Junk Food Junkies
We all say that we’re going to clean up our act, start exercising, eat better and cut out the junk food. How hard can it be, really, to give up chips and pop?
Well, as it turns out, it’s about as easy as kicking heroin. Junk food is every bit as addictive as hard drugs and food companies have been playing us for addicts all along.
Major food corporations invest billions of dollars in research and development to design the perfect combination of ingredients and chemicals in their products that will keep us hooked and coming back for more.
Let us examine the potato chip. When you first pop a chip into your mouth the coating of salt and fat light up your brain’s pleasure centers like a fireworks display. And then the starch in the potato causes the same glucose spike as sugar, but it is absorbed into your bloodstream much more quickly.
Then that spike immediately dips making you crave another one. You can just keep on eating them, and because there’s no real substance to them, your stomach never gets full.
“Bet you can’t eat just one” is one of the truest corporate mantras ever spoken!
The pillar ingredients of junk food are salt, sugar and fat. Food company laboratories are constantly striving to find combinations of these pillar ingredients to find the “Bliss Point.”
It turns out that there is an optimum amount of salt, sugar and fat that the human brain likes, and this is called the bliss point.
Mouthfeel is the way the food feels inside a person’s mouth. Junk food industry scientists adjust factors like crunchiness to produce a mouthfeel that consumers crave.
Then we have “Flavourburst”. Technologists adjust the size and shape of salt crystals so that they can assault your taste buds into submission.
And finally, the gold standard of all junk food science is ‘Vanishing Caloric Density.” This is the process by which the food melts in your mouth so quickly that the brain is tricked into thinking that it is consuming fewer calories than it actually is.
The Cheeto is a perfect example of vanishing caloric density at work. Pop one of those strangely coloured things in your mouth and it dissolves so fast your brain doesn’t even register it…better eat a whole bag!
And it’s not just recognized junk foods that are addictive….most “healthy foods” are packed with hidden crap. Food companies have been dumping sugar into nearly everything we eat, from yogurt to wheat bread.
Eighty percent of prepared food sold in North America has processed sugar in it, and processed sugar has 56 different names.
High fructose corn syrup is the most common form of processed sweetener, and it is in nearly all soda pop and prepared juice products.
Neuroscientists discovered that exposing rats to HFCS brought about behavioural changes similar to those produced by addictive drugs like cocaine!
Fox News interviewed a scientist who discussed a study he had conducted wherein rats were fed on a diet of junk food. After the rats had gorged themselves into obesity, the junk food was taken away and replaced with healthy food.
Rather than eat the healthy food, the rats chose to starve themselves for two weeks!
The rats would even intentionally subject themselves to electric shocks to get to the junk food, even though they could eat the healthy food without getting a jolt of electricity.
I don’t know about you, but that sounds like addiction to me.
Just like the tobacco companies have deliberately added addictive chemicals to cigarettes to keep smokers hooked, the entire business model of junk food companies is to get you chemically dependent on their products. Can you Just Say No to junk food?
Stephanie Kelley
