what does eating junk food do to your brain
This Is Your Brain on Junk Food
In "Hooked," Michael Moss explores how no addictive drug can fire up the advantage circuitry in our brains equally rapidly as our favorite foods.
In a legal proceeding two decades ago, Michael Szymanczyk, the chief executive of the tobacco giant Philip Morris, was asked to define habit. "My definition of addiction is a repetitive behavior that some people observe difficult to quit," he responded.
Mr. Szymanczyk was speaking in the context of smoking. Just a fascinating new volume by Michael Moss, an investigative journalist and best-selling author, argues that the tobacco executive's definition of habit could apply to our relationship with another grouping of products that Philip Morris sold and manufactured for decades: highly processed foods.
In his new book, "Hooked," Mr. Moss explores the science behind habit and builds a case that nutrient companies have painstakingly engineered processed foods to hijack the reward circuitry in our brains, causing us to overeat and helping to fuel a global epidemic of obesity and chronic illness. Mr. Moss suggests that candy foods like cheeseburgers, irish potato fries and ice cream are not only addictive, but that they can be fifty-fifty more addictive than alcohol, tobacco and drugs. The book draws on internal industry documents and interviews with industry insiders to argue that some food companies in the by couple of decades became aware of the addictive nature of their products and took drastic steps to avoid accountability, such as shutting downwardly important research into sugary foods and spearheading laws preventing people from suing food companies for damages.
Paradigm
In another cynical motility, Mr. Moss writes, food companies beginning in the late 1970s started ownership a slew of popular nutrition companies, allowing them to profit off our attempts to lose the weight nosotros gained from eating their products. Heinz, the processed food behemothic, bought Weight Watchers in 1978 for $72 1000000. Unilever, which sells Klondike confined and Ben & Jerry'south water ice cream, paid $2.iii billion for SlimFast in 2000. Nestle, which makes chocolate confined and Hot Pockets, purchased Jenny Craig in 2006 for $600 million. And in 2010 the individual equity firm that owns Cinnabon and Carvel ice cream purchased Atkins Nutritionals, the visitor that sells low-carb bars, shakes and snacks. Most of these nutrition brands were subsequently sold to other parent companies.
"The food industry blocked usa in the courts from filing lawsuits challenge addiction; they started controlling the science in problematic ways, and they took control of the nutrition industry," Mr. Moss said in an interview. "I've been crawling through the underbelly of the candy nutrient industry for ten years and I go on to be stunned by the depths of the deviousness of their strategy to not merely tap into our basic instincts, but to exploit our attempts to gain command of our habits."
A former reporter for The New York Times and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Moss start delved into the world of the processed food industry in 2013 with the publication of "Common salt Saccharide Fatty." The book explained how companies formulate junk foods to accomplish a "bliss point" that makes them irresistible and market those products using tactics borrowed from the tobacco manufacture. Still after writing the book, Mr. Moss was non convinced that processed foods could be addictive.
"I had tried to avoid the word addiction when I was writing 'Table salt Carbohydrate Fatty,'" he said. "I idea it was totally ludicrous. How anyone could compare Twinkies to fissure cocaine was beyond me."
Merely as he dug into the science that shows how processed foods affect the brain, he was swayed. 1 crucial chemical element that influences the addictive nature of a substance and whether or not we swallow it compulsively is how rapidly it excites the brain. The faster information technology hits our reward circuitry, the stronger its bear on. That is why smoking crack cocaine is more than powerful than ingesting cocaine through the nose, and smoking cigarettes produces greater feelings of reward than wearing a nicotine patch: Smoking reduces the fourth dimension it takes for drugs to hit the brain.
But no addictive drug can fire up the reward circuitry in our brains as rapidly every bit our favorite foods, Mr. Moss writes. "The fume from cigarettes takes x seconds to stir the brain, but a touch of saccharide on the natural language will do so in a trivial more than a half 2nd, or six hundred milliseconds, to exist precise," he writes. "That'due south nearly 20 times faster than cigarettes."
This puts the term "fast food" in a new lite. "Measured in milliseconds, and the power to addict, zero is faster than processed food in rousing the brain," he added.
Mr. Moss explains that even people in the tobacco industry took note of the powerful lure of processed foods. In the 1980s, Philip Morris caused Kraft and General Foods, making it the largest manufacturer of candy foods in the country, with products like Kool-Aid Jell-O and Cocoa Pebbles, and eventually others such as Chips Ahoy and Oreo cookies. Merely the company'south onetime general counsel and vice president, Steven C. Parrish, confided that he found information technology troubling that it was easier for him to quit the company'due south cigarettes than its chocolate cookies. "I'm dangerous effectually a bag of chips or Doritos or Oreos," he told Mr. Moss. "I'd avoid even opening a bag of Oreos because instead of eating ane or two, I would eat half the handbag."
As litigation against tobacco companies gained basis in the 1990s, one of the manufacture'southward defenses was that cigarettes were no more addictive than Twinkies. It may have been on to something. Philip Morris routinely surveyed the public to gather legal and marketing intelligence, Mr. Moss writes, and one particular survey in 1988 asked people to name things that they thought were addictive and and so rate them on a scale of 1 to x, with 10 being the nearly addictive.
"Smoking was given an eight.5, well-nigh on par with heroin," Mr. Moss writes. "Simply overeating, at 7.3, was not far behind, scoring higher than beer, tranquilizers and sleeping pills. This statistic was used to buttress the visitor'south statement that cigarettes might non be exactly innocent, merely they were a vice on the club of spud chips and, as such, were manageable."
But processed foods are not tobacco, and many people, including some experts, dismiss the notion that they are addictive. Mr. Moss suggests that this reluctance is in part a event of misconceptions near what addiction entails. For i, a substance does not have to hook everyone for it to be addictive. Studies evidence that most people who beverage or apply cocaine do not become dependent. Nor does everyone who smokes or uses painkillers become addicted. It is also the case that the symptoms of addiction can vary from one person to the adjacent and from one drug to another. Painful withdrawals were in one case considered hallmarks of addiction. Simply some drugs that we know to be addictive, such every bit cocaine, would fail to encounter that definition because they do not provoke "the body-wrenching havoc" that withdrawal from barbiturates and other addictive drugs can cause.
The American Psychiatric Association now lists eleven criteria that are used to diagnose what it calls a substance use disorder, which can range from mild to severe, depending on how many symptoms a person exhibits. Among those symptoms are cravings, an inability to cutting back despite wanting to, and standing to use the substance despite information technology causing harm. Mr. Moss said that people who struggle with processed food can try uncomplicated strategies to conquer routine cravings, like going for a walk, calling a friend or snacking on healthy alternatives similar a scattering of basics. Only for some people, more extreme measures may be necessary.
"It depends where you are on the spectrum," he said. "I know people who can't touch a grain of sugar without losing control. They would drive to the supermarket and past the time they got home their motorcar would exist littered with empty wrappers. For them, complete abstention is the solution."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/well/eat/hooked-junk-food.html
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