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We fucked up. We Americans are so damn smart andso driven to make a buck and create new ways to earn money off each other that we tampered with natural ingredients until — over the past five decades — we replaced traditional foods with dead, chemical-based crap because the cheap stuff turns a bigger profit. The American food industry took the natural human preference for sweetness and fat and exploited it, using increasing amounts of chemicals and innovation to make many foods that are just as addictive — and just as useless — as opioid drugs.
And now look at us! Because of our horrible Standard American Diet (SAD), we’re abusing our bodies with junk that causes heart disease, diabetes, brain disorders and other health problems, often fatal. We Americans have created a culture of selling ourselves death. We pay money to poison ourselves. The too-smart-for-our-own-good American food industry developed ingenious formulae to make people want to eat more of certain items whether or not we’re feeling actual hunger.
For example, Doritos, Oreos, Cinnabon, Big Macs and the entire menus of places like Applebee’s and TGIFriday’s have been scientifically engineered to mix with our saliva in a way that forms a delicious paste in our mouths with just the right amount of staying power and fade-out. Not only do these foods taste good, but many have been chemically orchestrated to leave an aftertaste that triggers the desire to eat more. Some foods are even engineered to have an aftertaste that’s more appealing than the actual taste of the food in your mouth. This irresistible aftertaste, keeps us returning to the bag of chips or sleeve of cookies or refrigerator. [See David A. Kessler’s book on this subject.]
God damn it! We Americans did this in our obsessive need to make money, make
money, make more money. How can we get people to spend more money on our
product? How do we make people unable to get through the day without our food-ish item or drink? By manipulating the ingredients until people’s brains are hard-wired to respond to those substances like heroin.
On the other end, when we begin to notice that our waistlines are getting too wide, a subset of the food industry is there for us with different chemically manipulated food-like substances to give us hope for losing weight. We couldn’t have come up with a more lucrative racket if we’d had the financial industry to try to come up with one. The American food industry got us hooked on cheap, destructive products, one effect of which is to make us fat. And then it created another useless industry of cheap crap for those who want to lose weight. Fuck.
And the really damnable part is that those so-called weight loss products are part of the problem. In the 1950s Ancel Asshole Keyes asserted that natural saturated fats were bad for us, and the then-burgeoning vegetable and cotton oil manufacturers wanted to create a market for margarine. So they created the fiction that natural saturated fats cause heart disease and man-made margarine crap is good for us.
Since then Americans have been operating on the false belief that lowfat starches and sugars are the way to lose weight. In fact, sugars and starches cause weight gain, as we can see by how much fatter Americans have become since the birth of the lowfat food industry and the U.S. government’s recommendation that we all eat five or more servings of starches a day. Since 1980 Americans have put away tons of breads, pastas, grains and desserts, many of them with reduced fat ingredients. And look at how healthy we are as a result!
Driven by greed and not giving a damn about actual humans, the brain trust of the American food industry made money by getting us hooked on chemically non-foods and chemical beverages that cause health problems. And then we sell each other more chemically non-foods and chemical beverages to remedy those health problems. But those “helpful” products really make things worse, so we need more and more and never-ending more stupid products that we’re fooled into believing will help us become healthy. We are fucking idiots! I hate us! We’re selling each other DEATH and we’re selling it to the rest of the world! Americans suck!
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Leolin: yes, all the drugs and hormones that the meat and dairy industries pump into their animals are a huge problem. I've started buying only eggs and meat that are organic and drug-free. It's expensive, but I'm done screwing up my body with that stuff.
I love this article and your quote " We pay money to poison ourselves ". To add to what you said, the food industry has also done an awesome job telling us that we need tons of animal protein to survive "Got Milk?" "Beef its whats for dinner". Leaving the ethics of eating another living creature aside, animals that are raised for food are pumped up with growth hormones and antibiotics so that they can grown fast and survive long enough to make it to slaughter. Did you know that 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the United States are for use on livestock and poultry, not humans? The majority aren't even given to animals that are sick. Instead, it's normal practice in the meat industry to mix these drugs with livestock food and water day after day as a substitute for healthier living conditions and to make chickens, pigs, and cows grow faster. Then there are the chemicals that are used on the "food" so that while it moves through the processing chain, sits on the shipping trucks, and waits on the shelves before you buy it it can land in your chart looking "fresh". And when people eat animal proteins where do these medications go? In your body. Add that to all of the crap that you talked about in your post no wonder why people are so fucking sick. And you are so right, instead of changing how we eat (organic, less animal protein, less processed foods) we go to the MD so that they can pump us full of even more chemicals. SMDH. We cant blame these food companies solely because as long as people buy this crap they will continue to make it. #letfoodbethymedicine