Addict Nation (33 page)

“Don’t ever give a kid his first chicken nugget because if he doesn’t know he likes it, he is not going to ask you to go there.”

—Dr. Leslie Brown, pediatrician

Fast food makers intentionally overuse three highly addictive substances—fat, salt, and sugar—to ensure that customers will experience a craving for more fast food. Humans are genetically programmed to crave fat, salt, and sugar to get us through times of famine. But now, thanks to fast food, these three substances are being consumed in such excessive quantities that they’re creating times of obesity. They’re insidious because they kill our desire to eat anything healthful. Like those poor, exploited rats, we’re likely to go for bad food or no food at all. After devouring greasy cheeseburgers and milkshakes on a regular basis, it’s hard for a simple salad or an apple to even register with our dopamine receptors.

OA Can You See

They say food addiction is perhaps the hardest addiction to break because, unlike alcohol or drugs, every human being has to eat to live. So, every single day, we are confronted with our demon and must battle it out.

OA (Overeaters Anonymous) can help us eat in a sober way, developing a healthy relationship with food. If your food and/or sugar cravings feel overwhelming—physically or emotionally—the very best option would be for you to start going to OA meetings. They’re easy to find. Just Google “Overeaters Anonymous.” There are some interesting reasons Twelve Step programs like OA work when diets don’t. Some are spiritual. Some are scientific.

“One of the paradoxes that causes people to be put in a trap is dieting. Dieting requires people to make an effort. You have to make yourself eat this way in the morning and you have to make yourself change to foods that are unfamiliar, and you have to take yourself out of the herd if your culture is food centered. These all cause effort. Any time we are making an effort we are causing our stress chemicals to flood the brain. So any time the stress chemicals build up in the eating center they will make a person eat. So a diet is a set up to eat. There isn’t anyway to avoid that set up. This is why recovery in
Overeaters
Anonymous
works with addiction when all the willpower in the world doesn’t work. The very first step in all the 12 step programs is: I am powerless over this chemical. I admit I am powerless over this chemical and my life became unmanageable. By admitting powerlessness, it’s the opposite of effort. It is letting go. And when we let go we put that stress chemical, that ‘effort’ chemical back in its box. Then something can change for us.”

—Anne Katherine, licensed mental health counselor and author of
Anatomy of a Food Addiction: The Brain Chemistry of Overeating

I know exactly what Anne Katherine is talking about in the above quote. For more than twenty years, I tried to use my willpower to quit drinking. It never worked for more than a day or so. But the first day I went into recovery and genuinely surrendered to my powerlessness over alcohol, I felt a psychic shift and a relief from cravings that I often describe as a miracle. I’ve come to find out that there are biological underpinnings to that miracle. Surrender is the opposite of stress and effort. Surrender is the key.

Apply the Concept of Surrender
to Narrow the Food Battlefield

Unlike alcohol, we can’t give up all food. So we have to manage the gray areas. For example, we can surrender to being powerless over the worst food. Try it! Surrender to the truth that you are powerless over fast food! Acknowledge that your willpower simply will not work when trying to navigate the treacherous shoals of a fast food menu filled with seductions like the Angus Third Pounder (from McDonald’s), which has between 720 and 860 calories and about 39 grams of fat.
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We know that willpower simply does not work when applied to the substance to which you’re addicted. So, instead, surrender to the fact that you are powerless over the siren call of fast food and see if you feel a sense of relief and strength.

Just as a recovering alcoholic will not drink even one drop of alcohol, you must avoid even one bite of fast food. That one decision will eliminate a lot of the world’s most intensely addictive foods. You can do this one day at a time, which is how recovery works. Say, “Just for today I will not visit a fast food restaurant.” Say, “Just for today I will stop going through the drive-through lane of fast food joints.” No excuses. Gradually, it will get easier. Then it will become second nature. One day, you won’t even think about it. You will have found a new joy by discovering freedom from the cycle of bingeing and remorse.

If it helps, here’s a fact likely to make even the most diehard fast food addict a little queasy. Today, the average hamburger has pieces of flesh from at least dozens to even hundreds of different cows. When you bite into that cheap burger, you’re eating a lot of different creatures whose carcasses have been blended together.
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Yuck!

Sugar, Sugar

In sobriety we talk about avoiding “people, places, and things” that can trigger our addiction. We just covered “places.” Now it’s time for “things.” And when it comes to food, a big “thing” is sugar.

A while back, I admitted that, along with being a recovering alcoholic, I am also a sugar addict. I finally surrendered to the fact that I am powerless over sugar. A lot of recovering alcoholics are sugar addicts because there is so much sugar in alcohol, and when you remove the cocktail or wine, the craving for the sugar remains. Fifteen years after I had my last drink, my cravings for sugar had gotten out of hand, becoming harder and harder to control, and causing me to gain weight. I was learning, yet again, that all addiction is progressive.

“It feeds on itself. You get depressed. I was so depressed. It’s a big spiral. When I got to be that big and that far gone—I was up over 450 pounds at one point—I felt like I was literally in a hole I couldn’t get out of.”

—Danny Cahill, winner of
The Biggest Loser

I had already tried half measures, like switching to “natural” sugars such as maple syrup, agave nectar, and evaporated cane juice. But in recovery they say half measures avail us nothing. I had simply switched from cakes loaded with processed sugar to equally fattening cakes loaded with natural sugar. I finally had to let go of sugar . . . period . . . in all its forms . . . one day at a time. Now, when I’m having a sugar craving, I pray . . . and wait it out. I also eat naturally sweet fruits, like nectarines, cherries, bananas, and mangos. I make delicious desserts just with fruits. My other safety valve is stevia, which is a naturally sweet alternative to artificial sweeteners and also has virtually no calories. It even comes in packets like sugar. Of course, because it’s so healthy and natural, this fantastic product is usually not available in regular supermarkets. You can get it at a health food store, a food co-op, or Whole Foods.

“Nobody ever went to the 7-11 at 9 o’clock at night to buy strawberries. Nobody ever went out to the grocery store at 11 o’clock at night because we just had to get cauliflower or green beans or tofu. What we tend to want is sugar or things that turn to sugar like starchy foods.”

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

Another Way to Narrow the Food
Battlefield Is to Go Vegan

Vegans do not eat any meat or dairy products. The philosophy is simple and based on respect for the fellow creatures who share our world. Vegans believe animals are not ours to eat (or wear . . . or torture). People may give up meat and dairy for ethical, health, or spiritual reasons. I went vegan for all three.

The China Study
is a powerhouse book about one of many studies that show a vegetarian diet is healthier and naturally lower in calories, fat, and cholesterol. The in-depth survey of lifestyle and disease in rural China and Taiwan found “People who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease . . . People who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease. These results could not be ignored,” according to author Dr. T. Colin Campbell.
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I’ve been vegan for about fourteen years, and God only knows how fat or sick I’d be today if I hadn’t made that leap. Going vegan was one of the very best decisions I’ve ever made in life, right up there with getting sober. In fact, you could call veganism food sobriety. Why? Sobriety is all about living a life of honesty, integrity, humility, and kindness. It’s the antithesis of addictive behavior, which is self-centered, shortsighted, and often mean-spirited.

All addiction wreaks havoc on those who come into the addict’s orbit. Because food is so pervasive in our society, it is perhaps the most destructive addiction of all. I went vegan after a moment of clarity when I realized that eating animal products was not just a personal lifestyle choice. It was also a moral choice. I decided that killing and hurting goes against my moral beliefs, not just when it comes to human beings but when it comes to all beings that feel pain and suffering, including cows, pigs, lambs, goats, turkeys, and chickens.

We have a population that has now surpassed the 300 million mark. Think about all those chicken nuggets that people cram into their mouths, pretending they grow on trees. There’s a great poster of a beautiful, little yellow chick, and the caption says: “I am not a nugget.” Take a guess at how many animals are slaughtered in America for food every year.

Come on, just take a guess (I will tell you the correct answer in a moment).

These animals don’t just suffer when they die. Their lives are hellish from the moment of their birth to their last breath. Pigs, which have a higher IQ than dogs, are kept in crates—called gestation crates—just slightly larger than the size of their bodies, never able to turn around or even scratch themselves. It’s easier to fatten them up and control them that way. These highly intelligent creatures become psychotic because of the intense confinement. It is simply torture. In fact, according to the brilliant book
Eating Animals
by Jonathan Safran Foer, which I highly recommend, “Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or cat.”
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He’s absolutely right. If you treated your dog or cat the way cows, pigs, goats, lambs, turkeys, or chickens are routinely treated, you would be arrested.

Americans kill 10 billion animals for food every year. 10 billion! That’s a lot of killing . . . a lot of bloodshed, a lot of suffering.

There are very few laws to protect farm animals, even though they have eyes, ears, hearts . . . even though they feel loneliness, pain, and terror. Most Americans love their dogs and cats as members of the family and empathize when they feel pain. Otherwise Americans wouldn’t be spending nearly $10 billion a year on veterinarian bills.
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That’s money spent on compassion. But Americans also spend $142 billion per year on cruelty.
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That’s how much beef, chicken, pork, turkey, and lamb we buy. That money is underwriting factory farming. “Don’t tell me about farm animals. I don’t want to know!” is something I often hear.

Factory farming has been described as an abduction, rape, and murder operation. Baby farm animals are ripped away from their mothers after birth—calves are literally pulled out of the womb and taken immediately away from their distraught mothers. If the “wet” calves are male, they will likely be tethered on a short chain in seclusion until they are slaughtered for veal. The fact that they can’t move makes the veal meat more tender. For these male calves, the first steps they will ever take are on the way to their executioner. Female calves enter the madness of dairy farming, where they are artificially impregnated to begin the nightmarish process all over again. The rest are sent to a slaughterhouse to be killed. Abduction, rape, and murder.

We often watch gruesome crime stories on TV, where drug addicts and psychotics do incomprehensible things to other men, women, and children. We gasp in horror and wonder,
How did these
people become so evil?
But looking at the violence committed in the name of food, when we eat that food, we need to ask ourselves the same question,
How did we become so deadened to the suffering of other
sentient beings?

“Our anger, our frustration, our despair, have much to do with our body and the food we eat. The way we eat has much to do with civilization because the choices we make can bring about peace and relieve suffering. When we eat the flesh of an animal with mad cow disease, anger is there in the meat. We are eating anger and therefore we express anger.”

—Thich Nhat Hanh, author of
Anger

In May 2009, talk-show titan Oprah, who is usually a very evolved and sensitive person, offered viewers a coupon for free chicken at a major fast food chain. She announced that the offer for a free, grilled-chicken, two-piece meal would be available for twenty-four hours. By that afternoon, it was the fifth most searched item on Google Trends. Restaurants were mobbed. More than 10 million coupons were downloaded. The chain was thrilled, telling ABCNews.com the reason the company sought out Winfrey to promote the product was “pretty self-explanatory. She’s got a huge audience who trust her.”
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Getting the picture? It is heartbreaking to think of the millions of chickens that were slaughtered for that one promotion and alarming to see our nation’s meat addiction in full bloom.

Meet the Meat Junkies

Naloxone is a drug used to counter the effects of opioid overdose, for example, heroin or morphine overdose. In the terrific book
Breaking
the Food Seduction,
Dr. Neal Barnard writes, “When researchers use the drug naloxone to block opiate receptors in volunteers, meat loses some of its appeal. Researchers in Edinburgh, Scotland, found that blocking meat’s opiate effect cut the appetite for ham by 10 percent, knocked out the desire for salami by about 25 percent, and cut tuna consumption by nearly half. They found much the same thing for cheese . . . What appears to be happening is that, as meat touches your tongue, opiates are released in the brain, rewarding you—rightly or wrongly—for your calorie-dense food choice and propelling you toward making it a habit.”
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In other words, you can get hooked on meat! Meat and dairy are the staples of fast food—and just as with cigarettes, the business model built on addiction is highly profitable. In the movie
Super Size Me,
the director points out that at least one major fast food company calls its good customers “heavy users.”