Why Do People Become Addicted to Certain Foods?

Hi I'm Katie Lucas, and I'm behind the scenes with the Dr. Oz show here, with Dr. Mike Dow, Psychotherapist and Addiction Recovery Specialist from TLC's freaky eaters. Thanks so much for being here today. Thanks for having me. So, let's just get right into this. How does this compose of this urge start to eat these types of food, where does this urge start from? Well in one of our premier episodes, you'll see when Kelly, who's addicted to eating cheesy potatoes.

Kelly had a traumatic incident where she was forced to eat the food which is a little girl, and then threw up, after that incident everything she ate was cheesy potatoes so one of the times some of our food eaters actually have such traumatic incident that leads them to this kind of eating.

For other people, they just find something and they gravitate towards it and it becomes that food addiction. So sometimes there can be a specific event, sometimes the mix of genetics plus environment that leads to this addictive behaviors.