The 5 Most Addictive Foods — And Why It’s Not About Willpower | EP 393

Summary

Podcast Summary: The 5 Most Addictive Foods — And Why It’s Not About Willpower

The Dr. Gundry Podcast | EP 393
Date: March 3, 2026
Host: Dr. Steven Gundry (PodcastOne)

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Episode Overview

Dr. Steven Gundry delves into the science and psychology behind food addiction, counting down the top five most addictive foods as consistently reported in surveys. He unpacks the biological and chemical reasons these foods are so irresistible, emphasizing that addiction is not about weak willpower, but rather the result of engineered ingredients and evolutionary signals. Dr. Gundry interweaves scientific insights, personal anecdotes (including his own battles with M&Ms), and practical tips for regaining control. The episode closes with a listener Q&A on egg-derived muscle supplements.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Why We Crave Certain Foods

• Theme: Food addiction is rooted in brain chemistry and evolutionary wiring, not weakness.

• Quote:

  "These foods aren't addictive because they're bad. They're addictive because of what's built on into them."
  – Dr. Gundry (00:34)

• Main Idea: The combination of sugar, fat, salt, and refined ingredients creates a powerful cycle of cravings. Food chemists deliberately engineer these combinations for maximum pleasure stimuli.

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The 5 Most Addictive Foods & What Makes Them So Irresistible

#5: Cookies (01:48)

• Components: High sugar & refined flour.
• Science:
  • Rapidly absorbed sugars spike insulin, promoting fat storage.
  • Refined flour digests even faster than table sugar (higher glycemic index).
  • Fructose in sugar powerfully stimulates hunger and dopamine-driven reward.
• Industry Tactics:
  • High-fructose corn syrup used for its intensity and cost-effectiveness—makes cravings stronger.
• Personal Note:

  "No wonder I could consume a pound bag of M&M peanuts and still want more."
  – Dr. Gundry (04:03)

• Solution: Learn the underlying mechanisms—knowledge helps break the cycle.

#4: Chocolate (07:18)

• Components: Sugar + fat + mood-altering compounds in cacao.
• Effects:
  • Triggers comfort and stimulation in the brain—cravings often feel deeply emotional.
  • Dark chocolate can offer health benefits but is often processed to remove these.
• Tip:

  "The higher you go [in cacao percentage], the less sugar and quite frankly, the less sugary, wonderful flavor you get."
  – Dr. Gundry (08:18)

  • Opt for 72%+ dark chocolate, inching up to 90-95% for less rewarding, more health-beneficial options.

#3: Chips (10:52)

• Components: Salt, fat, and refined starch.
• Evolutionary Pull:
  • Salt is rare in nature—humans are "salt-seeking organisms."
  • Fat enhances mouthfeel and historically delivered fat-soluble vitamins.
  • Refined starch rapidly breaks down into sugar.
• Famous Reference:

  "Like the famous ad for potato chip company, bet you can't just eat one."
  – Dr. Gundry (12:34)

• Tip:
  • Reduce added salt and processing—whole foods stop you from overeating.

#2: Ice Cream (14:58)

• Components: Sugar, fat, and creamy texture.
• Effect:
  • Sugar spikes reward circuits; fat prolongs pleasure.
  • Creamy texture delays satiety signals—"reward lasts longer than the feeling of fullness."
• Strategy:

  "Make your own at home... using allulose, a natural sugar that does not spike your sugar."
  – Dr. Gundry (16:09)

  • Many healthy DIY recipes exist, making pleasure possible without the crash.

#1: Pizza (17:37)

• Components: Sugar-laden tomato sauce, refined flour crust, salty cheese, abundant fat.
• Craving Mechanism:
  • Hits all reward circuits (sugar, fat, salt) while delaying satiety signals—makes you keep eating.
• Missing Link:
  • Virtually no fiber, so the gut never tells the brain “I’m full.”
• Gut-Brain Connection:

  "It's actually our gut bacteria that make GLP-1 that goes to your brain and says, hey, you're full. Don't have to eat anymore."
  – Dr. Gundry (18:26)

• Actionable Advice:
  • Eat whole foods, full of fiber, to re-engage your natural fullness signals.

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Central Takeaways

• It’s Not About Willpower:

  "This was not a willpower problem on my part. These were chemical reactions that were driving my need to keep eating this stuff."
  – Dr. Gundry (05:40)

• Foods are engineered to target dopamine and pleasure circuits in the brain—PET scan studies confirm this.
• Changing the patterns requires knowledge and, often, practical swaps (e.g., darker chocolate, homemade ice cream).

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Food Industry Tactics:

  "Food chemists study the dopamine responses in people’s brains... and you can design added ingredients that hit these pleasure centers even better."
  – Dr. Gundry (19:40)

• On Breaking Addictions:

  "Once I realized this, my need for M&Ms disappeared. My Diet Coke disappeared. Not overnight, but permanently."
  – Dr. Gundry (20:00)

• Empowerment:

  "With knowledge comes power. And if I can do it, you can, too."
  – Dr. Gundry (20:24)

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Supplementary Q&A Segment

Fortitropin (“Yolked”) and Muscle Building

Listener Question (20:36): Does the egg yolk-derived supplement “Yolked” (with fortitropin) really help build muscle?

• Explanation:
  • Fortitropin (from fertilized, not fermented, egg yolks) may block myostatin (a muscle-growth regulator).
  • Some animal and one human study suggests it helps muscle mass by increasing VEGF (also used by cancer cells to recruit blood supply—caution advised).
  • Underlying culprit for muscle loss: leaky gut triggers myostatin production.
  • Advice:

    "Secure your leaky gut, and there won’t be a problem in the first place."
    – Dr. Gundry (22:37)

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Actionable Strategies & Closing Advice

• Eat foods whole: The fiber feeds gut bacteria, which send natural fullness signals to the brain.
• Opt for minimally processed alternatives: Less salt, higher fiber, more real ingredients.
• Educate yourself: Understanding the science makes resisting engineered foods easier.

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Segment Timestamps

• Introduction & Main Theme – 00:00
• Cookies (#5) – 01:48
• Chocolate (#4) – 07:18
• Chips (#3) – 10:52
• Ice Cream (#2) – 14:58
• Pizza (#1) & Gut-Brain Satiety – 17:37
• Food Industry Science & Personal Anecdotes – 19:40
• Q&A: Fortitropin/Egg Muscle Supplements – 20:36

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Summary Tone

Throughout the episode, Dr. Gundry maintains a conversational, down-to-earth tone with scientific precision, frequent analogies, and practical encouragement. His candor about his own food struggles and successes gives listeners personal motivation as well as actionable information.

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Transcript

[Dr. Steven Gundry]

When researchers asked people which foods they struggle most to stop eating, the answers were remarkably consistent. Different people, different backgrounds, same results. So today I'm going to walk you through five foods that consistently show up at the top of that list. And here's what matters. These foods aren't addictive because they're bad. They're addictive because of what's built on into them. So we'll reveal each food one at a time and then open it up to show you the ingredients driving the craving. And along the way, I'll share how I broke my own food additions, including eating a bag of M&MS, a pound bag of M&MS. At a single sitting.

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Let's start number five. Now this food shows up again and again when people talk about losing control.

Cookies.

Why? Well, sugar is in cookies, and sugar that hits the bloodstream fast is a recipe for disaster. Let's break it down. Sugar that's absorbed rapidly spikes insulin levels. Insulin is pushed out by the pancreas to handle the sugar that appears in your blood. That sugar that appears in your blood is handled by that spike of insulin, which tries to remove that sugar from your blood by forcing it into your muscles. Unfortunately, if your muscles are full, and quite frankly, most of us, our muscles are full, the muscles have no room for that sugar. So insulin goes up higher and higher, trying to remove that sugar from the bloodstream if it can't get into the muscles. Insulin is a fat storage hormone. And so that sugar, which can't get into the muscles is stored as fat. Now, the second part of cookies is it uses refined flour. And anytime we take a whole food like wheat and we refine it into fine white particles, that food like flour behaves actually more powerfully than sugar itself. It actually has a higher glycemic index than table sugar. So we've got a one, two punch of sugar and sugar. The sugar actually stimulates a dopamine signal in our brain and makes you want more of that hit. That means you want it again and again. Now interestingly, there's been a lot of research that sugar, table sugar is half glucose and half fructose. Fruit sugar, it's half and half. So the sugar in table sugar is called sucrose. Half glucose, half fructose. Here's what is interesting. You could give humans or rats glucose, strictly glucose, and none of this happens. On the other hand, if you give them fructose, not only does all of what I've talked about happen in spades, but fructose feeds the demand in your brain for more of the same thing. It actually stimulates hunger. And so it's the perfect combination to give short lived satisfaction. Quick dopamine hit, but then the fructose in sugar drives the need for more and more of the exact same thing. And this has been repeated in human studies and animal studies. It's actually the fructose in sugar that's the bad part. Now add to the fact that companies got smart and instead of using cane sugar, which is expensive, they realized that high fructose corn sugar, corn syrup, is whole lot cheaper to produce, has more fructose in the ratio of glucose to fructose, and is sweeter than cane sugar. So the company wins because it's cheaper. You get more fructose, that drives the urge for more. And it's no wonder that I could consume a pound bag of M& M peanuts and still want more. So it's the fructose that's actually driving this loop. And one of the things that I realized once I learned this mechanism, that this wasn't a willpower problem on my part. These were chemical reactions that were driving my need to keep eating this stuff. And again, once you understand that this chemical reaction, which is controllable by understanding what it's going to do to you, that was one of the easiest things for me to stop eating. How about number four? Now this one isn't just about taste, it's about how it makes you feel. And that's chocolate. Chocolate is one of the just wonderful compounds. It's sugar plus fat plus compounds in cacao cocoa that actually affect mood and reward pathways. So you get comfort and stimulation at the exact same time. And this is why chocolate cravings often feel so emotional. Now on the other hand, there are definite benefits of dark chocolate. They range from brain health, they range from heart health, they range from memory health. There's a lot of good things about dark chocolate, but most of the chocolate in America has been treated with what's called alkalization or dutching to bind all the polyphenols that chocolate has benefits for. So, yeah, an ounce of chocolate is probably a good idea, as long as it's extra dark chocolate. Now, how do you stop at one ounce? Here's my trick. You're really looking for the sugar in chocolate, and the easiest way is keep cranking up the percentage of cacao in your chocolate bar. Start at a minimum of like 72% dark chocolate cacao, but work your way up. Go to 80, go to 85, go to 90. The higher you go, the less sugar and quite frankly, the less sugary, wonderful flavor that you get. But the higher you go, the higher the benefit in polyphenols. It's really difficult even for me to eat a lot of 90, 95% dark chocolate. There's just no reward system involved. So kick up the percentage of cacao in your chocolate and you'll be amazed in how it'll keep you under control.

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All right, number three in the survey, chips. Now this probably doesn't need much explanation. Chips are salt, fat and refined starch. Now, salt amplifies pleasure. I hope everyone realizes that we are salt seeking organisms. Salt is a very rare substance available on this earth. In fact, salt was so important that ancient currencies were actually based on the weight in salt. The expression he's worth his weight in salt is actually true. Slaves were traded for salt or salt was traded for slaves. Salt is very rare. We are one of the few organisms that sweats salt. And so we are always under evolutionary pressure to find salt because it's so rare. So salt hits a pleasure center. Now, fat improves mouth feel. We also know that long ago fat was a very good delivery device for fat soluble vitamins. So the combination of salt and fat hits so many evolutionary switches, it's hard to stop the refined starches and chips. Again, when you eat a whole food, whole breaking down the starches, let's just take a potato for example. Takes a long time for our digestive enzymes to break down the starches in a whole potato. On the other hand, if you finely slice that potato into rapidly breaking down starch, it breaks down quickly, gives you a sugar hit. And so the salt doesn't increase your fullness, the starch breaks down quickly, the fat improves the mouthfeel. And like the famous ad for potato chip company, bet you can't just eat one. And that increases the reach back behavior to get more. Because evolutionary this was a really good idea. Not anymore. So how do you stop this? Well, quite frankly, the less salt you add to almost any food, the less likely you are to have that reach back factor. The second thing, quite frankly, is the less you process in these cases starches, the less you will turn them into sugar rapidly and the less you'll crave of them. It's one thing to eat a bag of potato chips and quite another thing to eat two boiled potatoes without salt. Think how you would handle either of those two scenarios. Number two, it's cold, it's creamy, and it's really hard to stop mid bite. Are you guessing what number two is? You're right, it's ice cream. Now, again, doesn't have to take a lot of figuring out why this is so wonderful. Number one, you've got sugar which hits your dopamine receptors fast. You've got fat which stretches out the reward signal. Now the texture actually delays these stop cues that you would get. And the reward lasts longer than the feeling of fullness. So how do you personally give it up? Number one, make your own at home. I have many recipes online on how to make healthy ice cream. Using avocados, using extra dark chocolate, using allulose, a natural sugar that does not spike your sugar. In fact, it lowers sugar so you can have your cake and eat it too. In this case, you can have those feelings, that pleasurable feeling that you want in your mouth, but that's not going to undo your health. So make it at home. And it's actually really easy to do. Ice cream makers that you can use at home are really cheap. You can find them at Target, you can find them online. They're like 49 bucks. And quite frankly, if you've looked at the cost of a pint of ice cream recently, in four making it at homes, you've done the job of what that ice cream maker did. All right, finally, take a guess what the number one most addicting food on surveys was. Yeah, you guessed it. Pizza. Why? Well, first of all, there's oodles of sugar in the sauce. It may say tomato sauce, but let's be realistic. Most tomato sauces have a lot of extra added sugar. There's refined flour in the crust, which breaks down rapidly into sugar. There's fat in the cheese, there's salt everywhere. So you get this hit of fast energy, you get all the amplified reward signals and, and sadly, you have delayed I'm full signals. There is nothing that actually stimulates this feeling of I'm full. One of the reasons for that, which I haven't mentioned up until now, is that everything that we've talked about preceding, none of these foods have any soluble or for that matter, insoluble fiber. And we have to realize that again, our great great grandparents ate whole food, and they ate that food whole. When we ate it like that, there was a lot of leftover starches, soluble fibers that we couldn't digest, but the gut buddies that lived down in our colon could. And so we gave them what they needed to eat, and they made signals, literally text messages that went to our brain and said, hey, our needs are met. We're full.

Thanks very much.

You don't have to keep eating. And it's called the gut centric theory of hunger. And those of you who are fascinated by GLP1 agonists like Ozempic, like Zeppelin, should realize that it's actually our gut bacteria that make GLP1 that goes to your brain and says, hey, you're full. Don't have to eat anymore. You don't need to inject it to get that feeling. You just have to give your gut bacteria what they need to eat. And one of the best places to start is eating foods whole rather than broken down. So make these things with better ingredients and better portions. The other thing that's important to realize that breaking this pattern, you don't have to think you are a undisciplined person this is not about willpower. All of this is about repeated exposure to ingredient combinations designed to keep you eating. And you have to realize that food chemists study the dopamine responses in people's brains. People undergo PET scans and MRIs when they are given these foods, and they light up the pleasure centers like nothing. And you can design added ingredients that hit these pleasure centers even better. So once I realized this, my need for M M's disappeared. My Diet Coke disappeared. Not overnight, but permanently. I haven't had a Diet Coke in over 30 years. I don't think I've knowingly eaten an M M since that time. Not that I probably could consume an entire bag of them. But with knowledge comes power. And if I can do it, you can, too. So those are the five worst troublemakers, and they all pretty much do the same thing to you. They did it to me. And it's a new year, and let's try to stay away from these troublemakers.

Foreign it's time for questions. All right, the first question comes from Facebook from thirsty pandas. Dr. G. Everybody's going crazy for this new egg supplement called Yolked. Like ferment a day with an ingredient called fortitropin. Here's the definition. A bioactive compound by meios derived from fertilized chicken egg yolk via a patented process believed to preserve the natural structure and bioactivity of key proteins, peptides, and lipids naturally present in fertilized egg yolk. Does this really help build muscle? Well, thanks for that question, Thirsty Panda. First of all, this is not fermented egg yolk. This is fertilized egg yolk. And fertilized eggs mean, obviously, that sperm activated the egg, and so fertilize. And fermentation is totally different, just like pastured chicken is totally different than pasteurized chicken. But does it build muscle? There have been animal studies that suggest that this compound, fortitropin, does block a key factor called myostatin, which contributes to sarcopenia. When you block myostatin, you do build more muscle. So, yes, this product has been shown to build more muscle. But spoiler alert, you'll never guess what activates myostatin in the first place. If you guess leaky gut, go to the head of your class. Myostatin is produced as a response to leaky gut.

So good news, if you want to

build muscle, secure your leaky gut, and there won't be a problem in the first place. And to answer that question a little bit further, yes, there is a human study that suggests that it does help build muscle, but it helps build muscle by increasing levels of VEGF. And if you've heard me and Dr. William Lai talk about VEGF, VEGF is how cancer cells grow new blood vessels towards themselves. So be careful what you wish for, particularly if you're getting on in years. And to the second part of your question, can I ferment my own egg yolks and get the same effect? Well, you can actually ferment eggs, but

that's not a fertilized egg.

You can buy fertilized eggs at many health food stores, but no, you can't ferment your egg yolks to get the same effect. But great question. Now, thank you to those who have entered the review Giveaway. As a reminder to enter to win a free gift from me, simply leave a review on Apple or Spotify screenshot and email it to my [e-mail] we choose a winner each week, so keep those reviews coming. Okay, here's an excellent one from KMM 1304. He gives the podcast five stars and writes the man with the Plan. I've been listening to Dr. Gundry's podcast for almost two years and have learned more about health and longevity than I've ever, ever imagine. He gives a fantastic stable foundation and some of the best useful tips and hacks to understand how the body works and what you need to know to achieve real health. He has changed my life and the life of many others around me. As far as I'm concerned, he's one of the greatest men of our time and of all time, and his impact on the world will continue to grow and set the standard for optimal, optimum health for everyone. Wow. Well, thank you KMM 1304. The checks in the mail, as I say. No, seriously, that's. That's very nice of you to say that.

Very kind.

You know, I've been doing this for 30 years now and my patients have taught me what works and what doesn't work. And I'm happy to pass what I've learned on to you and glad you're putting it to use.

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