We're All Addicted to Cooked Food

As life's pleasures go, food is second only to sex.
Except for salami and eggs - that's better than sex, but only if the salami is thickly sliced.

- Alan King
 

More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.

- John Kenneth Galbraith
 

Never order food in excess of your body weight.

- Erma Bombeck
 

From my journal Monday 9 May 94 (we were in Suva):

Three copies of my favourite newspaper (the AVA) arrived in the mail.  I quote Mark Scaramella:

Think locally.  Case in point:  Wood Burning.  The Feds say that "one typical season of heating one home with wood produces the same amount of mutagenic particles of air pollution as 130,000 miles on a gasoline powered car."  In addition, researchers in Louisiana have found that "free radicals from wood smoke remain chemically active in the body 40 times longer than tobacco smoke."  And, "heating with wood stoves is 400 times more polluting than heating with gas."  Bay Area Air Quality Management District studies show that the largest contributor to particulate air pollution is wood smoke, which accounts for 40% to 67% of winter air pollution compared to autos at about 20%.  Mary Rosenberg, Executive Director of an organization calling itself "Burning Issues" (66 Sylvan Way, Los Altos, California 94022) says, "We are breathing Lung Disease and no one knows it," adding, "We recognise the hazards of tobacco smoke - but the dangers of wood smoke are proven to be far more toxic and we ignore them."  A million tons of wood is burned per year in the Bay Area alone.  Rosenberg also says that EPA-approved "high-efficiency" stoves while a little better than conventional ones, are still very bad and do not solve the problem.  Her position is that only conversion to non-wood burning heat will make the air safe.

Fortunately, wood smoke isn't as addictive as tobacco smoke (although watching a log burn in a fireplace is mesmerising), but there's something I think may be more addictive and which may have caused even more greenhouse warming in the long term than the use of fireplaces and woodstoves to provide household heat: the practice of cooking food.  I understand that beans and grains need to be cooked because otherwise our gut, not evolved to digest them raw, wouldn't absorb all their nutrients.  Enhancing the natural flavour of food is usually accomplished by adding salt, something sour like vinegar, something sweet such as sugar, something pernicious like MSG, or by increasing the aroma and/or modifying the texture through cooking.  I think this turns that food into a drug.

Refining (or distilling) food - producing sugar, white flour, or whiskey, for example - turns it into a less healthy, more addictive, less nutritious drug.  Smells of cooked food entice eating in people not normally hungry.  So, for many, does even the sight of products containing refined sugar (candy, sodas), refined flour (French bread, croissants, pastas), or both (pastries).  Overeating is wasteful and unhealthy on this overpopulated Earth.  Worldwide, trees are slaughtered to provide either direct fuel (fire pits, cookstoves) or indirect fuel (charcoal, wood chips) for cooking food.  This cooking is often done primarily to boost flavour and whet appetite (example: the suburban backyard barbecue).

Cooking the food we serve allows a crowd of people with disparate tastes and nutritional needs to be mostly satisfied eating the same meal as everyone around them.  (Otherwise, family meals could be tense, each person in a land of plenty hungry only for something "different" or for the foods likely to contain those few nutrients that each individual finds is temporarily in short supply; otherwise, each person craves refined/distilled culinary drugs of choice like chocolate cake or Irish coffee.)

I think smells of cooked food should be heavily regulated in public.  Kitchens, public and private, should to be vented and smoke scrubbed of identifiable scent.  Obese people could sue restaurants who beckon them unfairly with escaping smells.

If heroin, cocaine, and marijuana were tasty, would society view them differently?  What if they were nutritious?

The following is taken from Terence McKenna's book, Food of the Gods:

The early importation of African slave labour into the New World was for one purpose only, to support an agricultural economy based on sugar.  The craze for sugar was so overwhelming that 1,000 years of Christian ethical conditioning had little impact.  An outbreak of human cruelty and bestiality of incredible proportions was blandly accepted by the institutes of polite society.

Sugar is entirely unnecessary to the human diet - it contributes nothing that cannot be gotten from some other, easily available source.  It is a "kick," nothing more.  Yet for this kick the dominator culture of Europe was willing to betray the ideals of the Enlightenment by its collusion with slave traders.  In 1800 virtually every ton of sugar imported into England had been produced with slave labour.

Sugar is culturally defined by us as a food.  This definition denies that sugar can act as a highly addictive drug, yet the evidence is around us.  Many children and compulsive eaters live in a motivational environment primarily ruled by mood swings resulting from cravings for sugar.  (However some people appear to crave fat at least as much as sugar, if not more.)

Sugar deepened its claim on consumers throughout the 16th century.  The 17th-century introduction of tea, coffee, and chocolate only drove the craze for sugar to new heights.

Irish coffee - containing as it does caffeine, alcohol, fat, and (generally) sugar - must be one of the most decadent drinks in existence!

It is extraordinary that in the relatively short span of two centuries four stimulants - sugar, tea, coffee, and chocolate - could have emerged out of local obscurity and become a basis for vast mercantile empires, defended by the greatest military powers ever known to that time and supported by the newly reintroduced practice of slavery.  Such is the power of "the cup that cheers, but not inebriates."

I think that people who have weak stomach acid are particularly attracted to the aroma and presentation of food.  They are easily made ill by bad food as their gastric acid is often not strong enough to kill all germs.  Cooking food helps insure its safety.  The food also needs to be "presented" - to look good because bad food has visual as well as olfactory cues.  On the other hand, people with "cast iron" stomachs may find cooking tedious, on some level not absolutely necessary because, unless their food is blue with mould or redolent of decay, it will do.  The aroma of cooking food overwhelms them, often causing them to overeat.  When opposites pair up, friction can result if accommodations can't be made.  Yet who puts "compatible strength of stomach acid" on their list of desirable characteristics in a mate?

Fast Food Is Addictive in Same Way as Drugs, Say Scientists

Source: sabineofgermany.typepad.com

by Jeremy Laurance

Overeating might not be a simple matter of self-control.  Lovers of burgers, fries, fizzy drinks and other fast foods could be in the grip of an addiction similar to that experienced by users of hard drugs, scientists claim.

Bingeing on foods that are high in fat and sugar may cause changes in the brain that make it hard to say no.  By stimulating the brain's natural opioids, large doses of the foods can produce a high that is similar, though less intense, to that produced by heroin and cocaine, they say.  The claims are based on preliminary animal studies but are being cited by lawyers acting for overweight Americans, who in a class action against the fast food industry are seeking compensation for the cost of caring for obesity.  John Banzhaf, the lawyer who took on the tobacco companies and won, is leading the case.  The group includes Caesar Barber, aged 56, who has had two heart attacks and is diabetic.  He claims he ate in fast food restaurants for years without being warned of the health risks.

Mr Banzhaf says that to win he only has to convince a jury that fast food companies share the blame for Mr Barber's health problems.  "We might even discover that it's possible to become addicted to the all-American meal of burgers and fries," he told New Scientist.

John Hoebel, a psychologist at Princeton University, and colleagues showed that rats fed a diet containing 25% sugar developed withdrawal symptoms when the sugar was removed, including chattering teeth and shivering.  When the rats were given a dose of naloxone, a drug that blocks opioid receptors, the researchers noted a drop in dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens, a cluster of cells in the mid-brain linked with feelings of reward.  Writing in Obesity Research, he says this is the same pattern of neurochemical activity seen in heroin addicts going through withdrawal.  "Drugs give a bigger effect, but it's essentially the same process," he said.  Other scientists, including Ann Kelley, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin medical school, have observed similar changes in brain chemistry.

But Michael Jacobson, director of the Centre for Science in the Public Interest, Washington, said there was little evidence to back the claims.  Jeanne Randolph, psychiatrist at the University of Toronto with an interest in obesity, said it was well known that eating fast food and sugary snacks stimulated a cycle of instant satiation followed by a plunge in blood sugar, which triggered desire for another snack.

Yesterday Professor James Griffith Edwards, editor of the scientific journal Addiction, said: "Whether a burger habit can be regarded as an addiction depends on how you define addiction.  The difference [between a habit and an addiction] is not a qualitative one but a quantitative one.  I am quite fond of dark chocolate but it is not going to destroy my life like a heroin addiction."

Jeremy Laurance is the health editor for the Independent

Source: The Independent [UK] 30 January 2003

Fat, Sugar "Addiction" Linked to Obesity

by Richard Macey

Scientists have found evidence that fat and sugar may be addictive, possibly explaining why many obese people just can't get enough junk food.  The area of the brain that moderates eating behaviour is influenced by the blood's level of leptin, a substance secreted by fat cells.  However, a study by a psychologist at New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine has found that rats fed high-fat diets take only three days to lose their ability to respond to leptin.  "The fatter a person becomes, the more resistant they will be to the effects of leptin," Luciano Rossetti says in the February 1 issue of New Scientist.

The magazine reports that another researcher, Sarah Leibowitz, a neurobiologist at New York's Rockefeller University, found that the level of galanin, a substance that stimulates eating and curbs the body's use of energy, increases in the brains of rats that dine on even one fatty meal.  In another experiment, rats developed "the shakes" when taken off a sugar-rich diet, developing symptoms similar to people withdrawing from nicotine or morphine.  "The implication is that some animals - and, by extension, some people - can become overly dependent on sweet food," Dr Leibowitz said.

A University of Wisconsin neuroscientist has also reported that rats that overindulge show "long-lasting changes in their brain chemistry similar to those caused by extended use of morphine or heroin."  But Australian nutritionist Rosemary Stanton was not convinced yesterday.  "I need more proof; all this is based on rats," she said, suspecting eating problems had more to do with habit.  "You get into a habit of eating what you always want but you can change your eating habits."  Dr Stanton feared the findings could send the wrong message to the obese.  "People might think there is nothing they can do and will say, 'I might as well go and have three Big Macs'."

Andrew Byrne, a Sydney doctor who has worked with addicts for 15 years, warned that addiction was hard to define.  However, he said, if the symptoms of overeating included being unable to cut down, needing regular consumption, suffering an adverse reaction, feeling guilty and attracting the attention of others saying "you are fat", then food was addictive.  Both agreed that if fat and sugar were addictive, all fast food ingredients should be listed on the packaging.

Source: www.theage.com.au 31 January 2003

Cheese "Can Be as Addictive as Morphine"

An American doctor has claimed that cheese can be as addictive as morphine.  Dr Neal Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee on Responsible Medicine, says cheese is addictive because it contains small amounts of morphine from cows' liver.  In his book - Breaking the Food Seduction: The Hidden Reasons Behind Food Cravings and Seven Steps to End Them Naturally - he explains why people are hooked on products like cheese, meat, sugar and chocolate.  He says: "There's a biochemical reason many of us feel we can't live without our daily fix.  Cheese, for example, contains high levels of casein, a protein that breaks apart during digestion to produce morphine-like opiate compounds, called casomorphins.  These opiates are believed to be responsible for the mother-infant bond that occurs during nursing.  It's no surprise many of us feel bonded to the refrigerator."

Dr Barnard says his research could help overweight people currently suing fast food restaurants, by proving the food is addictive like tobacco.  He has developed a 3-week diet and lifestyle program to help people kick their "addiction" by changing their eating habits, exercising and sleeping well.

Source: ananova.com Friday 6 June 2003

Stand up and Slim Down, America!

by Jane Galt

We're a nation of fatties, and getting fatter.  At least, I am.  And so, to judge from the media reports, are the rest of you.  You're not just getting fatter, either; you're getting diabetes, heart trouble, and joint problems.  You're making your kids fat.  You're dragging down life expectancy for everyone, and won't that be embarrassing at the 2008 International Mortality Olympics in Leopoldsville?

Public health experts, and health journalists, are screaming that we need to do something about this!  But most of their ideas, like making television commercials telling us how fat we are, or getting the President to sit in on someone's 3rd grade gym class, don't seem very useful.  If nagging people to change their habits without enforceable consequence actually worked, well, just think how clean my room would be right now!

So what would work?  It's useful to look at the great public health success of the last 50 years: smoking.

In the 1960's, nearly 40% of adults smoked.  By 2000, that number had fallen to 23%.  (That's from an LA Times story that I accidentally forgot to bookmark and now can't find).  After plateauing in the early 1990s, smoking once again began to decline in the latter half of that decade.  The number of cigarettes smoked per day has been declining since the 1980s, again with a plateau and another sharp decline.

Smoking cessation seems to have had a number of big "pushes": the original studies, in the 1950s, linking smoking to lung cancer; the surgeon general's finding that smoking caused cancer in 1964; the warnings on cigarette packs; the division of the world into smoking and non-smoking sections in the 1970s and early 1980s; and the anti-tobacco lawsuits of the mid-to-late 1990s.  Now, of course, we have the effort to ban cigarettes in public places - a line of attack which is, to judge by my acquaintances, working.  It's just too much of a pain in the ass to be a smoker these days.  There is also the considerable stigma that began attaching to smokers in the mid-1990s, and the increasingly hefty taxes being imposed.

What lessons does this give us for designing, an, er "fattening cessation" programme?

In other words: incentives matter.  If you want to get people to stop doing something (and I don't concede that that's a legitimate project for the government, but let's assume for the moment that it is), you need to make it very costly, in both money and other pleasures, to indulge.  If you want people to stop being fat, you need to make it expensive and unpleasant to be overweight.

How might we do this?  I'll tell you how we won't: public health advertising, "National Fitness Day", getting elected officials to badger their constituents or "set a good example", a 3¢ tax on soft drinks.

Here are things that would work, in my opinion:

Make discrimination against the overweight not only legal, but mandatory

Encourage health and life insurance companies to jack up their premiums.  Make seats in public accommodations, from stadiums to subways, physically impossible for the obese to fit in.  Force airlines to charge them for an extra seat.

Also, get their peers to be mean to them.  It's no coincidence that the subcultures in which fat is most stigmatised - the white upper middle class ones - are also the ones in which obesity is least prevalent.  Don't pay for public health announcements; pay sitcoms to make cruel jokes at the expense of overweight characters, who should all be written as lazy and stupid.  Any scenes involving food should show the overweight characters as revolting gluttons, with food running out of their mouths and down their shirts as the other people in the room watch in stunned horror.

Make unhealthy food extremely expensive

We're not talking about some measly 1%, 5%, or even 50% tax.  If you want people to cut down on unhealthy eating, you need to usher in the era of the $5 can of soda, the $10 Big Mac.  I'd guess that an increase in the price of fatty and/or sugary food somewhere on the order of 5- to 10-fold would be the minimum effective tax.

Make being sedentary even more expensive

Slap a 50% tax on automobiles, a 500% tax on power lawnmowers.  Limit elevators to buildings of 5 stories or more, and force them to stop only at every other floor.  Give tax credits for "heart healthy buildings": ones with no elevators, and parking at least 1/4 mile away.  (Obviously, I assume there would be an elevator - small and slow! - for the disabled.)  Slap a 300% surcharge on cable or satellite television, and an additional Britain-style TV tax besides.  Jack up the cost of broadband, video games, and mp3 players.  Subsidise sports leagues and parks.

Would all this work?  I think it probably would.  If it becomes even more difficult to be fat, I assume people will do less of it.

How insensitive I am!  Me, with the lanky frame and the 19.5 BMI!  Don't I realise that if fat people could stop being fat, they would?

Look, I do understand that there are probably all sorts of genetic and metabolic and environmental reasons that I am not fat, and other people are.  I don't think overweight people are lazy, or bad, or less strong-willed than I; I assume that their hunger signal must be, for whatever reason, much more insistent than mine is, and also, that they probably didn't grow up with quite the morbid fear of fat that pervades the private schools of New York.

But the number of fat people has gone up dramatically in the past 50 years, and the number of fat children is skyrocketing.  Did we undergo some massive change in our genes?  No, we underwent a massive change in our environment: cheaper food, less activity.  If we change that environment to a less fat-friendly one, I assume that the number of fat people will also change.  But it's ridiculous to even contemplate, because unlike smokers, fat people are not a shrinking minority; they're a growing majority.  They are us.  And we are not going to pass laws making our lives harder, even if many of these suggestions weren't a gross affront to liberty.

But given that we're not going to do what works, I don't see why we should waste time and money doing what doesn't.

Source: www.janegalt.net 31 March 2005

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