Welcome to another installment of “10 Words or Less,” in which I ask interesting people for brief answers to brief questions. Today’s participant is a clinical psychologist and author who holds the nation’s first endowed professorship in eating disorders, at the University of North Carolina. Remember, please: No counting! “10 words” is about attitude, not addition, and besides, let’s see you do it. 

Name Cynthia Bulik
Born when, where 1960, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Residence Chapel Hill, NC
Family situation Married, three kids
A transformative event from your childhood “The death of my brother, Mark. I was 9. He was a premature baby who lived one day.”
When did you know you wanted to research ED? “My sophomore year in college. I was invited to do rounds with George Hsu, the attending physician for an eating disorders program in Pittsburgh.”
A surprising fact about you “I’m a [national-level] gold medalist ice dancer.”

So it turns out that when I wrote yesterday about the Jane Brody squib in the Times yesterday, referred there by my friend Ron-the-voracious-reader, I had actually been referred slightly elsewhere, to the mainbar of what Brody wrote. She was reporting the release of a series of reports in the British medical periodical The Lancet that address the growing obesity epidemic.

Almost a year ago, I wrote aboutNicholas Christakis's Ted Talk, which showcased his research about connectedness in social networks.

What would have been my mild interest was heightened by his using obesity as an example: He said his research showed that if your friends were obese, your chances of being obese were 45 percent higher. Even more freaky was his suggestion that if friends of your friends whom you'd never met were obese, your chances were 25 percent higher, and that you had a 10 percent greater chance of being overweight if your friends' friends' friends were.

Turns out, his conclusions haven't been accepted into scientific fact just yet. Writing yesterday in the Boston Globe, reporter Carolyn Y. Johnson recapped the significant doubt that has bubbled up:

I say in my book, ”Fat Boy Thin Man” that when the ideas that I hold about compulsive eating and food addiction become mainstream, scientific advances will have been far more influential than anything I said. I believe my story of losing 150 pounds-plus and keeping it off for two decades deserves to be in the conversation, but as a counterpoint to the science, not a replacement for it.

Writing in yesterday's Times, Tara Parker-Pope reported on studies done in California and Italy about how rats reacted when given a high-fat drink:

"The body immediately began to release natural marijuanalike chemicals in the gut that kept them craving more. ... The compounds serve a variety of functions, including regulation of mood and stress response, appetite, and movement of food through the intestines. Notably, they were released only when the rats tasted fat, not the sugar or protein."

One key point is that when the body's chemistry is thus activated, we are driven to act in ways we wouldn't freely choose — in this case, to eat past when we've taken on sufficient fuel.

This truth is very important to recognize, for several reasons. For people who tut-tut toward fat people for being morally weak, it's important to know that for some people, there's more at work than just moral fiber.

I've expressed this idea before; sorry if it's a repeat for you: I'm moved to say it again while reading Anne Katherine's "How To Make Almost Any Diet Work."

Many people scoff when I suggest that flour or processed sugar is akin to heroin or cocaine, because the latter pair are "really addictive," not to mention illegal. "Everybody knows" they have no similarity.

I didn't know Bart Hoebel well; anyone who did might be offended to hear that I think I knew him at all. But I did spend a weekend with him, and about 50 others, a few years ago, and he left an impression.

Hoebel, a psychologist at Princeton who led ground-breaking research on addiction to sugar, died last week at age 67.

This study finds that regular exposure to sugar-laden drinks dulls the drinker's sensitivity to sweetness, requiring more substance to get the same hit.

You wouldn't necessarily know this, but that's one of the seven official standards the American Psychiatric Association uses to diagnose addiction: Increasing tolerance.

I've said before that I don't oppose weight-loss surgery, and understand that it is sometimes the best hope for some obese patients' survival. But my solution wasn't surgical, and my experience tells me that surgery isn't the only remedy available.

Because of its prevalence — in part because it is supported by insurance while the methods that helped me no longer are — I'm often interested in studies on these surgeries.

In my focused world, the release of Ashley Gearhardt's (et. al) study advancing the evidence for food addiction has been a welcome thunderbolt from several directions. Unreservedly.

But nothing is perfect, and I must quarrel with the report's closing words: