The food industry is poisoning the population—globally. The USA being the most advanced country is the most poisoned. The giant corporations—Kraft, Nabisco, General Mills, MacDonalds, Coca Cola, Frito-Lay, Nestle's and others—they all do it with neuroscience. They know the brain is in charge, as the neuroscientists constantly tell us, and so they address themselves to instinctive reactions. They certainly don't encourage thoughtful deliberation about whether or not to buy what is nutritious.
The food giants deliberately activate brain-based reactions for salt, sugar, fat, crunch, mouth feel, tastes, colors and other factors. The goal is to get you to eat more and more of their particular food. That will make you buy. If you get high, if you get addicted, then that's wonderful. Or rather, that's the goal. So what if everyone gets obese.
The CEOs think they're clever by taking a food that is healthy and known to be healthy, like natural yoghurt, and then marketing it as Yoplait without consumers knowing that it has been filled with sugar. So people buy it and eat it and eat it and buy it. And General Mills' profits swell. Why would they worry about obesity? or diabetes? or hypertension? or gout?
It's a free country. If the consumer wants it, let them have it. You can imagine the way their mind works: "if we don't feed them over-the-top doses of sugar, salt and who knows what else, then some other company will." So it's a race to the bottom.
In the same way that investors love the defence industry that gets fat on cost-plus contracts that weaken enterprise, so investors also love MacDonalds and Hershey's. The sage of Omaha, Warren Buffet, has been a proud owner of Coca Cola for decades.
Fresh food which we evolved to eat and thrive on over millions of years is anathema to the food industry, because it wants food to last weeks or months in transport and storage. When you think of it, poisoning your customers is quite a unique business proposition. But, because this grotesque behaviour is spreading world-wide, it has a long way to run.
Is there an answer?
Yes—there is. But don't look to politicians and regulators for it. No politician is going to start a "war on food" to parallel the "war on drugs". In any case, legislators are all bought: look how they prevent their own health scientists from communicating to the general public. And they provide the subsidies that make corn especially cheap: and corn is the basis for most snacks, one way or another. Good food, healthy food, fresh food becomes comparatively too expensive—especially after paying for all those drugs for the family's diabetes and hypertension.
Just as governments ensure that the prudent bail out the profligate, so they require those who eat wisely and remain healthy to pay for the disability benefits and health care costs of mindless junk-food addicts.
The only solution is personal.
That means having contempt for your brain and valuing your mind.
It means seeing processed food for what it is: a horror.
Your brain has evolved and adapted for food scarcity—especially salt, sugar and fat scarcity. It has no way of coping with the assaults on it by the food industry techies. No way at all.
Your mind, however, is something beyond your brain. You can use it to determine what is good for you, good for your children, and good for others that you feed. You do not have to give way to impulses, the knee-jerk impulses for a physiological high. You do not have to conform. Animals are controlled by their brain. But you are more than an animal or a brain.
If you value your mind, then you will try to understand how it works, how it creates, how it enables human-centric choices.
Put biology in its place. Get to grips with your truly human elements. Spend time with THEE.
WK
About
Warren Kinston