LAWRENCE — University of Kansas researcher Tera Fazzino is investigating whether “hyperpalatable” foods marketed to Americans — foods formulated with artificially high amounts of fat, salt and carbohydrates — have traits commonly associated with addictive substances. She recently earned a $2.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to test the idea using experimental practices standard in the field of regulatory research.
“We’re using methodology that has already been established in the areas of tobacco and drug regulatory science and is required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for any testing of nicotine or other tobacco or pharmaceutical products that enter the market,” said Fazzino, associate professor of psychology at KU and director of the Life Span Institute’s Cofrin Logan Center for Addiction Research & Treatment . “We're using methodology that’s already been established with known substances and addictive drugs and is used for screening and surveillance and regulatory efforts. We're applying it to testing the addictive properties of these foods.”
Fazzino and her colleagues will recruit around 168 participants, then provide them with different “potato chip” food stimuli produced in coordination with the Food Innovation Accelerator program at Kansas State University-Olathe. The food stimuli will differ in their formulations, and their formulations won't be known by participants.
“In the lab, they will sample a chip food stimulus,” Fazzino said. “Then they'll answer some questions about what they think about the chips, how much they like them and then complete some behavioral tasks.”
These tasks will help measure the chips’ “reinforcing effects,” said the KU researcher.
“One will be a self-administration task where they will earn chips to eat,” she said. “We chose chips because this type of savory, salty, carb- and/or fat-heavy food is very characteristic of the U.S. food environment. It’s a kind of a nice, initial food stimulus to use that would have pretty broad applicability to the entire food supply.”
The chip study is based on long-established methodology used by FDA regulators to assess “abuse liability,” which the agency defines as “the potential of a substance to result in addiction and be used repeatedly or even sporadically resulting in undesirable effects.”
“Typical abuse-liability paradigms test the addictive properties of a substance by designing an experiment called an acute dose-response paradigm, where they test different concentrations of the drug,” Fazzino said. “The main comparison is what's called a negative control, which has none of the reinforcing characteristics of the substance being tested. So, for example, if we were testing the addictive properties of vaping products for nicotine, the negative control there would be just vapor without the nicotine in it. We’ve designed our paradigm accordingly, and this acute dose-response paradigm is the gold standard for testing the addictive properties of substances.”
Results could help identify specific ingredients or ingredient combinations that boost a food’s reinforcing properties.
“These foods contain combinations of nutrients, such as fat and sodium or carbohydrates and sodium, at levels that are uncommon in nature,” Fazzino said. “If you remove one of those key nutrients, the food should become less reinforcing.”
The KU researcher said her findings might inform regulators and policymakers, not just fellow scholars.
“The grant was written in a way that we could be able to provide direct evidence to the FDA about the abuse liability of these food stimuli, with the intention of informing potential regulatory action,” she said.
Fazzino recently published findings into how the tobacco industry used practices from cigarette sales to formulate and market hyperpalatable foods in the U.S. and globally in the 1980s and 1990s , with a legacy of negative consequences public health. She said she hopes her new research could spur U.S. policymakers, who she said lag behind regulators in other parts of the world.
“South America is leading the way,” Fazzino said. “Countries like Colombia and Chile have been very proactive in enacting regulatory action to protect their populations from these foods and to prevent these foods from taking over their food supplies. That’s included bans on marketing, especially to children. That has also included really strong, very clear black warning labels with white letters indicating this is ultra-processed or this is unhealthy in some way, and taxation on certain products.”
The NIH grant will enable hiring of a postdoctoral researcher dedicated to the project, fund work by graduate students, and give research and training opportunities to KU undergraduates.
“It's funding not only the study, but student trainees,” Fazzino said. “We have a new postdoc who just joined us. We have research coordinators who will all get state-of-the-art training and experience working on this study. This is really on the forefront of addiction science.”