In the end, it’s this fickleness on our part, and our appetite for information, as much as the industry’s cunning, that has fueled the processed food industry’s rise to power. We fret, they fiddle, and we eat more of their product. Until we started worrying about the salt or fat. When we caught on to that, they reduced the amount of sugar they added altogether, but maintained the appeal of the product by bumping up the salt or fat.

They simply dropped the corn syrup from their formulations-and their labels-and switched to using sugar derived from sugarcane or concentrated fruit juice, or whichever kind of sugar sounded better to us. Which it isn’t, but we shunned the corn syrup anyway, and the food manufacturers responded with ease. The sweetener known as high-fructose corn syrup rose to the top of our food concerns in the early 2000s, thanks in part to the competitive marketing by sugarcane growers that suggested their sugar is better for us. It presents itself in varied ways and degrees of arduousness in being difficult to quit. It’s shaped by an array of influences, within us and without, that determine whether we’ll be among those some people who get in trouble. Whether it’s that urge we feel when we walk by a vending machine, or our conditioned response to merely seeing an advertisement for the Marlboro Man, the chief executive of Philip Morris was spot-on with his definition of addiction: “a repetitive behavior that some people find difficult to quit.” It’s a behavior that’s often mindless on our part, hidden from our own scrutiny, and guaranteed by its repetitiveness to get us to act again and again. With food being everywhere, and within easy reach, we’ll reach for it again whether or not we are actually hungry, having been conditioned by the repetitive nature of that act But by the time we start seeking out food on our own, that conditioning is working against us. That’s all well and good when we’re infants.

Predicting the nutrition that it’s going to get. The infant is experiencing one of the first conditioned responses with food through the taste of the milk or the smell of the mother. Underlying this behavior is what psychologists refer to as a conditioned response.Ĭonditioning is a way that we learn and increase the likelihood that we will survive. The most fleeting of thoughts, often subconscious, can prompt us to pause whatever we’re doing and grab something to eat.

We don’t even have to labor very hard in initiating a meal or snack. Much of processed food is designed to be consumed mindlessly, allowing us to watch TV or play video games or drive a car at the same time. But it’s the manner in which we repetitively eat that matters in addiction. We eat every day, several times at least, from the day we are born. Little we do in life is more repetitive than eating. Kindle | Hardcover | Audiobook What ’s Your Definition?

Michael moss hooked