Addict Nation (32 page)

Osteoarthritis (degeneration of cartilage and underlying bone within a joint)

Gynecological problems (abnormal menses, infertility)

Let’s face it, being fat affects every single aspect of a person’s life. So obesity’s true impact is like a Rubik’s Cube, very hard to figure out.

In our country, powerful commercial interests are always working to influence the debate. Their methods are often ingenious, to wit: “Where’s the Beef?” and “Got Milk?” The food and agriculture lobbies are among the most powerful in Washington. Officials who point the finger at food-related industries—especially meat and dairy production— can become the subject of a campaign to discredit them. Politicians who vote against the food-agriculture behemoth can find themselves targeted as “un-American” or “radical” come re-election time.

“Thirty-one million kids eat school lunches. Much of what is served in schools is a commodity—by that I mean the government says: ‘Ahh, the dairy prices are falling. Let’s buy up cheese to help the farmer and let’s give the cheese to kids to eat.’ Cheeseburgers, cheese pizzas. Not because anyone thinks they need more cholesterol, but because the law right now says that if meat prices fall, the government buys up meat. If cheese prices fall, the government buys up cheese. They serve it in prisons, they serve it in hospitals, they serve it in schools. And that’s the law. Even while we have people running the school program saying: ‘This is too many calories. It’s too much fat.’ They are absolutely in a bind.”

—Dr. Neal Barnard, founder and president of
Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

Obesogenic

Suffice it to say that the CDC is correct in saying America has become obesogenic, meaning the environment in the United States promotes the overeating of bad foods. Obesogenic! What a great way to buttonhole the issue of cultural food addiction. But here’s the real shocker! The blame for our nation’s toxic food environment can be laid directly at the door of the government. In a nightmarishly ironic twist, the very government that is waging a campaign against obesity is responsible for and encourages it!

Uncle Sam Makes Us Fat, Then Tells Us to Diet

Time
magazine did a brilliant cover story called “Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food” explaining, “Americans spend less than 10% of their incomes on food, down from 18% in 1966.
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Those savings begin with the remarkable success of one crop: corn. Corn is king on the American farm, with production passing 12 billion bushels annually, up from 4 billion bushels as recently as 1970. When we eat a cheeseburger, a Chicken McNugget, or drink soda, we’re eating the corn that grows on vast, monocrop fields in Midwestern states like Iowa. . . . Over the past decade, the Federal Government has poured more than $50 billion into the corn industry, keeping prices for the crop . . . artificially low. That’s why McDonald’s can sell you a Big Mac, fries and a Coke for around $5.”
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Without government subsidies, estimates are the average hamburger would cost more than twice that amount.
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“I felt that I was addicted to food. Of course I was. How else do you get to 450 pounds? I would eat all the time. I would go through the fast food drive-though on the way home from work before I would eat dinner. I felt like I couldn’t stop. I say it is a drug. It’s the cheapest drug out there. That’s what makes it so potent. You can pull off at any time and for one dollar you can get a double cheeseburger.”

—Danny Cahill, Winner of
The Biggest Loser

The American taxpayers are subsidizing the production of corn that agribusiness feeds to factory farm animals. “Factory farmed” refers to an industrial system that traps animals in a high-speed assembly line from birth to slaughter. In the United States, small family farms are being pushed out of business, giving way to massive animal factories where billions of animals endure tortured existences in extremely tight quarters, never seeing the light of day. Despite escalating moral, health, and environmental concerns, America’s top priority always seems to be keeping food prices low, even though cheap food is precisely what is seducing us into overeating. The government’s corn subsidies allow fast food corporations to churn out cheap burgers and fries, thereby encouraging their overconsumption. Without the government’s collusion, those burgers would be way too expensive for the average consumer to binge on.

“Meat production is subsidized by the government and so is dairy, so it is cheaper for them to make a hamburger than a veggie burger.”

—Neal Barnard, M.D., clinical researcher
and author of
Breaking the Food Seduction

Our Enabler-in-Chief Is the U.S. Government!

Why on earth is the U.S. government fueling our obesity crisis at the very same time it spends our tax dollars to warn us about the dangers of obesity? That’s crazy! Like a fox. Our politicians keep handing over these insidious, self-defeating farm subsidies because lawmakers, more than anything else, want to get re-elected. If they play along with the big industrial farmers, they get big donations. Conversely, any politician who tries to rewrite the farm bill to wipe out those subsidies knows that agribusiness will declare war on him and try to force him out of office. It’s the vicious cycle of addiction, Washington style. Our government is a moral mess, with corporations basically controlling the very agencies that are supposed to regulate them. All addiction leads to cynicism and moral corruption.

I can hardly remember the last time I stepped foot in a fast food restaurant. When I did, I think it was only to use the ladies room, not to order anything. At my old job with
Celebrity Justice,
co-workers used to joke that I would rather find out my partner had gone into a topless bar than a fast food restaurant. It’s true! Sadly, I don’t have a lot of company on this. Every day, one-fourth of all Americans eat fast food!
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Like lemmings, Americans keep going to the killer trough, their blinders tightly fastened. Here’s some of what these fast food addicts conspicuously ignored:

In 2004, the groundbreaking documentary
Super Size Me
put the problem in our face using an extraordinarily clever technique. We watched Morgan Spurlock get thicker and thicker and sicker and sicker as he subjected his body to a fast food–only diet. After only a month, he had gained almost twenty-five pounds and began to suffer liver dysfunction and depression. It took Morgan well over a year to get back to his normal weight.
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This was followed by the highly acclaimed dramatic film
Fast
Food Nation
in 2006. Based on the best-selling nonfiction book of the same name, the film’s tagline was “Do you want lies with that?” This film outlines how fast food production is not only gross, but involves the torture of factory farm animals while simultaneously dehumanizing those low-paid workers who have to slaughter them.
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Then in 2009 came the riveting documentary
Food, Inc.,
which— again—exposed the horrific cruelties of America’s factory farms, where tightly packed cattle are forced to live in their own manure and where chickens are crammed into cages so small they can never stretch their wings. The film brilliantly outlines the health and environmental risks of factory farming, which is the pipeline to fast food. It proves to the viewer that industrial farming is unsustainable, meaning if we keep doing it much longer we’re in for some heavy-duty blowback. Can you say salmonella?

In sum, you’d have had to be living under a supersized rock not to have heard all the loud warnings about fast food! Why then are Americans still spending well over $110 billion on fast food every year?
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We spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music combined. Our increasingly overweight children often recognize fast food logos before they recognize their own name.

It’s because we’re addicts. Addicts do not respond to reason or rational argument. Do you think a heroin addict is going to quit shooting up just because you show the junkie a documentary about the dangers of heroin? Aw, but you can’t compare food to heroin . . .

YES, YOU CAN!

“The taste of sugar on the tongue releases opiates within the brain. You can demonstrate this on day one of life. If you have a newborn baby and need to take a drop of blood, the baby cries. Nurses learned a long time ago, if you take a little sugar water and you dribble it into a baby’s mouth just before you do a heel stick the babies often don’t cry—or they don’t cry so much. Research shows there is sort of a pain killing effect with sugar.”

—Dr. Neal Barnard, clinical researcher

I was disheartened to read that a group of scientists decided it would be a good idea to study rats to confirm the “addictive” properties of junk food. The research found that rats fed a high-fat, high-calorie diet—equivalent to fast food—developed compulsive eating habits, similar to a drug addiction. The study divided the rats into three groups. One group ate normal food, and the second was fed fatty foods for an hour a day. The third was fed fatty foods for up to twenty-three hours per day. Researchers reported that the third group began to eat compulsively, requiring more and more fatty food to get the same “high.” They continued gorging even when threatened by electric shocks.
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Fast food overstimulates the “pleasure centers” in our head. Foods heavy in sugar and fat create “feel-good chemicals” that hit receptors. Those receptors react by demanding more, more, more. Also, just as word quickly spreads when a good party’s going on, the number of these ravenous receptors grows. When countless hungry mouths inside your brain begin crying out for pleasure, that’s called developing an addiction. So the body will now demand more and more sugary, fatty foods. It’s a classic vicious cycle.

“We can make ourselves addicted to food . . . just by eating a lot of sugar. So if you are flooding your body with sugar, your receptors will change. Receptors, when they get empty, want more. It’s like little mouths that want to be fed—like little kittens. And as you feed these little kittens, more kittens from the neighborhood come over . . . and more cats come to your house, and all of a sudden you’ve got more and more cats.”

—Anne Katherine, author of
Lick It! Fix Her Appetite Switch

It’s never quite enough. The researcher described the junk food rats this way: “They always went for the worst types of food, and as a result, they took in twice the calories as the control rats. When we removed the junk food and tried to put them on a nutritious diet— what we called the ‘salad bar option’—they simply refused to eat. The change in their diet preference was so great that they basically starved themselves for two weeks after they were cut off from junk food . . . These same rats were also those that kept on eating (the junk food) even when they anticipated being shocked.”
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In other words, regardless of the pain and suffering it caused, the junk food was so like heroin that the regular healthy food ceased to offer any kind of pleasure rush by comparison. It might as well have been cardboard. Their mouths and their brains had become completely disinterested in anything but the fatty foods.

They really didn’t need to torture a bunch of rats to figure that out. This is a perfect example of unnecessary animal experimentation. All you need to do is look at our kids! Millions of parents find it almost impossible to get their kids to eat any healthful foods, like green vegetables. I was at a friend’s house for dinner once and saw a child actually start weeping when someone suggested he eat the vegetables on his plate. American kids are being turned into junk food junkies. And, once hooked, they’re likely to remain that way the rest of their lives.