Week 10
How can food be addictive?
Many people believe we are living in an epidemic of addiction. Everyone seems to have a vice, whether it’s food, shopping, drugs, alcohol, gaming, or even social media. The food addiction epidemic is likely due to processing. The more processed something is, the more addictive it is too, and we see this with various foods.
Let’s look at the innocent coca leaf. There was a time in our history when perhaps someone chewed on a coca leaf and got a little spurt of energy to make it up the mountain or escape an attacking animal. Then we took that innocent coca leaf and processed it into cocaine, and then crack cocaine. The same could be said for the grape. The grape was your average innocent fruit, but what did humans do? Humans processed it and made it into wine. How many lives have been devastated by alcoholism?
I was at lunch with a colleague, and while he didn’t have any food issues, he was very curious about food addiction because he’d gained about thirty pounds after becoming a dad and settling into domestic life. He asked, “Why do people give up bread? People have been eating bread for over ten thousand years. That’s got to be fine,” he said, and at that moment, our server set down a basket full of fluffy focaccia bread.
I never tell people what they should or shouldn’t eat. It’s not for me to say, but here’s what I told him: “Bread is not the same as it was even a hundred years ago. My mother was born in the 1930’s in Southern Italy, and one of her daily chores included baking bread for the family with real whole wheat, which was, in its entirety, unprocessed.” My mother talked about having to eat that bread warm out of the oven because if we waited until the next day, it would be as hard as rock and difficult to eat. In fact, she soaked the bread in water the next day to make it edible. So I said to him, “If you could eat bread the way they did a hundred years ago, I’d say, ‘Go ahead.’ It would never be addictive. But that white fluffy focaccia bread? You know it’s going to be addictive. It will hit the bliss point.”
The “bliss point” is the term the food industry coined when they learned to combine the perfect quantities of sugar, salt, and fat. They know that with this perfect combination, they send your reward center over the moon. Any time your brain lights up in an unnatural way, addiction is possible.
High-fructose corn syrup was introduced to the market in the 1970’s. With it, sugar became even more addictive and cost mere pennies to produce. High-fructose corn syrup is almost always a marker of poor quality, nutrient-free, disease-causing, industrial, food-like substances. With that said, I invite you to use this mantra whenever you’re at a coffee shop or food court and trigger foods call your name:
My trigger foods are factory-made, poor quality, nutrient-free, disease-causing, industrial-made, food-like substances that have robbed me of joy and health.