Creating Food Junkies

From an interview with the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration ,Dr. David Kessler , and author of "The End of Overeating"

"...we asked the question: If you want to stay alive, what are the things you can do to prevent getting a major disease? Three-quarters of us are going to die of cardiovascular disease or stroke or cancer.So I was very interested in preventing disease. And if you're interested in preventing disease, weight is a critical, critical factor...[ About one-third of American adults are obese or overweight, a rate that's double what it was three decades ago, according to the Centers for Disease Control.]


...The food industry has been able to figure out the bliss point, the optimal combinations of fat and salt, fat and sugar, fat, sugar and salt that you think tastes good, but when you look at the science, we now know that those ingredients stimulate, they activate the brain's circuitry.They stimulate our intake. They condition us. They drive us to want more. They affect the neural circuits. For decades, the food industry has said, "We're just giving consumers what they want." But, in fact, now we know that what they're doing is excessively activating the brains of millions of Americans...

...I used to think I was eating for nutrition, that I was eating to satisfy me, satisfy myself. I didn't realize that I was eating for stimulation and that that stimulation locked in the neural circuits, strengthened those neural circuits, so every time I engaged in that behavior, I would do it again and again. I didn't understand why I had gained and lost weight, you know, over my lifetime many times...

...There is a syndrome that has emerged, not a disease, but several characteristics that we have studied. We've taken people who have these characteristics: loss of control in the face of highly palatable foods, lack of satiation, preoccupation with foods. And we've scanned them. We've done the neuro-imaging.And what's fascinating is that their response to the anticipation of food, to the cues, just to the sight or the smell, their brains get activated. Their amygdala regions become activated and become amplified much greater than healthy controls.And what's fascinating is people who have this condition of hyper-eating, once they start consuming the food, that activation stays elevated and doesn't shut off until the food is gone. It's not a matter of willpower...

...The business plan of the industry has been to take fat, sugar and salt, make it multi-sensory, make it irresistible, put it on every corner, and that that behavior has resulted in millions of Americans having a very hard time controlling their eating...It's only going to change once we understand what's going on. If we continue to allow the food industry to put fat, sugar and salt on every corner, to load it in our food, to be double-frying our food, to be injecting it with needles, to be bathing it in solutions of sugar and fat, to be predigesting that food, adding the emotional gloss, advertising, cueing us, stimulating the brains of millions of Americans, we're never going to be able to get a handle on health care and especially the costs of health care.The food is, in essence, it's constructed..." [ food is even designed to be pre-digested. Factory-farmed meats are ground up, injected with salt, water, a multitude of flavorings and chemicals, reconstituted and often processed with extra fat. It's "adult baby food." ]

Kessler provides additional evidence that certain forms of overeating qualify as legitimate drug addictions. Just as it is with, say, cocaine addicts, the supersaturated reward pathways of the brain do not have effective mechanisms for signaling: “That’s enough. Stop eating.” It may seem obvious in retrospect that the same mechanisms that make it so difficult for many drug addicts to “just say no” would also function in the case of addicted overeaters. What happens is similar to the flooding of reward circuitry that occurs in cases of what we might call “compulsive overdrugging,” otherwise known as addiction. The food industry, according to Kessler, has figured out what works, has packaged fat-and-sugar foods in products that scarcely even have to be chewed, and it has priced these products to move. Kessler examines iconic foods such as Big Macs, all of which have skilled marketing machines promoting consumption. Such nutritionally unbalanced foods propel people who already tend to eat more than mere physical need might otherwise warrant into uncontrolled behavior patterns of irrational eating. These persistent psychological and sensory stimuli lead to what Kessler terms “conditioned hypereating,” which he believes is a disease rather than a failure of willpower.Kessler explains that, normally, humans satiate after eating "enough" food, but the "normal" satiety point is overridden by the reinforcing effects of "multi-sensory" foods - those that stimulate several senses - like taste, sight and smell. We have learned to LOVE the combinations of fat and salt (French fries) or sugar and fat (ice cream) so much so that we eat even when we're not hungry.Of course, the fast-food industry, restaurants, and manufacturers of prepared foods use this knowledge to their advantage.


We can't stop because we're hooked, and the food industry is the pusher. Food companies can trot out willing doctors, dieticians and nutritionists who claim that eating their brand of poison in moderation can be part of a balanced diet but the companies are like drug dealers who prey on junkies. As Morgan Spurlock explained about McDonald's in Supersize Me, the targets are "heavy users," who visit the Golden Arches at least once a week and "super heavy users,” who visit ten times a month or more. In fact, according to one study, super heavy users "make up approximately 75 percent of McDonald's sales." The entire food industry, perhaps best described as "eatertainment" has refined the science of taking the cheap commodities pumped out by agribusiness and processing them into foodstuffs that are downright addictive. But food is far more than mere fuel. It is marketed as a salve for our emotional and psychological ills, as a social activity, a cultural outlet and entertainment.Americans are under the thrall of the food industry. More than half the population eats fast food at least once a week; 92 percent eat fast food every month; and every month about 90 percent of American children between the ages of three and nine visit a McDonald's

One anonymous food-industry executive told Kessler, "Higher sugar, fat and salt make you want to eat more." The executive admitted food is designed to be "highly hedonic," and that the food industry is "the manipulator of the consumers' minds and desires."

Changing our perilous food system means making choices -- not to simply shop for a greener planet or call for improved food labelling , but to collectively dismantle the nexus of factory farming, food corporations and the political and economic system that enables them.