Ashley Gearhardt, from the Yale & Rudd Center for Policy and Obesity explains the science of Sugar Addiction.

Ashley, is a clinical psychology doctoral student at Yale University. She received a BA in psychology from the University of Michigan.

Through her research on addiction and her clinical work at the Yale Center for Eating and Weight disorders, she became interested in the possibility that certain foods may be capable of triggering an addictive process.

To explore this further, she developed the Yale Food Addiction Scale to operationalize addictive eating behaviors in collaboration with Dr. Kelly Brownell and Dr. William Corbin. The scale is being widely used internationally. Currently, Ms. Gearhardt is examining cognitive and neural processes associated with symptoms of food addiction.