Food Freedom: Beat the Junk Food Trap
Junk food, those sinister processed products wreaking havoc on our health and waistlines, has stealthily invaded every corner of our daily lives. Seductive advertising messages bombard us relentlessly, making resistance feel futile. Here’s a sobering reality check: 80% of food and beverage advertisements targeting children completely fail to meet WHO health standards.
The industrial food machine has perfected the art of convenience, ensuring you’re never more than arm’s reach from your next caloric downfall. At work, during your commute, at home, at social events, they’ve got all your bases covered, making absolutely certain you won’t waste away from hunger. Ironically, it’s quite the opposite problem we’re facing. Here’s a mind-bending statistic: obesity now kills three times more people globally than starvation.
But wait, there’s more! We’re not just battling the food itself, we’re up against our entire environment. The tantalizing aromas wafting from that corner bakery, the subtle sounds of sizzling that make your mouth water, even the eating habits of the people sharing your table all conspire to influence our choices.
So here’s the million-dollar question: How on earth are we supposed to make sensible nutritional decisions when we’re drowning in a sea of artificially enhanced flavors, surrounded by what can only be described as an elaborate dietary trap? Are we truly capable of making free, conscious choices, or are we just sophisticated lab rats in the world’s largest behavioral experiment?
The deck seems thoroughly stacked against us, but recognizing the game is the first step toward changing the rules.
Gradually, just as a person who consumes a certain type of food every day begins to change, losing weight or gaining it, drawing strength or suffering from unknown ailments, so too are we subtly transformed by what we eat. Our bodies and minds are shaped, often without us realizing it, by the foods we choose or are exposed to.
Marguerite Yourcenar
The Addiction Economy: How Industry Controls Your Plate
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The Bliss Point Revolution
Industry leaders and politicians love waving the flag of “consumer choice” to justify keeping questionable products on our shelves. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: is that choice really free?
Enter Anthony Sclafani, a psychology professor at Brooklyn College who decided to peek behind the curtain of our food cravings by studying lab rats. His groundbreaking 1976 experiment revealed something disturbing, rats developed an uncontrollable desire for sugar that completely bulldozed through psychological barriers that should have stopped them cold.
The plot thickens. Florida researchers later conditioned rats to expect an electric shock every time they ate cheesecake. Did this stop them? Not even close, they kept coming back for more. Meanwhile, Princeton scientists discovered that rats suddenly cut off from sugar showed withdrawal symptoms, including teeth chattering that would make any detox center nervous.
The scientific community recognizes addiction through a sinister trio: compulsion, tolerance, and withdrawal symptoms. In humans, we’ve documented intense compulsive food cravings that create an overwhelming urge to consume specific foods, typically the energy-dense, salty, sweet, and fatty varieties that seem to call our names from every corner store.
But here’s where it gets crafty. Food manufacturers never use the word “addiction”, it’s far too loaded with negative baggage. Instead, they’ve coined a friendlier term: the “bliss point.” This refers to that mathematically precise amount of sugar that makes food and drinks absolutely irresistible. Every gram is meticulously calculated and tested before hitting the market.
So that perfect taste of your favorite cookies or chips? That’s no happy accident, it’s the result of extensive research, testing, and behavioral engineering.
The sobering reality: we’re consuming four times more sugar than WHO recommendations, despite mounting evidence linking high carbohydrate intake to inflammation and cardiovascular disease.
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The Health Marketing Illusion
Those seductive labels screaming “organic,” “high in fiber,” “vitamin-enriched,” “low-fat,” “all-natural” and similar promises? They’re nothing more than marketing smoke and mirrors designed to separate you from your money. If a product were genuinely healthy, would it need flashy labels to convince you?
Researchers conducted a fascinating experiment with chronic dieters, asking them to evaluate trail mix. Half the participants received packages labeled “fitness trail mix” complete with running shoe imagery, while the other half got plain “trail mix” packaging. Same product, different marketing spin.
The results were eye-opening. The “fitness” group not only ate significantly more of their supposedly healthy snack, but here’s the real kicker, when given the opportunity to exercise on stationary bikes afterward, they pedaled less than those who’d eaten the unmarked trail mix!
What’s happening here? That innocent running shoe image seems to trick the brain into feeling like exercise has already been accomplished. Consuming something labeled “fitness” apparently satisfies our psychological need for healthy behavior, creating a dangerous illusion that we’ve already done our part.
The more the participants ate, the less they exercised, as if their overconsumption had somehow earned them a free pass from physical activity. It’s a perfect storm of self-deception: not only do “health” products often mislead us nutritionally, they manipulate our perception of what constitutes healthy behavior.
The French-speaking Swiss Consumer Federation decided to investigate, examining 344 products in local supermarkets. Their verdict was devastating: 94% of products examined failed to meet World Health Organization standards for balanced nutrition, despite their health-focused marketing claims.
Food manufacturers ruthlessly exploit our natural tendencies, psychological profiles, and even our emotional needs to trap us in cycles of overconsumption. They’ve turned our desire to be healthy into their most profitable weapon against us.
The harsh truth we must face: our current food system isn’t designed to nourish the global population sustainably and healthily. It’s engineered to generate maximum profit, period. Our health is just collateral damage in their business model.
Your “Choices” Aren’t Really Yours
Junk food is everywhere today, but this wasn’t always our reality.
Until very recently in human history, staying alive meant constant physical struggle. Walking vast distances to find food, hunting and fishing with primitive tools, all of this demanded enormous energy expenditure just to survive another day.
Our primitive brain carries the genetic memory of those long gaps between successful hunts and brutal periods of starvation. This ancient survival mechanism now drives us to gorge on energy-dense foods, as if we’re still preparing for the next famine that may never come.
But it gets worse, our environment manipulates us at every turn. In buffet experiments, participants loaded up on more pasta and less salad when dining across from overweight individuals. Facing slim companions, everyone suddenly became more health-conscious and reached for the greens. It seems we feel less judged, and therefore less restrained, around those who appear to struggle with food themselves.
Feast with your eyes, and your mouth follows. Studies where participants ate blindfolded showed they consumed roughly 25% fewer calories than when eating with full vision. With food advertisements and social media imagery constantly bombarding our senses, is it any wonder we overeat?
Food organization directly impacts consumption. When researchers gave participants M&Ms in 10 different colors, they ate 43 more pieces than those who received bowls with only 7 colors. Greater variety and visual chaos trigger our primitive “gather while you can” instincts.
More dining companions equals more consumption, period. Meals with one other person are 33% larger than solo dining. With three others, portions jump 58%. Gather seven or more people, and consumption skyrockets 96% above eating alone. Remember your last holiday feast?
Stress makes calorie-dense foods more appealing while simultaneously destroying our decision-making abilities. The more stressed you are, the more vulnerable you become to high-calorie comfort foods.
Still convinced you have complete control over your food choices?
Most of us lack the nutritional literacy to decode complex ingredient labels. Take sugar alone, it masquerades under dozens of different names, creating a linguistic shell game that even educated consumers struggle to navigate.
Some people eat chocolate purely for enjoyment, a square or two satisfies them completely, and they move on. But others can’t stop at one piece, convinced they’re also eating “for the taste.” In reality, they’re caught in a different trap entirely: using food to soothe emotions, fill psychological voids, or feed an existing sugar addiction.
The critical question becomes: How can we outsmart our “natural” gluttony for overly rich and sugary products to avoid falling into this carefully constructed trap?
Solutions
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Pay closer attention to your environement
We try to control what we put in our mouths as best we can in an environment designed to make us eat more. Without conscious and constant actions, our attempts are doomed to failure.
Comb through your environment thoroughly. The sight, thought, smell, or even sound (sizzling bacon, the fizz of opening a soda, chips crunching between your teeth) of a product triggers the desire to eat or drink it.
If you want to change how you eat, you must change what’s in your fridge, your cupboards, on the table, on your desk… Under the bed?… We create a mental image of a product and the more we think about it, the more we crave it. However, everything we don’t reinforce eventually loses its intensity.
Exercise
Get rid of products you no longer want to eat. Replace them with those you want to consume more of, with a pitcher of water, or nothing at all.
If your family wants to keep sweets, group them all in a single cupboard, even going so far as to lock it and give the key to your partner. The goal is to create a food environment where you feel safe and protected from temptation.
Would you ask an alcoholic who quit drinking to return to a bar every night with his drinking buddies? What would be his chances of success in completely stopping alcohol?
We are the average of the 5 people we spend the most time with. Observe your relationships: who are the people who encourage you in your decisions, who are those who hold you back or create an environment conducive to bad habits?
Choose your social circle carefully.
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Shopping
- Don’t shop on an empty stomach.
- Be wary of seductive labels such as “organic,” “high in fiber,” “made with natural products,” “healthy.” Be skeptical. “Sugar-free”? Maybe, but with what else?
- Real food doesn’t have a label. The longer the ingredient list, the more processed the product.
- If you venture to buy a product with a label, read the ingredient list. Here’s a list of different sugar names that hide in food to help you. If one of these names appears in the first 3 ingredients, it’s a dessert.
- Try to see foods for what they are. When you look at a bag of chips, you might imagine a pleasant evening, surrounded by friends or watching your favorite movie. It’s an emotion that guides your purchase, the need for conviviality, comfort… But the reality is that it’s just a bag of potatoes, full of carbohydrates (48%), fried in bad fats with way too much salt. It has nothing to do with conviviality or real comfort. In other words, don’t shop with your emotions but with your reason.
- If you don’t buy the product, you won’t eat it.
How do you eat? Do you eat on the go, in front of your computer or TV? While talking? While listening to music or working?
How much time do you spend during a meal enjoying food, savoring different tastes, feeling the satisfaction of satiety come?
Attention plays a major role in our food experiences. Distraction, however, undeniably harms our taste pleasure. But worse, it prevents us from remembering what and how much we ate!
Researchers at Michigan State University recently concluded that when people eat while watching or listening to different forms of media and entertainment, they ingest about 150 more calories than when they don’t use media.
So if you repeat this behavior twice a day, you risk gaining 1kg in less than a month and about fifteen kilos in a year insidiously, without even realizing it!
Conversely, simply being aware of what’s on our tongue can make us feel more satisfied while eating less.
Exercise
When you sit down to eat, take a few seconds to assess your hunger. Use a scale from 1 to 10, with 0 meaning you’re not hungry at all.
Then, during the meal, take time to assess your hunger again.
In Japan, they say that 8 parts of the stomach nourish the individual and the other 2 parts nourish the doctor. It’s better not to completely fill your stomach.
Finally, at the end of the meal, if your score is still below 7, you may have eaten too quickly or perhaps you didn’t eat satisfying foods that provide the nutrients your body needs.
Generally, meditation increases the capacity for emotional regulation and concentration. In order to draw attention to your feelings, be present at every moment.
You might feel a craving for chocolate that seemingly comes from nowhere. However, if you take the time to step back and observe your day, you can trace it back to an emotion that is a potential trigger for the craving.
Did you have an argument with someone? Did you not say what you thought for fear of not pleasing? Did you stress about a financial matter or a family conflict?
Food then becomes a quick and available solution to suppress an emotion and avoid facing reality. However, it will never truly meet a specific emotional need.
Exercise
When you feel hunger, simply ask yourself if this hunger is physical or emotional.
If it’s not the physical hunger of your stomach, what do you need at that moment? It’s probably not a simple craving for chocolate, but a need for a hug, understanding, sex, feeling understood, saying things you don’t dare say to a loved one…
If it’s emotional, start by observing your emotions, without judgment. Simply be present for yourself.
Our brain is not adapted to manage the current abundance of overly rich processed food in the Western world. Just as we once ate to survive, today we must learn to navigate the jungle of products that are anything but natural yet increasingly tempting. Learn more about an alternative way of eating.
In addition to our environment, we must pay more attention to our own feelings and treat our needs with kindness.
SOURCES
MOSS Michael, Hooked: How Processed Food Became Addictive, WH Allen, 2021
KOENIGSTORFER J, BAUMGARTNER H, The Effect of Fitness Branding on Restrained Eaters’ Food Consumption and Post-Consumption Physical Activity, Journal of Marketing Research, 2016
RTS, Vacarme, Pris.es au piège de la malbouffe, https://www.rts.ch/audio-podcast/2022/article/pris-es-au-piege-de-la-malbouffe-27418783.html .
Dr BARKATOU Inès, L’influence de l’industrie du sucre dans la recherche en santé, Sciences du Vivant [q-bio], 2019
Dr LUSTIG Robert, Fat chance, the hidden truth about sugar, obesity and disease, Fourth Estate, 2014
CHOZEN BAYS Jan, Manger en pleine conscience, Editions Les Arènes, 2019
HERTZ Rachel, “Why You Eat What You Eat: The Science Behind Our Relationship with Food”, Edi
CLOUET Thomas, Combien de sucre, https://www.thomasclouet.com/category/blogs/combien-de-sucre/
Copyright ©Nutrinama Ekaterina Choukel
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