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Disease & Conditions

Obesity

Why the Diet Industry Wants to Keep You Fat

Obesity:

On every high street there are legalised drug pushers peddling stuff every bit as addictive as any hard drugs. They are in your supermarket and even your small local shops. I'm not talking about cigarettes or alcohol. I'm talking about all the processed and convenience foods that practically everybody uses. I'm talking about such apparently harmless substances as sugar and artificial sweeteners. The processed food manufacturers want to make us junkies on their junk food.

Recent scientific research has shown that the sweet taste of sugar and artificial sweeteners is actually more addictive than cocaine. Other tastes may soon be found to be just as addictive. The reason is in our genes. Our ancestors learned that sweet foods were a source of high energy, high flavor foods were the most nutritious and salt was scarce. We evolved pleasurable reactions to those tastes - reactions that give more pleasure than hard drugs. Processed food manufacturers know this and load their 'food' with sugar, salt and flavor enhancers to fool our bodies into thinking they are getting nutritional value.

The multi-national food producers have grown fat in the last few decades - along with the population. Their in-house boffins have invented all kinds of chemicals to stabilise, preserve, color and enhance the taste of nutritionally valueless junk food. We are fooled by the look and taste into thinking it's nutritious and buy it in ever increasing amounts. By clever marketing, a bean once thought to be too poisonous to eat has now become the number one 'health' food, even though it is known to be carcinogenic. Cheaply produced emulsions of vegetable oils and water are sold as a healthy alternative to butter. If it's low-fat, low sugar, anti-cholesterol, etc, it's marketed as a healthy alternative.

There's an unholy alliance between the the multi-national food producers and the drugs companies. The loose regulation of drugs is a scandal, where profit reigns and public safety is way down the list. If we get an adverse reaction to a foreign chemical in our food, there's always a convenient cure for the symptoms provided by a drug company. The fact that the 'cure' may give us worse symptoms is not accidental - it's no good for business if we're all healthy.

The obesity epidemic we are now seeing is a direct result of the prevalence of processed food. The average American family spends 90% of their budget on it. Because our genes make us addicted to taste, we become easy targets for the food marketers. Unfortunately (fortunately for them), having eaten a calorie laden, tasty ready meal, we soon need another because the nutritional value is so low. The result is that we eat far more calories than we need.

There is absolutely no point in dieting to lose weight, then going back to your old habits - that's what the food and drugs industries rely on to push their products. We are all addicts - victims of our ancestry. Addressing the problem is the Cave Man Diet. It's not just about calorie control, it's about getting rid of addictions and eating only healthy food. If you truly want to lose weight and keep it off, it means committing to a different lifestyle.

Are there some foods you just can't resist? Do you have an issue around food? The Caveman Diet can deal with your diet addiction. Stuart Hill is the author of the Caveman Diet and other challenging websites. He lives in Shetland, UK.