Unless this is your first visit here, you know that I am convinced that food addiction exists, and that I reserve high dudgeon for the medical establishment for not understanding what I know to be true. (Feel free to make your own judgments about the know-it-all texture of that; I’m not unaware of them.)

They’ve recognized substance use disorders involving tobacco, alcohol, amphetamines, and myriad other chemical dependencies. But not food, not yet.

Friday night at the Promising Practices in Food Addiction conference in Houston, the holistic nutritionist Heidi Snyder made a fabulous point that I thought could sweep away any barrier, even though it won’t:

“You could almost call it chemical dependence considering how adulterated food is.”

How true! Take a look at the labels of most processed foods, and count how many “ingredients” you can’t identify, or that you know not to be food, as our grandparents would have defined it. Those are chemicals.

Skeptics might scoff, and say that those aren’t “real” chemicals like they’re talking about when they say “chemical dependence,” but why are some chemicals “chemicals,” and some aren’t?

We are all deeply submerged in a fog that has gathered so slowly that we don’t recognize it, but those are chemicals. And people who subsist on that stuff just might be dependent on them — they certainly keep coming back to them.

It brings to mind a comment that Kelly Brownell, the Yale obesity researcher who is at the top of his profession, made to an obesity conference on Bainbridge Island, Wash., last year: This stuff is regulated by the FDA, but it should really be regulated by the EPA.