Stop Eating Bullshit
Diagnosis:
Here’s your grocery store:
There is a lot of evidence that a lot of humanity’s health problems are due to the grey bullshit section. We and our dopamine based human operating systems are suckers for this bullshit. The food in the grey section is food that is processed. It is food that is not food. It is an industrial produced edible substance. It tastes good. But it is screwing us up big time.
Cigarettes used to be thought of as OK. They were sold to patients in hospital beds.
Then we figured out that cigarettes were NOT OK. Top down government steps were taken and bottom up “people getting smarter” steps were taken. So smoking rates have gone down (at least at least in most liberal democracies) but lots of people still smoke even with the government restrictions and smokers knowing full well that it fcks up their lungs. And yes, smoking pot will mess up your lungs worse than cigarettes. The only hope for this will be getting a consistent oral drug delivery system for the THC. Sorry for the digression.
Diet has now replaced smoking as the health issue of the day so a cigarette moment is coming for the food industry.
The Aetiology:
There are lots of explanations out there for why ultra processed food (UPF) is now slowly killing us. It is making us fat. It is giving us diabetes. It is giving kids inflammatory bowel disease. Yadda yadda yadda.
There is a lot of sense to the story that UPF’s are bypassing some ancient “control eating” thermostats in our bodies. This concentrated-calorie-modern food, because it is so dry and soft and tasty, seems to slam into the upper GI tract (mouth, stomach) quickly and doesn’t allow for the rest of the gut to release hormones like in the good ol’ days with good ol’ food telling the brain, “Hey brain, the body is filled up! Don’t eat anymore!” You don’t have to chew modern food either which is screwing up our upper airways.
Now don’t get me wrong. I still think an individual has a responsibility for his/her individual health but there is a system out there that is Elizabeth Holmes-ing people. Age old argument. Is it nature or is it nurture. Is it the person’s fault or is it the system's fault. It’s not just one of them. It’s always two.
There’s also a lot of sense to the story that our body’s engine (mitochondria) are meant to run on hi test gas (glucose) but with the UPF’s, into the tank we are pouring in bunker oil (high concentrate fructose, that comes from all the subsidized corn)
The Pathogenesis:
BUT…this whole god damned food “problem” is really about incentives…yeah….that’s right….MONEY! The truth of the matter is that we’ve had enough food for decades so MORE profit only comes from MORE food. Food is focused group tested like crazy by the five big food companies on the planet and products that get you to eat more (whether you need to or not) are the ones that get to the grocery store shelf after all the expensive marketing research.
The other big money factor is that if you are a big food company and have waste that you are going to feed to animals or throw away, but you can somehow “process” it and flog it to your customers at 1000X the money of what the guys feeding animals will give you….then what the hell. That’s improved corporate efficiency. That’s serious capitalistic coin, man. Yes the last sentence was a little 1960’s, I admit.
The Complications:
A classic example of this 1000X is the animal tendon that is grounded up and sold to gym rats as “collagen” that will help them build muscle. What bullshit. If you have excess cottonseed oil which tastes like shit you can bleach it, deodorize it, solidify it and then emulsify it and ….. Voila! Margarine. Bread in plastic bags is not really bread anymore. It is a soft foam that is manufactured. But it does last longer on the shelf so there’s more profit in it. Nice chewy granola bars seem so moist. But it is not the water that’s doing that; it’s the glycerol. Monster Beverage Corporation over the last 25 year has been the biggest winner (just a shade south of 300,000%…yes…that is three hundred freekin’ thousand percent return) in the equity markets. It has doubled Apple's rate of return FFS. It is water, sugar, caffeine and a bunch of flavoring that we push on kids with advertising. So fcking what! We need to get our customers young! Asshole!
Kids are indeed bombarded with advertisements. Big strong men who are athletes and beautiful Barbie doll women that the kids can grow up to be just like if they eat this shit in a box (sugar) with the cartoon on the front.
And while I am raving. Don’t call me a red pinko communist socialist BUT this is worse for poor people. Much worse. And the basic reason is that poor people need a lot bigger percentage of their income (or maybe all of it!) to buy food. Hello grey section, here we come.
Now of course there are Warren Buffet type people who drink a case Coke everyday and live long lives with lots of money. But most people on this planet are not like this. I dunno, maybe in a thousand year Darwin’s evolution will select for them, but in the meantime there is going to be a lot of premature dying filled with expensive invasive medical “care”.
Food is provided to us by five, maybe six big companies (yeah, you could argue it is more than six but not by a lot). The big company’s main purpose is to be profitable. Now, that’s fine. Capitalism’s greed via the invisible hand is supposed to make society better but history is loaded with cases of companies where the invisible hand concentrates just a wheenzie bit too much on the profit thing and screws up a lot of things and is not so good. It is a repeating cycle. There’s innovation. There’s exploitation that follows. Then there’s reformation. Happened to the Medicis in Florence with the bonfires of vanity. Happened to the East India Company when their “increasing British trade” mission became secondary to them being a private killing dictator of India. Happened to the railroad lawyer turned president Abe Lincoln’s Great Pacific Railroad when Gould monopolized it and screwed farmers. Happening now to Big Tech. We are at the point now where some regulatory spanking will reign in these foods companies. If you are an individualist you say the market will do it. It you are a collectivist you say the government will do it. It will be both.
There is a really good point to make that we have been “reigning in” food companies for decades which is true….to a certain extent. There is a really good point to make that humans have been “processing” their food since we invented fire to act as a second stomach….fair enough.
These companies are just trying to make money from branding, from intellectual property hoarding, from repurposing waste which extracts money (voluntarily?) from individual customers. After all, they are competing. Right? But in a sense they really don’t have control of their business model as they are just doing what everyone else is doing. In a real sense you are looking at the multipolar trap of Moloch.
On Examination:
The definition of UPF boils down to… a)being in a plastic or tin foil bag, and b)has stuff in that bag added to it…stuff you don’t have in your kitchen. Another way to look at it is that they are little bags of concentrated sugar and salt and fat and calories and no fiber.
A large percentage of food is UPF. In other words it’s got a label (thank Christ that was demanded {regulated} decades ago) with all sorts of fancy chemical names on it. Now, in essence everything alive (us and what we eat) is chemicals. It’s just that the stuff that is put into food now is a lot different that the what occurred in “nature”?
The Treatment:
The success rate of diets is virtually zero. But the diet book is the biggest money maker in the book publishing business there is. Actually it is the whole self help book business so I exaggerated a bit. Actually (yes, I know, that’s the second actually) the main determinant of whether you buy a self help book (according to expensive market research) is whether you have bought a self help book in the past! Weird? Well, not really, I guess.
If you want your UPF addiction to change to disgust, try this. Buy a bucket of ice cream from the grey section. Pick the one with the most names on the legally required food contents label. Scoop out a big whack of it and throw it in a bowl. At the end of your so called eating experience you’ll see a lot of junk/warm foam in the bowl that doesn’t melt. This is xanthan gum. It is a filler or additive or chemical or emulsifier or thickener or stabilizer or you-pick-the-noun. It is put in the ice cream as a replacement for fat. Xanthan gum comes from the surface of bacteria. That’s where it gets its name (Xanthomonas campestris). Think of it as the gunk that’s in a dirty dishwasher filter. Hey man, that’s fcking gross! After thinking about this for a nanosecond you might not want to eat fake ice cream again!
Michael Pollan’s books have some good advice. One-Eat food (ie-not the stuff in tinfoil). Two-Not too much. Three-Mostly plants. The average good GP will say One-eat less or time restrict your eating. Two-Try not to drink calories like all those added sugar soft drinks. Three-Don’t smoke and cut down the booze. (ethanol is in fact a good organic solvent….dissolves brain tissue?) When I was a family doc I got tired of telling patients that how long their lives will be is entirely determined genetically by inheriting the right parents and environmentally by being born in the right country in a nuclear family. In other words, LUCK. The rest is bullshit. I didn’t last as a GP.
Now parents. Christ I hate giving unsolicited condescending advice to parents. LOL. But here goes. You (parents, that is) don’t have to be food Nazis over this stuff. Of course your kids can go out on Halloween and mau (or is it Mao?) down on the bag of sugar they collect. If your kids are at a kids party why can’t they overdose on sugar cake? You will look weird and your kids will be mocked if you are a prohibiting food Nazi.
The Prognosis:
If we took all the bullshit out the grey section of the grocery store then profits would fall and less dividends would be paid to Loblaw’s shareholders. Not going to happen (soon). The regenerative farming and degrowth folks who say we can provide ‘healthy” food to the world without oil from hobby farms are, for now, dreaming the pipe dream. The human operating system is still the same.
Optimistic note to end this rant on? Humans will figure this out but it won’t happen tomorrow.