You Can Break Free From Highly Processed Food Addiction!

The seeds for food addiction are innocently sown in early childhood. By those who love us most.  Our very own families. All within the first year of life.

With birthday cake bites, ice cream licks and nibbles of cookies, candies and cereals, the hyper-palatability of processed foods trains our brains to want more.

Sweet foods like ice cream, cake, cookies and candy are ubiquitous at family celebrations and outings.  They’re used as rewards for good report cards, chores completed, awards won and achievements accomplished.  Even for “cleaning your plate” at mealtime.

Motivated by love and caring, our parents and friends only want to amplify our happiness with delectable sweet treats. But with each bite firing off an out-sized “feel good” dopamine hit, we’re conditioning our brains to want more and more.

The addiction circuits in your brain are stimulated and reinforced day after day, year after year.

Is it any wonder you crave chocolate?

Addiction is integral to the food manufacturing industry’s profitability model.

The combination of our loved ones offerings us sweets and treats from infancy plus the food industry’s development and marketing juggernaut predisposes us to addiction before we can understand what’s happening to us.

Of course the manufacturers don’t come right out and confess to this travesty.  They claim they are providing only what consumers demand.

But we all understand how strong the undertow of cravings can become.  The siren call of cravings, urges and non-stop desires for certain hyper-palatable foods can overpower even the staunchest resolve to abstain.

And, although broccoli, a chicken leg or an apple taste good when we are hungry, when do we ever feel our brain has been hijacked with knee-buckling cravings for these simple, unadorned whole foods?  Like never?

Fair warning: what follows is my excoriation of the highly processed food manufacturers and their insidious and relentless destruction of our health and well-being.

I AM OUTRAGED!!!

The public appetite for food that tastes good and makes us feel good, regardless of how it negatively impacts our health, is the lever the food industry exploits under the guise of giving consumers what they want.

Here’s what’s really happening behind the scenes in the processed food industry.

Food chemists manipulate the ratios of sugar, salt and fat to maximize the addictive qualities of the food they manufacture.  Why?

To sell more products and keep us coming back for more.  That out-sized dopamine hit tells us that THIS food is THE food to seek out.  Our neurochemistry drives our out-sized desire.

To provide shareholders and investors with the highest return on investment.

According to Robert Lustig, MD, the food industry grosses $1.5 trillion annually with net profits of $660 billion.  That’s a 45% return on investment.

Now you can see their motivation to keep doing exactly what they’ve been doing despite scientific data which demonstrates the dangers to our physical and mental health from highly processed foods.

We still operate according to the biological imperatives of our ancestors.

In the era of the hunter/gatherer, all berries that tasted sweet in nature were safe to eat.  That degree of “sweetness” was very mild compared to the level of sweetness that assaults our taste buds today.

Since your ability to taste sweetness is located right on the tip of your tongue, your brain can quickly recognize “safe” foods beneficial to your survival.

When your brain perceives something as beneficial to survival, due to thousands of years of evolution and ingrained basic instinct, it produces that good old dopamine signal.

Dopamine, as I’ve been mentioning so much in this post, is THE chemical that causes feelings of pleasure and happiness. We rely on this reward system to reinforce desirable behaviors.

As you can imagine, the brain perceives sex as important for procreation. So it produces high levels of dopamine during and after sex to reinforce that it’s a very good behavior. We MUST remember this. It’s this dopamine hit that encourages us to keep remembering and repeating this species procreation behavior.

Dru also cause the brain to flood with dopamine. And, as you might expect, this chemical message tricks us into believing that drugs are necessary and important for our survival.  Now we’re in drug abuse territory.

Take away:  Over time, with high dopamine stimulation, the brain’s ability to produce its own dopamine diminishes. When that happens, it depends on substances to create it. This is how addiction progresses.

How we’re hooked by the processed food industry.

The food industry relies on a highly manipulated combination of  salt, sugar, and fat to “override our dietary self-control” with foods “so perfectly engineered to compel over-consumption.”

These engineered concoctions provide  dopamine wallop which tricks our brains into thinking these products are GOOD for our survival.

The result?  FOOD ADDICTION!

According to Michael Moss in his book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, processed food manufacturers “dominate the American diet” with tens of thousands of edible products stacked on supermarket shelves.

Competition is fierce to outsell competitors, grow market volume, market share, shelf space share, and stomach share.  The expanding girth of so many stomachs proves their success!

Salt, sugar, and fat are “the three pillars of processed food.”

With sugar and fat intake, brain pleasure centers light up bright yellow in functional magnetic resonance imaging studies, just as with cocaine.

Increasing the amount of sugar in a product leads to the “bliss point”, actually the range in which consumers express maximum taste satisfaction.   Once achieved, the manufacturers know they’ve created a product that will sell.

On average, Americans consume 22 teaspoons of added sugar per day, over two-thirds from processed food.  Nearly all processed food has added sugar.

As regards fat, instead of a “bliss point,” there is a search for the ideal “mouthfeel” (dryness, gumminess, and moisture release) to enhance a food’s palatability.

Fat can be added to edible food products without limit.  We find it in pizza, sauces, condiments, chocolate, cake, cookies, frozen dinners, candy, pretzels, chips to name a few..

Three-fourths of salt intake is from processed foods with only 6% of sodium intake from added table salt . Almost all processed food has added salt. Salt too has “addictive qualities.”

Newborn babies love sugar but dislike salt.  However, they adjust to liking it, upon coaxing, on or after the age of 6 months when they are exposed to processed foods.  The food industry has knowingly created a craving for salt.

Reducing salt, sugar, or fat in any product inevitably leads to an increase of one or both of the other two components of this jolly threesome to improve the product’s taste.

How’s this for a no nonsense indictment of processed foods?  According to Moss, many leading executives in the processed food industry avoid eating the products of their own companies.