While home in Minneapolis this past weekend, I took some time to catch up on recent Star Tribune articles. I came across the intriguing title, “Some foods as addictive as cocaine?” Apparently, 28 papers on food addiction have been published in this year alone, according to the National Library of Medicine. This is a hot topic, and the food and beverage industry is nervous. Researchers are picking apart the brains of food addicts and obese individuals to understand what makes them addicted to food. It is becoming clearer and clearer that the delicious beverages and foods we love can “hijack the brain in ways that resemble addictions to cocaine, nicotine and other drugs.”
Like me, you may be thinking to yourself “well, duh.” The human body has not evolved for the abundant, sugary, fatty foods common to American culture. The foods we tend to love most are also those that are the worst for us (fries dipped in ice cream, anyone?). Sugars and fats were rare in the hunter-gatherer’s environment, and they taste so great because of evolutionary pressures to search long and hard for them. When you only have access to fats and sugars once in a while, an affinity for them becomes essential for survival. Aside from searching the aisles for the items on our grocery list each week, we don’t do much hunting or gathering these days. The well-liked flavors that once helped us prosper are now killing us. As it turns out, not everyone appreciates this, which is why so many researchers are looking at the mechanisms behind food addiction. They need factual collateral to help the general public understand the ways in which food can modify their brains.
A widespread knowledge that food interacts with the brain in ways similar to that of lethal, illegal drugs could change the way we eat. This idea is frightening for the food and beverage industry, which the Trib article points out, is worth at least one TRILLION dollars. Though there is overwhelming evidence for the addictive nature of certain foods, “food company executives and lobbyists say nothing has been proven.” Ha! We can only hope that one of these days, the CEO of Frito-Lay will wake up in a cold sweat, fiending for his next potato chip fix, and think to himself “What have I done!?” Until then, it’s important to understand that food isn’t just sustenance. It can also be viewed as a delicious, fatty, drug.
Read the original Star Tribune article here: http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/wellness/133302438.html
Certain American Indians, as just one example, lived on buffalo and caribou meat pretty reliably before the arrival of European explorers. I think it is incorrect to state that fat was an inconsequential dietary factor. I completely agree that glucose and large amounts of fructose were not part of the diet. But this "sugary, fatty" meme in dietary science needs to be put down. We have been eating protein and fat in abundance since we learned how to trap and kill animals.
ReplyDelete"Certain American Indians, as just one example, lived on buffalo and caribou meat pretty reliably before the arrival of European explorers. I think it is incorrect to state that fat was an inconsequential dietary factor."
ReplyDeleteI'll premise my comment to this comment by saying first: I'm not a hunter nor do I ever intend to hunt. However, from what I have heard from friends and family that I know that do hunt is that meat from wild game tends to be leaner than that of domesticated animals raised to be slaughtered. I know it is very dangerous to state something as fact when it is second hand information, but one can still argue that differences still exist between the two. This of course doesn't completely negate the above comment, but does point to the fact that hunter-gathers may have had fat available in their diet, but it was still minimal when compared to what is available to modern man.
It is also important to point out, that although Native Americans in North America had access to large herds of buffalo and caribou, other hunter-gathering societies were not as fortunate. The most important point of all is that did early man readily have a reliable source of fat? Despite, the difference in the access of resources between hunter gathering societies of today and the not so distant past is that we all evolved from a common group of hunter gathers. And it can be argued that their access to dietary fat along with sugars was limited and this is where we originally evolved this "circuitry," if you will, that makes the ingestion of sugars and fats so rewarding and which still persists in modern man. The above is very hypothetical and I do not have any research right off hand to back up these claims, but it does give one something to think about.