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| Addictive Foods: Chocolate, anyone? Chocolate is drug-like in its effect. Artificial taste explodes in the mouth with crunchy, smooth, sweet flavors, supplying intense pleasure. Every texture and nuance of taste contrived to stimulate your 9,000 taste buds into sending pleasure signals to the brain. The intensified pleasure effect is addictive. We don't care about the additives or empty calories. Chocolate junkies crave a fix, driven by the desire for that chocolate pleasure. Pleasure for which we will pay any price, even our health. Chocolate bars are loaded with salt, sugar, caffeine and fat, up to 300 calories per bar. Like a body demanding heroin for its balance, the body will crave sugar, salt and fat. Take candy from a sugar junkie, and look out! Quitting causes withdrawals. Remove sugar, processed fat or salt from your diet, and you will crave them. You will go through the discomfort of facing withdrawal similar to the withdrawal from drugs. Eating processed food creates cravings for more processed foods. Eat fried foods, and you crave more. Eat cooked food, and you crave it. Eat sugar-filled food, and you will crave it. The Hostess Munchies are nothing more than disguised cravings for salt and fat. They promise satisfaction, but artificial pleasure never satisfies. It is a pleasure that takes by first giving. It steals valuable nutrition from your diet by feeding your body empty calories. Tom McGregor | |
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| Colaholics: Coca Cola is consumed 190 million times every 24 hours in more than 35 countries. Bear in mind, this is a product with absolutely no nutritional value. The slogan for Coke used to be "Coke is it!" Coke is what? I laugh every time I hear about Coke's carefully guarded "special recipe." Heck, I can tell you what it is right now - SUGAR. Millions of American are now being called "Colaholics" due to their addiction to the cola beverages. Cola has a higher physiological dependence than smoking and alcohol. Just stop and think about it for a moment. Human beings were not designed to drink fizzy brown sugar water every day, with every meal. Before the last century or so, we never drank anything like that. People mostly drank water, or, when they were available, coffee, tea, milk, beer, wine... beverages with little or no sugar in them. But nowadays, people drink this syrupy-sweet junk all the time, almost exclusively in some cases. Isn't that a really weird situation? Lard Biscuit | |
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Every waking moment of our lives, we swim in an ocean of advertising, all of it telling us the same thing: Consume. Consume. And then consume some more. In 2003, the auto industry spent $18.2 billion telling us we needed a new car, more cars, bigger cars. Over the last twenty-five years, the number of household vehicles in the United States has doubled. The rate of increase in the number of cars, vans and SUVs for personal travel has been six times the rate of population increase. In fact, according to the Department of Transportation, there are now, for the first time in history, more cars than drivers in America . That's ridiculous! Did we suddenly need so many more vehicles? Or were we sold the idea? We drive everywhere now. Almost nine-tenths of our daily travel takes place in a personal vehicle. Walking, actually using the legs and feet God gave us, accounts for appallingly little of our day-to-day getting around. Even on trips of under one mile, according to the Department of Transportation, we walked only 24 percent of the time in 2001 (and rode a bike under 2 percent). Walking declined by almost half in the two decades between 1980 and 2000. In Los Angeles, you can get arrested for walking. The cops figure if you're not in a car you can't be up to any good. If you're not in a car, you're a vagrant. Same goes for the suburbs, where so many of us now live. And what do you put inside that SUV minivan or pickup truck you're driving everywhere, other than your kids? Well, lots of stuff, that's what. In 2002, the retail industry in this country spent $13.5 billion telling us what to buy, and we must have been listening, because in 2003 we spent nearly $8 trillion on all kinds of crap. That's right, trillion. How insane is that? We are the biggest consuming culture on the planet. We buy almost twice as much crap as our nearest competitor, Japan. We spend more on ourselves than the entire gross national product of any nation in the world. And all that shopping – whew, has it made us hungry. Every year, the food industry spends around $33 billion convincing us that we're famished. So we all climb back into our giant vehicle filled with all our stuff from Wal-Mart, and we cruise to the nearest fast-food joint. If not McDonald's or Burger King or Taco Bell, then a 'fast casual' restaurant like Outback Steakhouse or TGI Friday's or the Olive Garden, where they serve us portions larger than our smallest kid, with the calories to match. What does all that consumption do for us? Does it make us happy? You tell me. If we were all so happy, would we be on so many drugs? Antidepressant use in the U.S. nearly tripled in the past decade. We've got drugs in America we can take for anything: if we're feeling too bad, too good, too skinny, too fat, too sleepy, too wide awake, too unmanly. We've got drugs to counteract the disastrous health effects of all our overconsumption – diet drugs, heart drugs, liver drugs, drugs to make our hair grow back and our willies stiff. In 2003, we Americans spent $227 billion on medications. That's a whole lot of drugs! This is the power of advertising at work, of billions of hooks that've been cast into our heads in the last thirty years, billions of messages telling us what we want, what we need and what we should do to feel happy. We all buy into it to some degree, because none of us is as young as we'd like to be, or as thin, or as strong. Yet none of the stuff we consume – no matter how much bigger our SUV is than our neighbor's, no matter how many Whoppers we wolf down, no matter how many DVDs we own or how much Zoloft we take – makes us feel full, or satisfied or happy. So we consume some more. And the line between personal responsibility and corporate responsibility gets finer and more blurred. Yes, you're still responsible for your own life, your own health, your own happiness. But your desires, the things you want, the things you think you need – that's all manipulated by corporate advertising and marketing that now whisper and shout and wink at you from every corner of your life – at home, at work, at school, at play. Consume. Consume. Still not happy? Then you obviously haven't consumed enough. Americans are eating themselves to death. | |
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Morgan Spurlock ate McDonald's food for a month for his film Super Size Me. Here is an extract from his book about the fast food business.| F |
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US people getting fatter, fast Americans are getting fatter at a rate never seen before, a report shows. In the past year, the adult obesity rate rose in 48 of America's states, and nationally from 23.7% to 24.5%, Trust for America's Health found. In 10 states, over a quarter of adults are now obese, despite campaigns alerting people to the dangers of over-eating. Mississippi, famous for its calorific mud pie, ranked the highest, followed by Alabama and West Virginia. Crisis point The non-profit organisation said the situation had reached crisis point and current policies were failing. Currently, about 119 million, or 64.5%, of US adults are either overweight or obese. According to projections, 73% of US adults could be overweight or obese by 2008, Trust for America's Health warned. In turn, this would mean many more people with obesity-related illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease, which could cost the nation billions of dollars. BBC World News August 25, 2005 | |
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| Hot Dogs: In an average week, Americans eat 350 million hot dogs. Isn't it cool how most hot dogs contain large amounts of edible "offal?" The closely guarded definition is: animal skins, snouts, ears, esophagi and/or powdered bone. Give me a DOZEN of those! Bruce Campbell |
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| Kids: I finally got my son to confess why he liked McDonald's. Was it the great taste or high quality of the food? No, he admitted...it was for the toys you get with the Happy Meal. Happy Meal? Nutritionally, it's a Sad Meal - a Tragic Meal. Bruce Campbell | |
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| Super Size Portions: It was probably inevitable that one day people would start suing McDonald's for making them fat. That day came this summer, when New York lawyer Samuel Hirsch filed several lawsuits against McDonald's, as well as four other fast-food companies, on the grounds that they had failed to adequately disclose the bad health effects of their menus. One of the suits involves a Bronx teenager who tips the scale at 400 pounds and whose mother, in papers filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, said, "I always believed McDonald's food was healthy for my son." How did today's oversized appetites become the norm? It didn't happen by accident or some inevitable evolutionary process. It was to a large degree the result of consumer manipulation. Fast food's marketing strategies, which make perfect sense from a business perspective, succeed only when they induce a substantial number of us to overeat. To see how this all came about, let's go back to 1983, when John Martin became CEO of the ailing Taco Bell franchise and met a young marketing whiz named Elliott Bloom. Using so-called "smart research," a then-new kind of in-depth consumer survey, Bloom had figured out that fast-food franchises were sustained largely by a core group of "heavy users," mostly young, single males, who ate at such restaurants as often as 20 times a month. In fact, 30 percent of Taco Bell's customers accounted for 70 percent of its sales. Through his surveys, Bloom learned what might seem obvious now but wasn't at all clear 20 years ago -- these guys ate at fast-food joints because they had absolutely no interest in cooking for themselves and didn't give a rip about the nutritional quality of the food. They didn't even care much about the taste. All that mattered was that it was fast and cheap. Martin figured Taco Bell could capture a bigger share of these hard-core customers by streamlining the food production and pricing main menu items at 49, 59 and 69 cents -- well below its competitors. It worked. Taco Bell saw a dramatic increase in patrons, with no drop in revenue per customer. As Martin told Greg Critser, author of "Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World," when Taco Bell ran a test of its new pricing in Texas, "within seven days of initiating the test, the average check was right back to where it was before -- it was just four instead of three items." In other words, cheap food induced people to eat more. Taco Bell's rising sales figures -- up 14 percent by 1989 and 12 percent more the next year -- forced other fast-food franchises to wake up and smell the burritos. By the late '80s, everybody from Burger King to Wendy's was cutting prices and seeing an increase in customers -- including bargain-seeking Americans who weren't part of that original hard-core group. If the marketing strategy had stopped there, we might not be the nation of fatties that we are today. But the imperatives of the marketplace are growth and rising profits, and once everybody had slashed prices to the bone, the franchises had to look for a new way to satisfy investors. And what they found was . . . super-sizing. Portion sizes had already been creeping upward. As early as 1972, for example, McDonald's introduced its large-size fries (large being a relative term, since at 3.5 ounces the '72 "large" was smaller than a medium serving today). But McDonald's increased portions only reluctantly, because the company's founder, Ray Kroc, didn't like the image of lowbrow, cheap food. If people wanted more French fries, he would say, "they can buy two bags." But price competition had grown so fierce that the only way to keep profits up was to offer bigger and bigger portions. By 1988, McDonald's had introduced a 32-ounce "super size" soda and "super size" fries. The deal with all these enhanced portions is that the customer gets a lot more food for a relatively small increase in price. So just how does that translate into bigger profits? Because the actual food in a fast-food meal is incredibly cheap. For every dollar a quick-service franchiser spends to produce a food item, only 20 cents, on average, goes toward food. The rest is eaten up by expenses such as salaries, packaging, electric bills, insurance and, of course, the ubiquitous advertising that got you in the door or to the drive-through lane in the first place. Here's how it works. Let's say a $1.25 bag of French fries costs $1 to produce. The potatoes, oil and salt account for only 20 cents of the cost. The other 80 cents goes toward all the other expenses. If you add half again as many French fries to the bag and sell it for $1.50, the non-food expenses stay pretty much constant, while the extra food costs the franchise only 10 more pennies. The fast-food joint makes an extra 15 cents in pure profit, and the customer thinks he's getting a good deal. And he would be, if he actually needed the extra food, which he doesn't because the nation is awash in excess calories. That 20 percent rule, by the way, applies to all food products, whether it's a bag of potato chips, the 2,178-calorie mountain of fried seafood at Red Lobster or the 710-calorie slab of dessert at the Cheesecake Factory. Some foods are even less expensive to make. The flakes of your kid's breakfast cereal, for example, account for only 5 percent of the total amount Nabisco or General Mills spent to make and sell them. Soda costs less to produce than any drink except tap water (which nobody seems to drink anymore), thanks to a 1970s invention that cut the expense of making high-fructose corn syrup. There used to be real sugar in Coke; when Coca-Cola and other bottlers switched to high-fructose corn syrup in 1984, they slashed sweetener costs by 20 percent. That's why 7-Eleven can sell the 64-ounce Double Gulp -- half a gallon of soda and nearly 600 calories -- for only 37 cents more than the 16-ounce, 89-cent regular Gulp. You'd feel ripped off if you bought the smaller size. Who wouldn't? The final step in the fattening of America was the "upsell," a stroke of genius whose origins are buried somewhere in the annals of marketing. You're already at the counter, you've ordered a cheeseburger value meal for $3.74, and your server says, "Would you like to super-size that for only $4.47?" Such a deal. The chain extracts an extra 73 cents from the customer, and the customer gets an extra 400 calories -- bringing the total calorie count to 1,550, more than half the recommended intake for an adult man for an entire day. When confronted with their contribution to America's expanding waistline, restaurateurs and food packagers reply that eating less is a matter of individual responsibility. But that's not how the human stomach works. If you put more food in front of people, they eat more, as studies have consistently shown over the last decade. My personal favorite: The researcher gave moviegoers either a half-gallon or a gallon bucket of popcorn before the show (it was "Payback," with Mel Gibson) and then measured how much they ate when they returned what was left in the containers afterward. Nobody could polish off the entire thing, but subjects ate 44 percent more when given the bigger bucket. The downside, of course, is that 20 years of Big Food has trained us to think that oceanic drinks and gargantuan portions are normal. Indeed, once fast food discovered that big meals meant big profits, everybody from Heineken to Olive Garden to Frito Lay followed suit. Today, says Lisa Young, a nutritionist at New York University, super-sizing has pervaded every segment of the food industry. For her PhD, Young documented the changes in portion sizes for dozens of foods over the past several decades. M&M/Mars, for example, has increased the size of candy bars such as Milky Way and Snickers four times since 1970. Starbucks introduced the 20-ounce "venti" size in 1999 and discontinued its "short"  unce cup. When 22-ounce Heinekens were introduced, Young reported, the company sold 24 million of them the first year, and attributed the sales to the "big-bottle gimmick." Even Lean Cuisine and Weight Watchers now advertise "Hearty Portions" of their diet meals. Everything from plates and muffin tins to restaurant chairs and the cut of our Levi's has expanded to match our growing appetites, and the wonder of it all is not that 60 percent of Americans are overweight or obese, but rather that 40 percent of us are not.Where does it end? Marketers and restaurateurs may scoff at lawsuits like the ones brought this summer against fast-food companies, and they have a point: Adults are ultimately responsible for what they put in their own mouths. But maybe there's hope for us yet, because it looks as if fast-food companies have marketed themselves into a corner. "Omnipresence" -- the McDonald's strategy of beating out competitors by opening new stores, sometimes as many as 1,000 a year -- "has proved costly and self-cannibalizing," says author Critser. With 13,000 McDonald's units alone, most of America is so saturated with fast food there's practically no place left to put a drive-through lane. Now, fast-food companies are killing each other in a new price war they can't possibly sustain, and McDonald's just suffered its first quarterly loss since the company went public 47 years ago. The obvious direction to go is down, toward what nutritional policymakers are calling "smart-sizing." Or at least it should be obvious, if food purveyors cared as much about helping Americans slim down as they would have us believe. Instead of urging Americans to "Get Active, Stay Active" -- Pepsi Cola's new criticism-deflecting slogan -- how about bringing back the 6.5-ounce sodas of the '40s and '50s? Or, imagine, as Critser does, the day when McDonald's advertises Le Petit Mac, made with high-grade beef, a delicious whole-grain bun and hawked by, say, Serena Williams. One way or another, as Americans wake up to the fact that obesity is killing nearly as many citizens as cigarettes are, jumbo burgers and super-size fries will seem like less of a bargain. Shannon Brownlee is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. | |
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| THE FATTEST PLACE ON EARTH: Anywhere in America is a perfect place to view the chunky, plump, rotund, stout and robust. But there are few places where you can witness the truly elephantine, corpulent, distended and gargantuan. Disneyland is one of them. Anyone who has hung at the park can attest to this fact: fat people are all over Walt Disney’s bucolic vision of long-lost America like an 8-year-old fat kid on a box of Ding Dongs. It’s tempting to make psychoanalytic generalizations about this phenomenon, so I will: Disneyland is a place designed to convey illusion, fantasy and make-believe. And if you’re living in a culture where the dominant visual paradigm is six-pack abs on men and slim women with cheekbones sharp enough to slice someone’s jugular, then Disneyland is a suitable venue for denial and avoidance of the cottage cheese accumulating on your rapidly expanding ass. But there are both more obvious and more complicated paths to explore. The obvious is that America is the fattest country on earth, and Disneyland draws 13 million visitors a year, most hailing from this country. Mathematically, you’re going to get a lot of porkers. The more complex is that Disneyland is a quintessentially American byproduct of the consumerism that has, over 229 years, transformed this country from a nation of second-rate disaffected religious separatists and entrepreneurs into a superpower. Disneyland, like so much of America, is about consuming more than we need. And just as the still-embryonic empire that Walt Disney kick started into full growth mode with the opening of his Anaheim theme park has morphed into a world-straddling business colossus, this nation’s waistlines have expanded to gargantuan proportions. In 1963, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 44.8 percent of the American population was overweight. In 2000, that number had risen to 65.2 percent. In 1963, 13 percent of Americans were obese; in 2000, it was 31 percent. In 1970, 4.5 percent of American children were overweight; in 2002, it was 15.8 percent. And the fattest are getting fatter. A study published in the February 2005 International Journal of Obesity reported that, in 1990, less than 1 percent of Americans were morbidly overweight; in 2002 that figure had nearly tripled to 2.2 percent, or 5 million Americans. JOEL BEERS |