They Hooked Us on Junk Food

RR

Sugar has been described by nutritionists as the methamphetamine of processed food ingredients, with its high speed, blunt assault on our brains, while fat is the opiate – a smooth operator whose effects are less obvious but no less powerful. Obesity in North America took off in the 1980s with the exponential increase in HFCS based soda consumption.

By 2003 the average North American adult was 11 kilograms / 24 pounds heavier than in 1960. One in three adults and nearly one in five kids aged six to eleven are classified today as obese. Type 2 (acquired) diabetes represents 12 percent of the Canadian population and rising as the Boomer segment ages.

Between 1980 and 2000 soda pop consumption tripled to the daily consumption levels it remains at today – an average of 200 litres or 40 gallons per year, 60,000 calories, 3,700 teaspoons per person (one can of pop contains ten teaspoons). In the 1990s General Foods had developed HFS (high fructose sugar).  The FDA was unwilling to ascribe anything more than tooth decay to soda pop sugar until a Yale study made headlines finding that children who were given two cupcakes suffered a tenfold increase in adrenaline and exhibited abnormal behaviour.  World Health Organization proposed changing its nutritional guidelines to lower the recommended daily levels of sugar to 10 percent caloric intake, citing various links between sugar and diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity. (In early 2014, it began to appear there may be a slight decrease in sugary drink consumption).

The enterprise of manufacturing and marketing of foods is, at its most basic level, about sales and profits. Making money is the sole reason large food corporations like Kraft and General Foods exist and Wall Street is there at every turn to remind them of this. Indeed, some experts believe that Wall Street has been one of the chief causes of the obesity epidemic since the early 1980s, when investors shifted their money from stodgy slower growth blue chip companies to the high-flying technology and other sectors like processed foods that promised quick returns.

Enter Big Tobacco            In the 1970s and ’80s the writing was on the wall for the tobacco industry. Massive class-action lawsuits brought against them by most US States eventually resulted in billions of dollars in settlement to help offset quickly increasing medical costs. To protect their bottom lines, several of the larger tobacco companies, including R.J. Reynolds, and Philip Morris diversified into processed foods. Kraft Foods new owners, Philip Morris tobacco, brought a new motivation to the industry to get people to eat more of its convenience food in order to maximize profits. The tobacco executives used marketing apparatus and strategies that had been so successful in selling cigarettes and encouraged their in-house scientists to find ways to attract consumers and then applauded the victories when sales surged. 

Food companies are typically loath to provide details on specific products or brands. Their formulas are calculated and perfected by scientists and chemists who know very well what they are doing to hook us on sugar, fat and salt. For the consumer, especially the parent, the grocery store is a battlefield, sprinkled liberally with landmines itching to pop up into our carts and explode into our mouths. Salt, sugar and fat are cheap. Food companies were already selling their products in an environment in which there were twice as many calories as anybody needed. Now they had to grow their profits every ninety days. The result was that food companies had to seek to new ways to market their foods and they did this by making larger portions, as convenient as they could. In the heat of competition, they looked past the health impact of their products. Market and taste surveys have given way to computerized brain scanning techniques which allow tobacco owned Kraft and General Foods to design the perfectly addictive foods of today.

However, big tobacco argue they are in good legal shape because addiction arguments used in suing them previously does not apply to food as there is no painful withdrawal readily applicable to the desire for junk food. However, consumer advocates contend that when people start feeling hungry for junk food – salt sugar fat, they are not seeking the primary benefit of food, the calories needed to keep them alive – they are responding to the body’s signal that it doesn’t ever want to be put in the position of needing to eat. Most North Americans never truly feel the pain of hunger, starving for nutrition. The sad but very ironic reality is that while weight and obesity skyrocket, health is declining due to a lack of nutrition in the very processed food big tobacco now helps promote and glean massive profits from the way they did historically with tobacco. Their profits are once again dependent upon the costs to our health care system – and very own tax-payer dollars.      RR

             see - Sugar the Poison