I

n 2013, an undergraduate 
research project suggesting 
Oreos activated more of the 
brain’s pleasure centers than 
either cocaine or morphine set 
off a storm of media attention. 
However, the study was done in 
rats and never directly compared 
Oreos to either drug. Another 
blitz of media coverage, this 
time claiming cheese was as 
addictive as crack cocaine, was 
predicated on a study by associate 
professor Ashley Gearhardt, in 
the Department of Psychology 
at the University of Michigan. 
Ironically, Gearhardt’s study only 
mentioned cheese a few times. 
Bad science journalism aside, 
can foods be addictive? Is food 
addiction a valid behavioral health 
condition?
According to the American 
Society of Addiction Medicine, 
addiction is a chronic brain 
disease where “an individual 
pathologically pursues reward 
and/or relief by substance use 
and other behaviors.” While this 
definition is harsh upon first 
reading, it is important to note 
that not everyone exposed to 
something 
addictive 
develops 
an addiction. For instance, only 
8 to 12 percent of people (still a 
concerning statistic) who misuse 
prescription opioids, e.g. taking 
them not as their doctor ordered, 
develop opioid use disorder. So no 
need to fear, yet, Oreo lovers.
Oreos, cheese and other foods 
some would label as addictive 
have one thing in common: the 
bliss point. The bliss point is the 
right amount of salt, sugar and fat 
to maximize a food’s irresistibility. 
Like the tobacco companies that 
genetically modify tobacco plants 
to double their nicotine content, 
food 
companies 
meticulously 
design processed foods to take 

advantage of our evolutionary 
cravings for salt, sugar and fat for 
more sales.
Anthropologists estimate that 
Homo sapiens has been around for 
about 300,000 years and, for a vast 
majority of our species’s time on 
Earth, foods high in sugar, fat and/
or salt were a luxury. Since we 
need all three of those nutrients 
to live, it makes sense we evolved 
neural circuits that reward us 
for obtaining fatty, sugary and 
salty foods. Fast forward to 2018, 
however, where a vast majority 
of humanity gets the nutrition it 
needs from these foods and you 
run into a problem: We no longer 
need to seek fatty, sugary and salty 
foods to survive, but the neural 
circuits of 300,000 years ago still 
exist.
The one thing that trips people 
up the most about the idea of food 
addiction is the question, “How can 
food be addictive if we need it to 
live?” We still need fat, sugar and 
salt, however, we have innumerably 
more sources of these ingredients 
than our ancestors did. Something 
a lot of people do not realize about 
drugs like marijuana is that their 
addictive properties are rooted in 
biology. Your body is coursing with 
naturally produced chemicals that 
are structurally similar to a molecule 
of THC. That is why THC is able 
to activate your endocannabinoid 
receptors and cause the effects one 
feels when smoking or eating pot. 
Marijuana would get no one high if 
THC was not similar to anandamide, 
a brain chemical.
Why do I draw the parallel 
between marijuana and food? The 
brain needs a molecule to activate 
the endocannabinoid receptors. Both 
anandamide and THC will do the 
trick, however, they are not the same. 
I apply the same concept to food. We 
need food, yes. However, an Oreo and 

a cucumber are not created equal nor 
should they be treated as such.
In my conversations with people 
at the School of Public Health’s 
Department of Nutritional Sciences, I 
have observed that people readily fall 
squarely into the “yes, food addiction 
exists” and “no, food addiction does 
not exist.” I have already presented 
arguments for the former, but what 
about the latter camp?
The most consistent and cogent 
argument I hear against food 
addiction as a concept is that it is 
seen as conflicted with the “intuitive 
model of eating.” Intuitive eating is 
all about learning to respect your 
internal cues for eating, such as 
fullness, and rejecting external cues 
like diet culture. This model also 
maintains that no food is a bad food. 
On face value, the idea of addictive 
foods flies in the face of intuitive 
eating. It’s an external cue that makes 
some food “bad.”
I respect this argument and the 
intuitive model of eating, however, 
I believe the conflict is rooted in 
misunderstanding, not fundamental 
incompatibility. We label drugs of 
abuse like opioids and cocaine 
as “bad” and the dominance of 
Alcoholics Anonymous and its 
cousin Narcotics Anonymous in 
the addiction treatment world lead 
many to believe that abstinence is 
the only treatment for addiction. 
If that were the case, then we 
would tell people to avoid certain 
foods which could be addictive, 
which as I said before, goes 
against intuitive eating. While AA 
and NA have done worlds of good, 
their total abstinence mindset is 

E

very day, I walk 
out my front door, 
and turn to lock 
it behind me. I cross the 
front porch, take the four 
steps to the sidewalk, and 
turn 
left 
up 
Benjamin 
Street as it curves into 
Mary Street. I take a left 
on Packard Street and a 
right on Hill Street and 
walk up the steps to the 
Weill Hall, where I have 
most of my classes.
I do this walk every day, at 
least twice a day, oftentimes 
more. As the semester has 
slowly seeped away I have 
taken this path in Birkenstocks, 
Blundstones, snow boots and 
high heels. On the way, I have 
listened to music and podcasts 
or chatted with a friend as we 
strode shoulder to shoulder. 
These four short blocks have 
seen 
me 
content, 
anxious, 
stressed 
and 
triumphant. I 
usually find myself lost in 
thought, concerned for a friend, 
thinking about the weekend’s 
plans or pondering how I’ll ever 
get all my work done that day.
I feel as though the weight 
of all that contact has worn a 
path along the pavement that 
exactly matches the length 
of my stride and the contours 
of my feet, like the concrete’s 
muscle memory has come to 
expect me. I had a similar 
sensation last year on my daily 
walk to class along Oakland 
Avenue, and my freshman year 
as I crossed in front of Mosher-
Jordan Residence Hall and 
along the bridge beside the 
Central 
Campus 
Recreation 
Building each day, winding 
around the Ruthven Natural 
History Museum. I spent a 
lot of time on each of those 
routes, engendering a feeling 
of nostalgia when I walk them 
now.
Over Thanksgiving break, my 
family and I drove past our old 
house, where I spent the first six 
years of my life. As we wound 
along the strangely familiar 
roads, I could practically feel 
my head resting against my 
little car seat, knowing my dad 
would pick me up and piggyback 
me to bed once we got home. 
I imagine I’ll find that same 
comfortable familiarity in 10 
years when I return to campus, 
carrying with me a completely 
different life, with different 
worries and a new soundtrack, 
walking these old routes and 
re-familiarizing myself with 

the shape of my 
younger stride.
When I was 
16, 
I 
spent 
a 
summer 
studying 
in 
a 
program 
in 
England. 
It was only a 
month, but I 
made 
some 
wonderful 
friends 
and 
became enamored with the 
city and University of Oxford. 
I 
remember 
crying 
as 
I 
prepared to leave, lugging my 
overstuffed 
suitcase 
across 
the dormitory threshold and 
waving goodbye to my new 
closest friends. On my way 
to the airport, we zig-zagged 
through 
the 
now-familiar 
streets and hills. As we did 
so, I wrote, “Throughout our 
lives we nestle into pockets 
of comfort, pockmarking the 
globe 
with 
our 
memories, 
notches of home that lay vacant 
when we leave, as only our 

bodies can fill them perfectly.”
By that point in my life, I 
had a lot of these pockets. I had 
school, camp and my family 
home. I had my cousin’s living 
room in Toronto and friends’ 
houses in Cleveland. I had the 
theater rehearsal room, the 
student newspaper lab and the 
park where the soccer team 
practiced.
Now, 
five 
years 
later, 
my 
imprint 
portfolio 
has 
expanded. But I have the 
benefit of something I didn’t 
have at 16: a little distance. 
The next summer I returned 
to Oxford as a tourist, eager to 
show the friends with whom 
I was traveling the city I had 
come to adore, waiting to fill 
once again the little me-shaped 
notch I had left behind. It 
was a fun day. We went to my 
favorite Indian restaurant and 
ice cream shop. We walked the 
same roads I had walked every 
day that summer. We even 
returned to my dorm, crossing 

the threshold through which 
I’d dragged my suitcase my last 
morning in England.
I spent all day trying to fill 
up the little crevice I’d left 
behind, but found I couldn’t 
quite fit. I could practically feel 
the dent, running my fingers 
around its edges as we strolled 
through town and by a beloved 
bookstore. I could sense it as we 
smelled the fryers bubbling in 
my favorite chip shop. But I was 
a different shape than I’d been 
the summer before. Parts had 
been stretched, parts refined 
and some parts had been 
moved around or discarded 
altogether. It was bittersweet 
to find so tangibly all the ways 
in which I was now somehow 
different.
My column this semester 
has been all about reaching 
back to feel the edges of these 
indentations, 
relearning 
their contours and finding 
comfort 
in 
the 
inevitable 
swell of nostalgia. It’s been 
an introspective journey that 
has forced me to recognize 
the transience of these few 
years in college that we are all 
experiencing together. There is 
a lingering frustration still left 
over from that day in Oxford. 
The idea of recapturing a long 
lost feeling is tantalizing, but 
probably fruitless.
The only thing we can do 
is leave the highest quality 
imprint possible. As I walk 
to class each day I try to 
do so mindfully, not always 
allowing myself to wander 
off in thought but rather 
make a point to feel the 
temperature on my skin and 
smile at strangers I pass. I try 
to recognize the shape I am 
making on the world around 
me so maybe I can feel it more 
genuinely when I return one 
day. We are always told that 
college will be some of the 
best years of our lives. So we 
should stretch as far as we 
can, making impressions all 
throughout campus, leaving 
the shape of ourselves up and 
down Ann Arbor. The more 
we do, the more memories we 
make, and the more we have to 
look back on years from now, 
smiling against the grain of a 
bittersweet nostalgia — grateful 
for the many places in the world 
we can call home.

Opinion
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4A — Wednesday, December 5, 2018

Emma Chang
Ben Charlson
Joel Danilewitz
Michael Russo
Dana Pierangeli

Tara Jayaram
Jeremy Kaplan
Magdalena Mihaylova
Ellery Rosenzweig
Jason Rowland

Anu Roy-Chaudhury
Alex Satola
Ali Safawi
Ashley Zhang
Reid Diamond

DAYTON HARE
Managing Editor

420 Maynard St. 
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
 tothedaily@michigandaily.com

Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890.

ALEXA ST. JOHN
Editor in Chief
 ANU ROY-CHAUDHURY AND 
ASHLEY ZHANG
Editorial Page Editors

Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily’s Editorial Board. 
All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

ALI SAFAWI | COLUMN

Oreos, cheese and other hard drugs

Footsteps and imprints

KENDALL HECKER | COLUMN

Ali Safawi can be reached at 

asafawi@umich.edu.

Kendall Hecker can be reached at 

kfhecker@umich.edu.

A 

bombshell 
report 
was 
dropped 
over 
Thanksgiving. The Fourth 
National 
Climate 
Assessment 
provided 
perhaps 
the 
most 
detailed scientific assessment of 
how climate change is going to 
impact every area of our lives. 
Produced by a confederation of 
13 federal agencies, including 
NASA, 
the 
Department 
of 
Defense, National Oceanic and 
Atmospheric 
Administration, 
National 
Science 
Foundation, 
U.S. Department of Agriculture 
and more, it details societal 
response strategies to mitigate 
and adapt to the effects of global 
climate change. Projected effects 
include massive declines in crop 
yield, sea-level rise that threatens 
millions, devastating wildfires 
and billions of dollars of economic 
losses every year. All of this 
will destabilize food and social 
systems we rely upon, which will 
exacerbate conditions leading to 
war and mass migration. Almost 
every national and international 
scientific body on the planet has 
converged around this reality, 
pointing to climate change as 
the largest impending disaster 
humankind has ever faced, and 
urging rapid action.
The advantage of a global 
scientific consensus is that we also 
have a roadmap to avoid these 
catastrophic effects and a metric 
to gauge our progress. The NCA 
reaffirms that avoiding the most 
damaging 
effects 
requires 
us 
to limit warming to 1.5 degrees 
Celsius, and a report released by the 
International 
Intergovernmental 
Panel on Climate Change in 
October indicates that achieving 
this will necessitate global carbon 
neutrality by 2050. This is still 
technically feasible, but it requires 
dramatic and immediate action.
Unfortunately, 
we 
at 
the 
University of Michigan have a lot 
of catching up to do. Universities 
are particularly well placed to act 
on climate: They have the means 
to understand the science, are not 
subject to the same quarterly focus 
as private institutions and have a 
stated mission to “serve the people.” 
In spite of this, the University has 
been woefully negligent when 
it comes to climate action — our 
emissions 
reduction 
goals 
are 
among the very bottom of Big Ten 
institutions, we lack a climate 

action plan, our administration 
refused to divest from fossil fuels 
despite broad community support 
and we have yet to join any of the 
large national coalitions (such as 
the University Climate Change 
Coalition or Climate Leadership 
Network) that help universities 
and their communities to become 
more sustainable. It has been noted 
in the press how badly we compare 
to 
Michigan 
State 
University, 
which is highlighted in the NCA 
for generating 5 percent of their 
energy locally via solar carports, 
and to The Ohio State University, 
which is 10th in the Environmental 
Protection Agency’s list of the top 
30 
green-powered 
universities 
and which committed to carbon 
neutrality 10 years ago. University 
President Mark Schlissel’s own 
Greenhouse 
Gas 
Reduction 
Committee recommended back in 
2015 that the University commit to 
much more ambitious targets and 
detailed specific ways to achieve 
such targets, but three years later, 
little has changed.

We can and must do better. 
The U-M community is filled with 
knowledgeable 
and 
passionate 
individuals, but climate change is 
an issue that we can only tackle if 
we work together, and we need bold 
leadership to focus our collective 
efforts. In a sign of hope, Schlissel 
announced in October that he 
was committed to “putting U-M 
on a trajectory towards carbon 
neutrality,” along with his intention 
to form a commission that would 
be “tasked with developing our 
plan.” But for this commission to 
be effective, Schlissel must commit 
to a defined, science-based date 
for carbon neutrality. In a detailed 
letter to Schlissel, the Climate Action 
Movement at U-M (of which I am 
a part) has urged him to commit 
the University to achieving carbon 
neutrality by 2035, a goal in keeping 

with the IPCC timeline. This puts a 
firm date with a tangible outcome to 
the pledge that Schlissel has already 
made to pursue efforts to limit 
warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as 
laid out in the 2015 Paris agreement, 
and also reposition the University 
community as leaders in the fight 
against climate change.
Without a specific date, the 
commission’s 
mandate 
remains 
frighteningly vague and we will lose 
valuable time as they debate what 
their mandate even is, let alone how to 
develop a plan to achieve it. It will be 
far too easy for the commission to set 
the bar low and fall back on Schlissel’s 
qualification that such a plan must 
be “financially responsible,” an 
excuse for inaction that is all too 
familiar to a younger generation 
that has seen its future grossly 
and 
systematically 
undervalued. 
While there is a consensus that 
aggressive climate action now will 
be far cheaper than if it is delayed, 
the necessary investments in our 
future will still be substantial, and 
we will need the mandate of a public 
commitment from the highest levels 
of the University in order to sustain 
momentum. 
Schlissel rightly calls climate 
change “the defining scientific and 
social problem of our age.” Beyond 
the science we produce, the 
greatest asset that the University 
has to offer in the fight against 
climate change is bold and public 
leadership. Even though we at 
the University produce nearly a 
third of Ann Arbor’s emissions, 
Schlissel is right that simply 
becoming carbon neutral will 
not alone make a significant 
difference for climate change. The 
University’s impact — our impact 
— will only be meaningful if it is 
public and if it is ambitious. We 
must put to rest the notion that 
the necessary changes are simply 
too difficult or impractical. We 
can be what we have claimed to 
be all along: Leaders and the Best. 
The world needs leaders right 
now, and with some of the world’s 
greatest minds, a commitment 
to serve the public good and 
an endowment larger than the 
economies of one-third of the world’s 
nations, no one is better positioned to 
lead than we are. I hope we do, and 

Time to lead on climate

NOAH WEAVERDYCK | OP-ED

Noah Weaverdyck is a Ph.D. 

candidate in Physics and a member of 

the Climate Action Movement at U-M

MAECY LIGHTHALL | CONTACT EMILY AT MAECYL@UMICH.EDU

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

The only thing we 
can do is leave the 
highest quality 
imprint possible

Our impact will 
only be meaningful 
if it is public and 
ambitious

KENDALL
HECKER

