Has the Food Industry Turned Us Into Junk Food Junkies?

Why Pop Pills When You Can Pop Tarts?

Is food addictive? Is that why so many of us weigh more than we should, and even more than we would like to? And has the food industry been deliberately complicit in this by creating food products that are as addictive as possible?

These aren’t new questions, but they’re being asked much more frequently lately, and by health professionals whose reputations indicate they’re worth listening to. More importantly, the experts are tending more and more to come down on the Yes side of the question. Unfortunately, their arguments are usually laden with the kind of impenetrable biochemical and/or neurological terminology that leaves most of us nonscientists slack-jawed and blinking.

Happily, a more intelligible and persuasive approach to the subject was recently presented in a highly intriguing article by Barbana Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers in the New York Times. The authors considered overweight and overeating from a zoological standpoint, as not just a human but a broader, animal characteristic. It’s definitely worth a read, but it’s not a short article and readers might bail halfway through, so permit me to encapsulate what I thought were the most interesting points it raised.

1. Animals in the wild also overeat, even go on binges, and can become obese.
2. Animals become addicted, as we define addiction, to all manner of natural substances: birds to fermented berries, bighorn sheep to certain lichen, deer to mushrooms, and so forth.
3. What we can conclude from this is that addiction, the uncontrollable desire to ingest something because it triggers feelings of satisfaction, emerged very early in evolutionary history, certainly long before we did.
4. The reason that it emerged, and has remained in the DNA of the animal kingdom ever since, is because it was a fundamental survival aid. I can’t improve on the authors’ own words here, so I’ll just excerpt them:

Foraging, stalking prey, hoarding food… Animals are rewarded with pleasurable, positive sensations for these important life-sustaining undertakings. Pleasure rewards behaviors that help us survive. We humans get drug rewards for life-sustaining activities just as animals do … with rises in the release of certain natural chemicals, including dopamine and opiates. Do something that evolution has favored, and you get a hit. Don’t do it, and you don’t get your fix.

That’s as far as the Times writers go with the subject, but the conclusion to which it leads the reader, and the one that new studies seem to repeatedly suggest, is that one reason we eat more than we should of things we probably shouldn’t is because our bodies release all manner of pleasure-giving neurohormones to reward us for doing so. It may not be the only reason, but it clearly has seniority over all the others.

For hundreds of thousands of years, eating as much as one could of whatever one could whenever one could was absolutely vital for survival. Up until 10,000 years ago, and in some cultures a lot later, binge eating was eating. But our pig-out genes were only valuable in an environment where food was hard to come by, only seasonally or situationally available, or in limited or unpredictable supply. Today, that dicey food-supply environment has been turned completely on its head. Throughout the developed world, food is readily available, often so much so that tons of it go uneaten, offered in many forms and at any hour.

Our genetic makeup didn’t see that coming, with the result being that we have bodies designed to survive famine in a world where feast is increasingly the rule. And there are a couple of other important elements that nature didn’t anticipate when it comes to food. First, that an entire industry would emerge devoted to not just providing us with food, but to providing food that most strongly triggered our reward hormones — the kind with lots and lots of energy-packed, survivalist calories. Second, that it would use mass media to depict and extol those foods in the most enticing and persistent ad campaigns money could devise.

Has the food industry deliberately and knowingly highjacked our genetic reward system and handed us an obesity epidemic in the process? It’s not the hardest case to make. Certainly food’s addictive properties are not news to the people in that industry, whose jobs depend on knowing ways to get us us eat more of their products. And certainly they are hard at work looking to take advantage of those properties; General Foods probably has more chemists on its payroll than Monsanto.

If we’re lucky, the food labs will find healthy, non-addictive substitutes that trigger the same hormonal rewards as the high-energy sugars, simple carbs and fats that our bodies love. But the researchers will probably only get serious about seeking such substitutes if there is enough pressure from the market, meaning that people buy less of the product’s current version, however much it kick starts our joy juices. In short, the most efficient way to get the industry to turn out healthier foods is to stop consuming unhealthy foods.

Given human nature and the power of marketing, it’s hard to be optimistic about the likelihood of that happening, but the only other option, government intervention and regulation, seems about as likely in the current political climate as Obama taking Mississippi.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):

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Has the Food Industry Turned Us Into Junk Food Junkies? is a post from: CalorieLab - Health News & Information Blog

Source: http://calorielab.com/news/2012/08/29/has-the-food-industry-turned-us-into-junk-food-junkies/

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