Doritos, Obesity, Addiction, and Nic Cage

“Good evening, sir. My name is Steve.  I come from a rough area.  I used to be addicted to crack but now I’m off and trying to stay clean.  That is why I’m selling magazine subscriptions.” – Office Space

Now I’m gonna hum that song all day long.

What if . . . your food is actually an addiction, like heroin, tobacco, the metric system, or Lady Gaga songs?

I heard just a little bit of a radio talk show where the guest made that comment.  Well, kinda made that comment.  I embellished just a bit.

How on Earth could your food be addictive?

Humans have been eating food for as long as there have been humans.  Before that, they ate rocks.  Small ones, better for the digestion.  But humans were stupid, so our ancestor’s brains encoded subtle signals that made them think that sweet things were amazingly good.  That meat tasted wonderful.  That eating enough fat should make you feel full.

These signals directly from the food, sometimes.  Cheese contains casein.  I know that “casein” sounds like what you do to a bank before robbing it, but in this case it’s a protein found in milk.  And casein is found in dairy products, like cheese.   When you eat it, your body begins the process of digesting it.  And in digesting it, it turns it into opiates called casomorphins.  Yes.  Your body turns cheese into drugs that make you want to eat cheese.

When I eat sugar, I can feel it.  There’s a reason that parents think that kids are hyperactive, and that’s because they are.  Sugar hits the bloodstream very quickly, and stimulates an insulin response that plays hell with the endocrine (“Endo” is from the Latin for “Stupid name that George Lucas would use to name an Ewok® or something” and “crine” comes from being sad, as in “it’s a crine shame”) system.  We certainly didn’t have sugar in quantities 5,000 years ago, so our bodies developed a strong, positive response to this extremely energy-dense and reactive group of molecules.

It’s my guess that we’ve changed (via breeding) the nutrition that we get from our plants.  The corn (maize) of today doesn’t look much at all like the grass-looking plant that humans started breeding thousands of years ago to turn into the massive ears of corn.  It’s certain that the protein balance and other aspects of vitamins, minerals, and carbohydrate content have changed as we made corn what it is today.

So far, we’ve only touched on foods that were at least related to stuff we ate 5,000 years ago.  A native American from 1500 B.C. would recognize corn, kinda.  He’d recognize meat.  But he’d have no clue about what to think about a Ding Dong®, Twinkie™, or Nachos BellGrande®.

Bold John Wilder Assertion:  Modern foods have led us to a place far enough and fast enough that our digestive systems, brains, and hormonal system can’t even remotely begin to cope.

What evidence is there for this assertion?

Doritos® have more than 40 ingredients.

Wonder Breadâ„¢ has over 14.

The bread the Amish make has five.  Remove sugar, and you’ve got four.  And that makes yummy French bread.

Let’s think of the processed food that we buy in the supermarket (or convenience store) differently.  These foods aren’t the same as they were forty years ago.  They’ve been faced with the ultimate evolutionary system that the modern world has to offer:  the free market.

Markets are amoral.  They provide the product that people purchase, not the product that people need.  Markets are ruthless.  If no one buys a product, the product will cease to exist, quickly.

And what do we buy?  We buy things that we like.  Things that taste good.  Things that we crave.  What could be a better seller than food that has been taste and market tested to be something that is . . . addictive?

If you look at the data, you can see plainly that obesity had accelerated greatly in the United States.  If you were planning on hurting the place, you couldn’t have done a better job.  Sadly, there are too many changes that have happened during the time period to be absolutely certain about what happened.  The Internet hit.  Smart phones were invented.  High fructose corn syrup replaced sugar in lots of things (and it is different than sugar in how it is metabolized).  Air conditioning became more common.  Nicolas Cage started doing movies.

This isn’t good.

It isn’t getting any better.

It’s entirely possible that our changing food consumption has nothing to do at all with our changing obesity rates.  It’s probably all due to Nic Cage.

Maybe the food sticks to your ribs?

As I’ve pointed out before, there are many, many mysteries about being human.  It doesn’t make it easier to track down what’s going on in this experiment when the world is changing so very fast.  My take?  Our parents were skinny (mostly).  Why?  They ate food with mostly few ingredients.  Steak.  Eggs.  Broccoli.  Potatoes.  Lettuce.  Butter.  Milk they just got from a cow.  And they also expended more calories without washing machines or dishwashing machines.  And they were colder in winter and hotter in summer.

So, of the things that have changed, I’d bet that food is at least a part of it.  Heck, they had Coke®, but they served it in 8 ounce glass bottles, not 2 liter plastic jugs.  Mass quantities, like maybe an addict might want.

Or maybe (ounces to liters?) . . . it’s the metric system that’s making us fat?