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Overeating may reflect the brain's reward circuits, not just habit or weak will.

GLP-1 drugs affect the brain's craving pathways.

New findings revive renowned psychologist Bart Hoebel’s idea that feeding and addiction overlap.

Finding the late Bart Hoebel [1,2] at a neuroscience meeting was never difficult. He was exceptionally tall and rose above the sea of scientists not only in stature but also in vision, a commanding presence in every sense of the word. He was known for his pioneering work on the neurobiology of motivation, feeding, and addiction, subjects that have fascinated me since my early undergraduate years.

Much of Prof. Hoebel’s legacy lies in making the case that highly palatable foods, particularly sugar, recruit the brain’s reward systems in ways that resemble addictive processes [3,4,5,6]. That idea resonated with me at more than an academic level. I had seen others around me struggle to stop eating high-fat, high-carbohydrate processed foods despite earnest efforts to do so, and the notion that some foods might be addictive felt less like speculation than lived truth. Still, the idea remained a subject of controversy in the scientific community. To be clear, behavioral neuroscientists agreed that highly palatable foods engage neural reward systems. The debate was whether this justified the language of addiction, especially in humans. Some questioned how well animal models of sugar bingeing translated to human eating behavior, while others argued that obesity was too complex to be framed through an addiction lens. Yet the central question Prof. Hoebel raised never disappeared: Are some forms of overeating driven by mechanisms that overlap with those involved in substance use disorders?

That question is what makes Richard O’Connor’s recent review article in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience so interesting [7]. O’Connor argues that the emergence of GLP-1 receptor agonists has given new life to the debate over food addiction. These drugs, best known for their effects on........

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