Unhealthy Foods Hijacking You

I'll admit that I just don't really understand addiction. I've never been addicted to something (at least not that I'm consciously aware of) so it's hard for me to grasp when a smoker says that they can't just give up smoking or a heroin addict saying that they just can't give up their drug addiction.

But what we're seeing on a large scale of addiction that beats them all is an addiction to food. I'd have to guess that it's more the norm to be addicted to food than not be addicted to it.

This article talks about how our brains can very easily become addicted to food.

Well, not really addiction. But Dr. Kessler (whose the former head of the FDA)says that millions of people fall into "hypereating," which is when you eat high calorie, high fat, high sugar foods even when you're not hungry.

Food now has become so processed with fat and sugar, that you basically don't even need to chew anymore. You just stick it in your mouth, roll it around a little bit and down the gut pipe it goes.

From the article:

At issue is how the brain becomes primed by different stimuli. Neuroscientists increasingly report that fat-and-sugar combinations in particular light up the brain's dopamine pathway — its pleasure-sensing spot — the same pathway that conditions people to alcohol or drugs.

Where did you experience the yum factor? That's the cue, sparking the brain to say, "I want that again!" as you drive by a restaurant or plop before the TV.

"You're not even aware you've learned this," says Dr. Nora Volkow, chief of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and a dopamine authority who has long studied similarities between drug addiction and obesity.

It really is a true case of Pavlov's dog. You eat something, see it again, and eat it again even though you're not hungry because your brain said "that was good before, let's eat it again!"



More from the article:

First, the team found that even well-fed rats will work increasingly hard for sips of a vanilla milkshake with the right fat-sugar combo but that adding sugar steadily increases consumption. Many low-fat foods substitute sugar for the removed fat, doing nothing to help dieters eat less, Kessler and University of Washington researchers concluded.

Which is why the entire change to low-fat food back in the 80s and 90s is a complete disaster. Dietary fat makes you feel full. You pull that out, substitute it with sugar, and you can keep going and going and going.



And this paragraph I think is really interesting:

Unhealthy food has changed in the other direction. Foods high in fat, sugar and salt tend to be cheap; they're widely sold; and advertising links them to good friends and good times, even as social norms changed to make snacking anytime, anywhere acceptable.

Think about it. How many times have you called up your friends and said "Hey! Come on over for a fun night of eating lettuce and carrots while drinking water!!" It's just the image that companies and advertisers have used to show that eating their products (as unhealthy as they are) is what will make a night out with some friends and enjoyable time.

The solution? Kessler states that you need to retrain the brain and to think "I'm going to hate myself if I eat this." But I can see that causing a big problem when you actually slip up and eat it, become depressed, and eat more of it.

But taking the same concept of where we eat something and see it again and eat it again even though you're not hungry and changing it to other habits like exercise, might be something to look into.

I like where this research is going though and I hope we get more information on how we can change those neurological sparks away from overeating and more towards healthy living.

www.leanbodyfitness.com
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"Natural" Diet Pill Not So Natural

Well, another flop on the supplement front. This article talks about how a diet pill that was promoted as having all "natural" ingredients wasn't completely accurate.

The violators are a supplement called Starcaps that promotes the use of papaya as an ingredient the help with weight loss actually has a dangerous pharmaceutical drug called bumetanide which can have some bad side effects.

What's even worse is that this supplement isn't the only culprit. The FDA found dozens of other supplements with pharmaceutical drug in them that are not declared on their ingredient list.

From the article:

“A large percentage of these products either contain dangerous undeclared ingredients or they might be outright fraudulent on the ingredients and have no effect at all,” said Michael Levy, the director of the F.D.A.’s division of New Drugs and Labeling Compliance. “We don’t think consumers should be using these products.”

But this is where my blood pressure rises substantially with how we deal with supplements in this country from this part of the article:

Enacted in 1994, the main law on dietary supplements gives the F.D.A. jurisdiction only after the products go on the market. Rather than reviewing the supplements and approving them for sale, as the agency does with drugs, the F.D.A. is limited to spot-checking manufacturers and distributors, and testing products already on store shelves. Even the F.D.A. acknowledges there may be hundreds of other drug-contaminated weight-loss supplements for sale that the agency does not have the resources to identify.

What this means is that as long as a company puts the word "supplement" on the bottle of a product, they can make any claim they want about what the product can do and don't have to provide a shred of evidence to back it up. The only time the FDA gets involved is when there is a health claim or substantial complaints about the product (like ephedra was investigated and subsequently banned in 2004 by the FDA).

There was a laughable (in my opinion) update to the law last year as the article states:

Last year, the F.D.A. adopted new “good manufacturing practices” rules that require makers of dietary supplements to test the purity of each ingredient and the final product. Another new statute, which went into effect in December 2007, requires manufacturers to notify the F.D.A. of any reports of serious health problems caused by the pills. “The law adequately protects consumer health because it does have the monitoring system in place,” said Mr. Mister, of the industry trade group.

Oh big whoop. So the manufacturers have prove that the supplements they are providing actually have the ingredients in them that they claim and that there are no other ingredients, but they still don't have to show that any of those ingredients actually do what they say the product will do.

Sure, the law protects consumers into MAYBE not getting sick by taking these supplements, but it doesn't protect them from throwing money at products that, in my opinion are nothing more than placebos.

But, it's a hard climb to the top in trying to prove a $24 billion industry is nothing but a scam.

Sorry, that turned into more of a rant than I had originally intended too. Stay away from weight loss supplements folks. Just eat right, exercise and you'll get results in the purest of forms.

www.leanbodyfitness.com
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