Addiction to Food
Admit it, we all love salty french fries and chocolate milk shakes; it's simply in our nature to crave highly palatable foods. For some of us, our weakness is stopping ourselves from eating, and the abundant amounts of food around us makes it difficult to stop our bad eating habits. With all of the addicting food that the industries are making and selling, how can we resist? The industrial food system is addicting its customers by preying on our evolutionary desire for salty, sugary, and fatty foods. However, the thoughtful and health conscious consumer would be well served to develop a solid basis of discipline and knowledge when it comes to food consumption choices.
Since the beginning of human history, our bodies have been drawn toward this type of food. When we were hunter-gatherers finding fatty and sugary foods was a caloric windfall. Fat, sugar, and salt satisfies hunger cravings, which is why we used to seek these things as hunter-gatherers. "The food industry has made a fortune because we retain Stone Age bodies that crave sugar but live in a Space Age world in which sugar is cheap and plentiful," says Daniel E. Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard - (New York Times). With these cravings and food everywhere around us, it is no wonder that America has an obesity epidemic. We have grown up with the comfort of food and hold an attachment to it. "Sip by sip and nibble by nibble, more of us gain weight because we can’t control normal, deeply rooted urges for a valuable, tasty and once limited resource." Daniel E. Lieberman states.
Salt. Sugar. Fat. These three simple foods seem harmless; it is part of our everyday diet. Look at the ingredients on nearly anything and you will almost always find at least one of these three ingredients within your food. The industrial food system has distorted our dietary choices by emphasizing salt, sugar, and fat in their products. But, we can't solely blame the Industrial Food System; they are simply satisfying America's needs. After all, we are the ones buying their products and demanding for more. Fast food places are located everywhere to please us at any time of the day for a low price. They make it irresistible to buy large amounts of food instead of a smaller portions, because you get so much more food for a little more money. This is our problem, we don't know when to stop, and the companies take advantage of our lack of self-discipline. With constant advertisements being thrown at us, we can't resist the urge to eat. When we do eat fatty, sugary, and salty foods we feel good. This is the fast food restaurants goal, they want you to keep coming back for more to get that good feeling again; this is when over-eating and addiction starts. America's portion size has tripled over the past 20 years. We are so used to eating large amounts of food that it takes more and more to fill us up as we progress as humans. Fast food chains make it seem like we are eating food that was made up of few ingredients, but the truth is in the food. William Harris states in his article - (Top Ten Most Common Ingredients in Fast Food). "Burger and chicken joints don't think of the building blocks of a menu item as ingredients. They think of them as components, which are made of ingredients. For example, McDonald's famous Big Mac jingle -- 'two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun' -- suggests the sandwich has seven components. Would you believe it has 67 ingredients?" We may think that we are eating a simple meal with few ingredients, but think again. This food has been modified to taste perfect, and exactly the same every time.
Food begins to become a problem when people get addicted to it, in other words they begin to binge eat. As our country grows and time goes on, people are starting to become attached to food. With the abundant amounts of food we have, people don't take control, some don't even realize that there is a problem because of how unconscious we are to over-eating. Studies show that fast food is more addictive than heroin. A group of researchers did an experiment with rats and fast food and found that the brain of a rat was pleasured and over-stimulated much like the high of a heroin addict. These obese rats became addicted to the fast food, constantly ate, and never knew when they were actually hungry. When the fast food was replaced with vegetables, the rats starved themselves for two weeks. The results of the rat test connected to the movie "Super Size Me" when he would feel tired and lousy when he wasn't eating McDonald's but as soon as he took a bite of a Big Mac his mood changed and it's almost as if he got a "high" from eating. "After a bad day when we were little, our mom would hand us a candy bar not a cigarette." Dr. Ramani Durvasula says in a food addiction interview. So as we keep having bad days we make that connection again with food and how it made us feel happier and put a smile on our face, we get used to leaning on food for those bad days; and when we do eat unhealthy food all of the sugar, salt, and fat make it almost impossible to have just one, over the course of a bag of chips our mood can go from lousy to blissful.
When making decisions about eating food, it is fine to have an occasional unhealthy snack or treat every once in a while. It is in our nature to enjoy an ice cream cone or a bowl of chips. But when food starts to control you, or when the industrial food complex succeeds in turning your diet into an unnatural, health-threatening problem or addiction, you will suffer consequences that far outweigh the temporary pleasure of tasty, indulgent foods. Our minds have the power to overcome the temptations and enticements of our extreme, modern day food choices, many of which are designed to enrich corporations rather than serve health goals. It rests upon us to make wise choices. Although it can be hard, be the boss of your food. Know how much you are eating and what you are eating because our bodies can't help loving food that may not be in our best nutritional interests.