On the same day a dozen or so rather complicated basketball trades were completed in the NBA, I made a single, simple, personal swap. A pint of disdain for a pound of empathy.

As a result, I now feel a bit of fellowship with a presumed health-and-fitness foe: the junk-food junkie.

Here’s how the trade transpired.

I was reading a University of Michigan news release about the results of their National Poll on Healthy Aging. In it, school psychologist Ashley Gearhardt, PhD, MPhil, MS, admits it “may seem strong” to use the word addiction when it comes to food (a comment that could be a concession to the fact that the American Psychiatric Association still doesn’t officially recognize food addiction as an eating disorder).

“But research has shown,” she goes on, “that our brains respond as strongly to highly processed foods, especially those highest in sugar, simple starches, and fat, as they do to tobacco, alcohol and other addictive substances.”

Intrigued, I wanted to know exactly what their research had found, so I downloaded the full report, “Addiction to Highly Processed Foods Among Older Adults,” and began reading. Somewhere in the middle, I read that junk food - called highly processed foods in the report and ultraprocessed foods or UPFs in other papers - “can trigger the release of dopamine in the brain’s reward system at levels comparable to nicotine and alcohol.”

It was so similar to what I had read so many times before - such as the study where mice got more addicted to Oreos than cocaine - that my reaction should’ve been a roll of the eyes, maybe a yawn. Instead, I felt that nerves-on-full-alert tingle, my heart rate increase, my armpits perspire.

Because I remembered what I had written in this column two weeks ago. About how good I often feel on the bike and then for a few hours afterwards as a result of the “feel-good” hormone dopamine.

I joked that the feeling has to be the same sort of high junkies shooting up some pretty good stuff feel.

But this study was no joke. Could junk-food junkies - a group I had characterized as being mostly young and weak-willed hedonists - not only include a good portion of old people but also simply be seeking the same psyched-to-be-alive feeling I was getting after turning the pedals a certain number of times?

Here’s what the U-of-M study adds to the matter: That according to their national survey, 1 in 8 adults over 50 “met the criteria for addiction to highly processed food in the past year.”

The researchers determined this after 75% of the 2,163 adults between the ages of 50 and 80 they randomly contacted completed a modified version of the Yale Food Addiction Scale 2.0. While a rate of 1 in 8 is nothing to sneeze at, close to 4 in 9 (44%) reported at least one addiction symptom, the most common being “intense cravings” and the “inability to cut down intake despite a desire to do so.”

Further breakdown of the results reinforces two simple points about health that for some reason are easy to forget. That all the aspects of it are inexorably linked and that one doesn’t take precedence over another.

Those surveyed who felt their mental health was no better than “fair,” for instance, were at least three times more likely to meet the Yale Scale food addiction criteria compared with those who felt their mental health was “good, very good, or excellent.” This held true for both women (45% and 15%) and men (23% and 6%).

Of the men surveyed who claimed to be a healthy weight, only 1% met the standard for food addiction. Yet 17% who believed themselves to be too heavy did so.

The same difference in the women surveyed was 4-34%.

Moreover, the men who self-reported being in “good, very good, or excellent” health were 2.3 times less likely to meet the Yale Scale criteria for addiction to processed foods than those who believed their health to be less than that. And the difference for the women was nearly the same.

However informative these statistics may be, they fail to explain my new-found feeling of fellowship for junk-food junkies. For that, let’s recall the column of two weeks ago once again.

Happy, alert, focused, motivated: That’s the awesome-foursome feeling reported in it according to the Cleveland Clinic website when your dopamine level is optimal. So it’s understandable why you would eat foods to achieve it - and how you could get hooked on foods that can provide it.

In short, the U-of-M survey allows me to better understand the true allure of junk food.

But what can’t be stressed enough is that there’s a right way and a wrong way to achieve that psyched-to-be-alive feeling. Because the wrong way adversely affects your long-term health.