Death By Supermarket (5 page)

The reason so many people have fallen victim to HFCS is because it’s so much cheaper than refined white sugar, making it possible for food manufacturers to glut the market with products made with HFCS. Because HFCS has permeated our food chain, making it convenient to consume, it has contributed to unnatural hunger like no other food additive on the market.

Overweight bingers are not the only HFCS consumer targets. Optimal sports and integrative medicine factory foods—the latest spin-off in the “natural” factory-foods market—are blatant exploitations of people’s interest in the emerging field of integrative medicine and in products like Balance Bars, Carnation Instant Breakfast Bars, PR Ironman Triathalon Bars, Trader Joe’s Performance Bars, All Sport Body Quencher, and Powerade, all part of an ironic quest for good health and optimal athletic performance.

The food industry implies that we are getting the benefits of herbs when we consume alternative medicine products that contain herbs along with HFCS, such as Snapple Atomic and SoBe Courage drink, which contain ginseng and guarana, and Balance Nutritional Bars Honey Peanut Plus, which contain ginseng. But drinking, say, Snapple Ginseng Tea, which contains HFCS along with small amounts of hibiscus and ginseng, is not the same thing as taking the Chinese medicinal herbs hibiscus and ginseng in appropriate doses to treat a particular illness or to promote optimal wellness.

The fact that Chinese medicinal herbs are mixed with HFCS is an insult to this incredible 4,000-year-old medicine. Chinese medicine is energy based and centered on the concept of wholeness and balance. When you go to a doctor of Chinese medicine, he or she is truly interested in all the reasons your energy is imbalanced. In fact, one of the reasons Chinese medicine is so popular with Americans is that, while studies show that Western M.D.s interrupt within eighteen seconds of asking the patient to explain his or her problem,
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doctors of Chinese medicine will listen raptly to a nonstop, graphic monologue about a person’s poo, pee, snot, farts, and so on. All symptoms are important. After diagnosing a problem, the doctor designs an individualized herbal formula created especially to rebalance that person’s energy system.

This simple explanation of a complex and dynamic medicine should be enough to demonstrate why factory products containing herbs are not the same as using herbal medicine to treat a particular illness or to promote health and wellness, and furthermore only serve to put your energy system out of balance. Incidentally, doctors of Chinese medicine don’t just hand out herbs. A treatment plan always includes changes to one’s diet. For Americans this always includes counseling to stop eating factory food, especially food containing HFCS.

“Emotional eating” and “emotional triggers” are terms bandied about by weight-loss psychologists. Emotional eating refers to bingeing in an attempt to assuage one’s emotions. Emotional triggers are upsetting events or experiences that “trigger” emotional eating.

I believe that saying we’re overeating because of our “emotions” is totally missing the larger picture. Rather, emotional eating is the result of eating factory-food products instead of real, living food. Years of consuming sugar and not eating enough real, living food has resulted in modified brains. Adding to this problem, these modified brains are chemically imbalanced. Brains that are made up of unhealthy building materials and that are deprived of healthy, happy neurotransmitters understandably go haywire, demanding that people gobble everything in sight in an insane attempt to satisfy the brain’s needs for sustenance.

As much as someone might hate themselves for having an addiction to sugar, it’s not the result of a weak will. It’s a normal physiological response to an imbalanced diet that’s heavily weighted with sugar.

In the nineteenth century, dairy cows were fed the distillery slop left over after the refining of whiskey. Prohibitionist Robert Milham Hartley likened distillery cows to alcoholics. At first, he wrote, the cows resist eating the slop, but ultimately, “generally learn to love the nauseous slush as men acquire a relish for intoxicating drinks. Eventually, indeed, they become voraciously fond of this kind of food; and if they fail of their usual supply, they will paw and rave and indicate all the unhappiness of the drunkard who is deprived of his accustomed drams.”
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Like the addicted dairy cows of old, modified, neurotransmitter-depleted brains are permanently on code red, so that people paw and rave and act out extreme anxiety if they don’t have their sugar fix.

Emotional triggers are the result of “conditioned response.” The classic study of conditioning was conducted by Russian physiologist and experimental psychologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, who discovered the conditioned response. Pavlov began by ringing a bell (conditioned stimulus) and presenting his dogs with food. At first, the dogs salivated at the sight and scent of the food (unconditioned response). But after a number of trials the dogs salivated as soon as the bell was rung (conditioned response), even without the presentation of food. It took a very short time for Pavlov to detect the conditioning of his dogs to the bell.

Reinforced conditioning for sugary factory-food products begins in infancy and continues through childhood and adulthood. For many, eating sugar is associated with alleviating (however fleetingly) any type of pain. Because many brains lack feel-good neurotransmitters, these individuals feel pain a lot. They crave, feel insecure, unconfident, tired, cranky, depressed, obsessive, and so on. And because some have conditioned their brains to associate ingesting sugar with a temporary high that makes them feel so much better, that Pavlovian bell is always ringing. Thus we are an unnaturally hungry society that’s “conditioned” to knee-jerk react to any type of pain by ingesting horrendously unhealthy junk.

Binge eating should be addressed first by eating real, living food so that, cell by cell, a new, healthy brain can form. At the same time, real, living food will replenish happy brain neurotransmitters. Purging our culture of sugary factory-food products and making real, living food abundant, affordable, and convenient (including organically produced protein, fats, and cholesterol) would stop the cycle of so-called emotional eating for most people.

In the Introduction I said that by avoiding factory food and eating only real, living food we would stem the number of patients flocking to obesity clinics, ERs, and shrinks’ offices. Taking these steps would also dramatically reduce our prison population. This is a bold statement for some to swallow, as many people don’t believe that food can affect us that much or don’t believe that food can do what antidepressants can do.

One out of every 142 Americans is in prison. One out of every 32 is either in prison or on parole from prison, according to a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
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Known juvenile offenders were involved in about 1,043 murders in the United States in 2006, which is 10 percent of all murders.
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Consider that the majority of Americans aren’t gestated or brought up on real, living food that would provide them with the crucial nutrients their brains and bodies need to develop. Instead, many women consume soft drinks and eat chemicalized, HFCS-laden factory-food products during pregnancy, don’t breastfeed at all or long enough, and then feed their children sugary, synthetic, dead factory products. Consequently, we’re a nation that doesn’t have the healthy brains we were genetically predisposed to have. On top of that, we don’t give our unhealthy brains the nutrients necessary to produce happy neurotransmitters. Some neurotransmitter-imbalanced people self-medicate on sugary, chemicalized factory-food products. Others act out, cutting themselves, smoking cigarettes, abusing drugs, being sexually promiscuous, and otherwise directing their pain toward themselves. Some neurotransmitter-imbalanced people project their pain outward, and their rage lands them in prison, where their
chemical imbalances are further cultivated on a diet of the cheapest, most noxious substances in the American food supply.

What if the entire population of the United States—including drug addicts and prisoners with the potential for rehabilitation—stopped eating all factory-food products and ate only real, living food that provides amino acids, essential fatty acids, cholesterol, and other nutrients necessary to create healthy brains and to make healthy, happy neurotransmitters? It would be a utopian society.

Unfortunately, the government and some of our most trusted health agencies have gotten behind the sugar industry, as you’ll read next.

CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE IS THE
leading cause of death for men and women in the United States. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), nearly one quarter of all Americans have some form of cardiovascular disease, and each year about 912,500 Americans die of heart disease. (The CDC is a government agency whose mission is to prevent and control disease, injury, and disability.)

The American Heart Association publishes guidelines for preventing heart disease and strokes on their website. Recommendations include eating a “heart-healthy,” low fat, low cholesterol diet to reduce current risk and to prevent major risk factors from developing. To assist us in eating such a diet, the AHA sells their “American Heart Association Tested and Approved” heart-check mark to factory-food makers. For a product to qualify to bear the AHA heart-check mark, it has to meet the FDA criteria for a “healthy” food: It must be low fat, low cholesterol, low trans fat, and low sodium, and contain a minuscule amount of the daily value of one of six nutrients: vitamin A, vitamin C, iron, calcium, protein, or dietary fiber.
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When I contacted the AHA, I was informed that the heart-check mark was created “as a first-step in building a heart-healthy lifestyle. The mark continues to be an easy and reliable tool in selecting heart-healthy foods. Most importantly, it comes from the most respected source for health and nutrition.” According to the AHA, 92 percent of shoppers say the heart-check mark influences their decision to purchase a food. Of third-party
programs, the AHA heart-check mark is the most respected by consumers. Sixty-eight percent of consumers believe that the heart-check mark is backed by very strong or somewhat strong research. (The same percentage of Americans are overweight or obese.) If a consumer perceives that the nutrition symbol is backed by research, he/she is more likely to purchase the product. Fees to obtain the heart-check mark are $7,500 per product and $4,500 for annual renewals.
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Factory-food makers get a discount if they enroll more than twenty-five products.
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According to the AHA, the heartcheck mark is a powerful marketing tool that fulfills shoppers’ needs—“with it on your packaging and in your promotions, the heart-check mark can help move your product.”
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The AHA website offers a list of hundreds of factory-food products bearing the trusted AHA heart-check mark, such as Smart Beat Smart Squeeze Nonfat Margarine Spread, General Mills Cheerios, Cocoa Puffs, Cookie Crisp, Corn Chex, Count Chocula, Healthy Choice Low Fat Ice Creams, Chocolate Moose Milk Chocolate Drinks, Malt-O-Meal Frosted Mini Spooners, Honey Graham Squares, Honey Nut Toasty O’s, Kellogg’s Frosted Mini-Wheats Big Bite, Kellogg’s NutriGrain Cereal Bars, and Pop-Secret 94% Fat Free Butter Microwave Premium Popcorn.
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So if you’re among shoppers who say the heart-check mark influences your decision to purchase a product, you trustingly eat up all that refined white flour, chemical flavoring, factory milk, aspartame, MSG, industrially processed soy, hydrogenated fat, colored dye, and, most of all, refined white sugar and high-fructose corn syrup.

Eating sugar results in the secretion of insulin. Chronic high insulin levels are implicated in every single degenerative disease, including type 2 diabetes, cancer, and heart disease.

On January 12, 2005, the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) issued the federal nutritional guidelines, which are issued every five years. (The HHS is a government agency founded to protect the health of Americans.) The guidelines affect what goes into school lunch programs, government dietary education such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture
(USDA) food guide pyramid, factory-food labeling, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which doles out food stamps. (The USDA is a government agency founded to help farmers and ranchers and to keep our animal food products safe.)

The panel that composed the guidelines reviewed scientific evidence, submitted by an advisory committee, that linked sugar to obesity and demonstrated that eating sugar reduces the consumption of nutritious food. The panel chose not to include the specific guideline “Reduce added sugars” watering it down to “Choose carbohydrates wisely for good health.”
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This tepid admonishment fell on deaf ears, and we all know what happened to public health in the ensuing five years.

Given that the main concern of the writers of these guidelines appears to be more about navigating the political waters of factory-food lobbyists (including factory ranchers), the 2010 guidelines were such a yawn that they never even made the press. Basically what they reiterated was that Americans were fat, sick, and depressed and needed to do something about it. They proffered up their old food pyramid—the one with all the carbs as the largest daily food requirement. And since “healthy” carbs are products like heart-check-bearing boxes of Chocolate Cheerios, we will undoubtedly not see any changes in public health as a result of the 2010 guidelines.
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The International Obesity Task Force estimates that one billion people worldwide are overweight or obese, including 22 million overweight or obese children under the age of five. Way back in 2003 the World Health Organization recognized this alarming worldwide epidemic of obesity and the accompanying degenerative diseases of aging as being attributable to “malnutrition of excess.” A group of internationally respected scientists attempted to address this problem by drafting a global strategy on diet, physical activity, and health entitled “The Expert Consultation on Diet, Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases.”
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