in the fall, September of 2025, so stay tuned for that. You're invited. Okay, so, the point of the conference was to showcase and present to the world a consensus statement that 40 professionals, me among them, have been working on for about a year to get clarity and consensus on some basic foundational things around food addiction. Like what do we call the disorder? Is it a substance use disorder or a behavioral disorder? What do we know about it? What research is like solid? What research still needs to be done? Are there any things we can't agree on? Anyway, 37 out of 40 professionals signed on to the consensus statement, which at the link I'm providing below, you can access the entire consensus statement so it's detailed. I mean, I'm not going to read it to you. It’s not bedtime reading material, but it's fascinating and it won't take you that long to read it. I recommend that you do. I recommend that you do.
I want to speak to the main thing, which was that we decided that the disorder needs to be called Ultra-Processed Food Addiction. I know that many people in the Bright Line eating community like me, myself, are not initially thrilled with that, but I have come around and I want to again pitch you on coming around to thinking that that is exactly what it should be called. It's brilliant. It's so needed. Here's the thing. When you put food addiction in there as a substance use disorder in the DSM-V, in the ICD, in the addiction category where it belongs, because food addiction is an addiction thing. It's not a food thing, it's an addiction thing. It's right in line; food addiction, drug addiction, nicotine addiction, alcohol addiction, it's right there in line with those. You can't have food next to all of these very specific molecules like nicotine and alcohol and opiates that cause specific effects. You need to narrow it down a bit what is causing the issue. And when you say ultra-processed food addiction, not only does that make more sense in line with all of these other substances that are causing the problem, but now you single out ultra-processed foods as targets for regulation and control and limits in our society. That will be the lever that will start to change our societal outcomes so that we're not addicting and infecting the next generation of kids because right now, two-thirds of the foods we're feeding them are ultra-processed foods, and that is what's leading to their food addiction. Yes, after they're addicted, they can't eat things like honey anymore either. It's not just ultra-processed foods that are the problem once you're addicted, but ultra-processed foods are the driver of the problem. They really are, and we need regulations on them to change our food environment. Otherwise, it's going to be as hard forever to recover as we're experiencing it right now. It's hard in our environment because food is pushed everywhere, and we need some clarity about which foods are different, right? It's not the natural whole real foods that we need to be singling out. It's the ultra-processed food. So, I really do think we came to the right conclusion when we decided on ultra-processed food addiction as the term.
The main takeaway from the International Food Addiction Consensus Conference for me personally, was that I was blown away by the quality of the 11 presentations. Absolutely astounded. I learned so much. They were so good, and I cannot recommend them to you more highly. I'm going to single out one in particular. They were all very, very good, but Dr. David W's presentation was incredible. He wasn't able to be there in person. He zoomed in from LA, but his presentation on eating disorders versus food addiction and the war between these two communities and the nuanced way we need to be thinking about food issues and the way he's trying to build a bridge between the eating disorder world and the food addiction world is very powerful, very powerful.
Dr. Nicole Avina, such an amazing presentation at Princeton University, one of the very, very first people to establish sugar addiction in rats to show in her doctoral work back in 2001, that if you expose rats to sugar, boom, they get addicted and they start to show binge eating behavior. Amazing work.
Erica Lata. I learned so much from her, especially the way she talked about the NOVA Scale. I've come on this vlog, very skeptical about the NOVA scale because it's very unfortunate. They've got sugar and flour not listed as ultra-processed foods. They've got sugar and flour listed as culinary ingredients down in level 2, not level 4 ultra-processed foods problematic. Agreed. Erica Lada agrees with that, and she says, and I was swayed by her arguments. She said, look, the NOVA people are on our side. They're trying to change the food environment in exactly the way that it needs to be changed, and they're looking at it differently. They're looking at it from an epidemiological food systems perspective, an agricultural nationwide perspective. And from that perspective, it is these packaged foods that are born in factories and poured into bags that are the issue. The people who are buying sacks of sugar and flour and going home and baking, their families are not fat. Their families are not fat. These are the people who are still buying chickens and vegetables and sugar and flour, and they're going home and cooking actual food, and their children are a normal healthy weight. It's the people who are buying ultra-processed foods in stores as their main source of nutrients and sustenance that are getting fat. She said, look, we need to work with the NOVA people, not against them, and we do need to close this loophole of the cooking from home foods that are just as addictive to people who have food addiction. But that was a big takeaway for me. I really switched my tune on the NOVA Scale and yeah, I haven't met Carlos Montero yet. The guy from Brazil who created that scale, I hope to meet him someday and have a talk with him. It would be just some minor tweaks to the NOVA Scale that would make it work.
Anyway, those 11 talks were so good. Please, please access them if you care, if you're interested, if you want to. The link is down below. They're asking for a donation, really a modest donation of, I believe, 25 pounds or something like that, donation for the work of getting food addiction included in the ICD, so please donate access those talks. You really couldn't spend money in a better way if you're at all interested in this stuff. They were the highest caliber talks I can possibly imagine. They were so, so good, and I'm so happy to report that the overall tone of the conference was of such unity and positivity and professionalism. It was really a beautiful experience to be there.
I was so honored to be a part of it, and then I got to go to the Ador@bBLE Conference. Ah, so, so sweet. Thank you, Adele. Thank you, Sue. Thank you, everyone in London who put together this incredible conference. There were, I'm not sure, 150, 200 people there. I had nothing to do with organizing it. I just waltzed right in and got on stage and got to share with people and meet people, and it was such a treat. My highlight was probably dancing to the Prince Song, Kiss, at the dance. I had so much fun and so many good hugs. I met so many sweet people If I met you there, “Hi, I'm so glad we got to hug and meet. It was so, so good to meet you.”
I got filled up by that, and then I went by train with Amanda, Amanda Lith, someone I'd never met in person, and we got to ride the train. This was just one of those God things. You never know how coincidence works in the world, right? Amanda had left her passport at her Airbnb back in London, so after getting all the way out to Margate to the coast, that's not a short train ride people, she had to go back to London for her passport. We met up in London and shared the train ride back out to Margate together for the SHiFT recovery by Acorn intensive, and that meant that Amanda and I got that whole train ride to talk and connect, and what a kindred spirit. Honestly, we just related so well to each other, and she is doing such good work. I never went to treatment. I'm one of the only pretty low bottom drug addicts that I know who never went to treatment, not once, and some of that I think was the perspective of my parents. My dad's pretty counter-cultural. He was not about to turn his baby girl over to “the man.” He wasn't a big believer in institutions, and so yeah, I never went to treatment. I maybe should have been in treatment, but I never went to treatment, and I got clean at the age of 20 without treatment, just going to 12-step programs. It was very interesting to be in an inpatient treatment setting where people register and get their technology taken away and get their marching orders, and it was beautiful. It was beautiful.
My biggest takeaway, I love Amanda Lith. They're doing such great work there. It was very effective. I loved the people that I met, the people checking in there. It was great. I stayed for a couple days and really got to see some beautiful work being done, and the food plan that they hand out there is different than the Bright Line Eating® food plan in some interesting ways, and I had just huge respect, huge respect for their food plan for what they're doing. Here's one example. They're super clear, no caffeine, right from day one. You're off caffeine. That was cool. They also had a category that I'd never seen articulated in this way before, which is textures. They said, we don't do smooth and we don't do crunchy, which means no peanut butter, no nut butters. It means no Triscuits, no crackers, no Mary's Gone Crackers, no crunchy and no smooth. I thought, oh, that's interesting. That's a thing. It really is. They also had four meals a day. They had what's often called a metabolic adjustment at night, and I'm seeing more and more people who come from low bottoms with food addiction. More and more people who have binge eating disorder really benefit from a fourth meal, really benefit. And so, that was interesting to see as well. The fourth meal is pretty, you eat your dinner, but then bedtime is automatizable, as we know from brushing teeth. So, a fourth meal is pretty automatizable. It's not the healthiest from an autophagy standpoint. It's better to get the longer fasting window from dinner all the way to breakfast, but health isn't the top concern if you're still struggling with food addiction, right? Autophagy is a minor factor when you look at the negative impacts of still being active in your food addiction. So yeah, I'm a fan of that fourth meal for the people who need it. Anyway, yeah, then I left.
I spent some wonderful time with friends and came home, I mean an evening with friends, and then came home. It was a beautiful, beautiful trip. I, again, highly recommend you access those recordings. The link is below this video. If you're in the podcast, check the show notes and you will enjoy those recordings. I gave the final talk of the Food Addiction Consensus Conference. Well, Robert Lustig gave some remarks right after mine, but my talk was the final full length talk, and it was about what we had accomplished the day before. Those professionals who flew in or Zoomed in for workshops the day before had broken into two groups, and one group did the work of preparing the strategy for resubmitting to get food addiction accepted by the World Health Organization and in the ICD 11. What they came to was they got very clear on their strategy, which is very research focused and research based, getting to know who's on the World Health Organization subcommittee, who's going to be reviewing their submission and trying to get it done within the year. That's ambitious, but within one year, trying to get that submission accomplished. Last time, I believe the application was submitted in March, and we got a rejection letter by November, so it was a very thoughtful, very detailed rejection letter. We'll see if we can get a submission done by September of 2025, that next conference, that would be amazing and remarkable and wonderful, and some months after that, we would get word. The other subcommittee I was a part of, and our task was to outline some studies that would fill gaps or holes in the research literature to help and expedite getting food addiction listed, ultra-processed food addiction listed in the ICD 11 and the DSM-V, and here are the studies we came up with. Number one, a study on withdrawal. There needs to be more research done on withdrawal and stay tuned. You'll probably hear a vlog from me asking for subjects to participate in a study like that. This would be a way that people who are active in their addiction could help out to participate in a study looking at withdrawal. So, that's one study.
The other two studies really address one of the main criticisms of the World Health Organization from our application in 2021, and I say I was not part of the group that submitted that, but I've been a part of the group that's reviewed the rejection and tried to figure out where to go from here. One of their criticisms was, we don't need a diagnosis for food addiction. We've already got tons and tons and tons of diagnoses and of disorders related to food. We're covered, we're good. Look, we've got binge eating disorder. We've got diagnoses for obesity and everything in between. We're good. The reality is that food addiction is a different beast that's not being covered right now. And the way we know is that some individuals need an abstinence-based approach, and there's no disorder right now that would indicate that that would be helpful or needed for anybody. As a matter of fact, for people with eating disorders, it's often considered to be detrimental to have anything like Bright Lines for food. We're accused of causing eating disorders for goodness sakes. And so, here's the research we want to do. One is do a study that looks at an abstinence-based approach to eating no sugar, no flour. When I say abstinence-based, that's a bright line approach and look at, does it cause eating disorders? I'll tell you right now, it doesn't. Some people, right? It's a small percentage of people, but it does kick up a binge approach to food in some people, in more people than that. It quiets eating disorders and even cures them. And for most people, there's no difference. So, we need those percentages. We need those percentages.
The other study that needs to be done is on people who have both an eating disorder and food addiction, and then randomly assigning them to a standard eating disorder treatment. Again, because these are the treatment resistant people. They're eating disorders are not being effectively treated in this current standard of care or to a Bright Line approach, an abstinence-based approach, and watch the recovery take off in people who are finally getting support around not eating the foods that make them crazy. So, those are the studies that need to be done.
The Institute for Sustainable Weight Loss is kicking up. You'll be hearing more about this in future of vlogs, is kicking up to help fund those studies to help create the research database of subjects who could participate in those studies. It's really an exciting time. So much has come out of my time in London. Check out that link below. For 25 pounds, just a modest donation to help us with this work, you can access those recordings. I'm so glad to finally get to update you on what happened in London. I'm still just glowing thinking about it. What a fabulous trip. There's amazing work being done in the world, and I'm going to leave you with this one thought. I really had the perspective after London, as great as it was, as professional as it was, this is really still the Wild West when it comes to work on food addiction. This is nascent, nascent, nascent work. It's so tempting to think of 2024 as being modern times and in so many ways, these are modern times, iPhones and Bitcoin and all the things, Teslas, and whatever. And the reality is, when it comes to our research and our understanding of food addiction as especially food addiction treatment, these are the dark ages. We are just beginning our understanding. We have about 10,500 studies on food addiction and maybe half a dozen of them are on treatment. Almost nothing is published on food addiction treatment. And that's where our work lies. We here at Bright Line Eating are very, very well poised to do a lot about that. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
