Just Say No

Remember "Betcha can't eat just one"?

Agri-Biz knows damn well its Ultra-Processed products are both addictive and toxic. Back in the 60’s, Lay’s Potato chips taunted: “Betcha can’t eat just one.”

Ultra-Processed Foods author Chris Van Tulleken is quite sanguine about the amoral nature of Agri-Biz mega-corporations. Agri-Biz makes squillions producing edible products that are a) cheaper than unprocessed foods, b) ready to eat or easy to prepare, and c) with a long shelf life. Yes, they are addictive slow-acting toxins, but both the convenience advantages and the profits would disappear if Agri-Biz produced healthy foods instead. The corporate shareholders would never stand for it. (Van Tulleken gives an example of one corporate CEO who had an attack of conscience - and was promptly turfed out by his Board of Directors!) Though Agri-Biz puts a lot of marketing dollars into pretending its products are ‘natural’ and ‘healthy,’ that’s the limit of what it is willing to do. In a capitalist system we cannot and should not expect them to do different.

Van Tulleken is far less sanguine in regards to the various entities that Agri-Biz has bought off: the FDA, academia, associations of health professionals, and the mainstream media.

He says that the worst lie perpetrated by these groups is the classic: “A calorie is a calorie is a calorie” - i.e., it doesn’t matter what crap you put into your body so long as you use willpower to control how much of it you eat, or, failing that, use willpower to exercise long enough to burn off all those extra calories.

In other words, we’re supposed to believe that 100 million Americans became weak-willed gluttons and sloths starting about 1980, and that this epidemic of anemic willpower has since been spreading to the world’s poorer countries. (The fact that this sudden loss of moral fibre coincides with the rapid growth of UPF in these countries is strictly coincidental, of course!)

Chris Van Tulleken figures that nature would no more let us control something as important as our food intake than it would leave us in charge of our heart rate, or our breathing. His take is that, when faced with the foodstuffs that nature provides, the human body is actually pretty good at knowing what to eat, and how much. We only think we’re in charge.

The problem is that UPF tricks the body in a whole host of ways.

Take the flavouring molecule glutamate, for example. In nature it is found in the highest concentration in meat which has been aged and cooked just the right amount for maximum nutrition. We’re genetically primed to experience glutamate as deliciously pleasurable to encourage such good cooking practices - and also encourage us to eat lots of any foodstuff that is high in glutamate. Agri-biz throws glutamate into all sorts of crap junk food to trick our brains into thinking that this crap is exactly what your body needs.

To my mind, the most diabolical UPF is Coca-Cola.

Our bodies like and crave sugar because nature so often uses sweetness as a signal that a fruit is safe to eat. Bitter tastes are most often associated with poisonous plants.

That said, too much sugar in a food causes a spike in blood sugar that is not good for the body. So we’re built with a ‘yuck’ response whenever anything is too sweet, to encourage us avoid anything that is too sweet.

The caffeine in Coca-Cola is bitter. Originally some sugar was added to make Coke more palatable. Then the makers of Coke discovered that the added sugar gave its own kind of high that added to the high of the caffeine.

But there was a limit to how much sugar could be added before the resulting drink became sickly sweet.

The manufacturers of Coke found three ways around this problem. First they added phosphoric acid to the formula. It’s an acid made from phosphate rock. It eats away at your tooth enamel. The phosphorus in it sucks the calcium from your bones, weakening them. But the sourness of the phosphoric acid offsets the sweetness of the sugar, so they could cram a lot more sugar into Coke without it being too sweet.

Then Coke’s scientists discovered that the fizziness of carbonation also undercut the body’s ‘too-sweet’ safety mechanism, as did drinking Coke cold - both of which enabled them to stuff even more sugar into Coke without setting off the ‘too sweet’ warning. (Try drinking warm, flat coke sometime - it’s so awful not even kids will drink it.)

The payoff for Coke in sneaking all that extra sugar past our taste buds, is that Coke then creates an addictive sugar ‘high’ of spiking blood sugar. It’s a short-term high that feels good. (There are ten teaspoons of sugar in a 12-ounce can of Coke.)

This blood sugar spike is typically followed by a blood-sugar crash as the body overreacts to the spike in blood sugar levels. Which makes you hungry - perhaps for another Coke!

All that sugar that the manufacturers have managed to stuff into Coke harms the body in three ways. First, as your blood sugar spikes, the pancreas pumps out insulin which converts the glucose in your blood into fat. Then the subsequent sugar crash cause you to feel low energy, and hungry, prompting you to drink more Coke or eat more food which can also be turned into fat. Finally, the frequent cycling between blood sugar spikes and crashes screws up your insulin system in ways that make you more prone to store more fat and/or become diabetic.

It is because UPF so often subverts or sabotages the body’s normal control mechanisms that Tulleken figures that trying to restrict your intake of addictive and toxic UPF through willpower is a highly risky proposition.

If, instead, you simply eliminate Ultra-Processed Foods as much possible from your diet, not only do you avoid a soup of thousands of chemical compounds of unknown toxicity, but you give your body foods that it is genetically equipped to know how to handle. Your body’s innate wisdom can then operate the way it was designed to do.