Food Addiction – Ultra Processed Food

Food Production

As we discussed in the last video, we’ve been processing our food since we started cooking it. (Really, I’m sure we were smashing/grinding it before that, so I’m not saying cooking was the definitive beginning, but that it was an undeniable catalyst.

Cooking, canning, smoking, curing, brining, and dehydrating are all processes we put food through.

The Industrial Revolution brought forward mechanization and the assembly line. This meant lots of conveyor-belt foods in boxes that could stay on shelves a long time without spoiling.

It also birthed agricultural practices that dramatically increased the yield of food production, and the ability to turn a bigger profit for the people with the most tokens already. I truly recommend watching some of the many documentaries out there about the system of our food production. There are a lot to choose from.

I recommend starting with Food Inc. but I don’t want to lose you. Let’s see how much we can learn from the trailers. (Occasionally I’ve stumbled on food documentaries that present very alternate views. I recommend watching them all, and dissecting them for yourself.)

The Industrial Revolution also birthed the rise of Fast Food, as we continued to specialize, leaving less time for food preparation, and contributing to the loss of cultural food knowledge (knowing how to cook dinner).

Morgan Spurlock made a pretty big splash when Super Size Me came out, examining in trackable metrics how a month of McDonald’s affects the human body, and presenting it all in a video format. This was in response to a legal case, where two individuals were suing McDonalds for their obesity.

(Is this a good time to make the point that everything is legal in America until it isn’t? America is historically anti-regulation and pro-free market, because that’s what generates the tokens. That means that unless you discover that something is harmful, find proof, build a case, and have the money to enter that into the legal system, they just get to keep doing it, while Americans walk around thinking, “If they feed it to us, it must be ok.”)

His sequel looked at the questionable nutrition of the “health food” in fast food, and the distance between what we’re told, and what it really means.

Now admittedly, Morgan Spurlock died in his fifties. I don’t want to say it’s from eating McDonalds for a month. I AM curious if it’s because he couldn’t stop eating it after that.

The cause of his demise are irrelevant because the results are replicable.

So what’s going into those foods we crave?

Dang. That’s a lot to digest.

The FDA isn’t reviewing the things that hurt us.

The FDA isn’t reviewing the things that hurt us.

Did you catch the part where the FDA is just taking the food production companies’ word for what’s safe? I bet you did!

What’s driving this process? (Follow the Tokens)

Why don’t we know this? Why haven’t we acted on this? Shouldn’t we be able to get up, go to work, stop at the grocery store for food that is acceptable for sale in our country, and go home and eat it without it being unsafe?

Not everyone is a natural-borne researcher. Our basic public education should be sufficient to teach us how to be safe, and instead of explaining how faulty the system is, it guilts the citizen for making “poor choices.” It conditions the citizen to see the government as benevolent and protective, and blameless. Gross.

You shouldn’t have to be a genius to safely navigate being American. Even people who despise scholarship deserve to be safe as American citizens.

I have a bag of Xantham gum in my pantry to replace the corn starch that I can’t have. It’s incredibly interesting to work with, but I would never add molded broccoli to the sauce. I also only used it once because it got REALLY WEIRD.

We like our foods THICK, MOIST, DELICIOUS and we want them to LAST until we are done with them. ‘Merica!

How did you feel about that last video knowing what you know now? Did your spine squirm at the gaslighting.

“Don’t worry.”

“It’s completely safe.”

“Your government is here to protect you, and they checked everything.”

“Regulation is for countries that treat their people like petulant children.”

These are the lies being touted while admitting to you how scary it actually is. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

Did you catch that the same companies are already making versions of these products, without the harmful stuff in them, to sell in countries that have banned them? They are already producing it, but the safer food just isn’t available to us, because we’re not petulant children. Lucky us.

Tired of being Gaslit?

The Center for Science in the Public Interest maintains a list of food additives and their associated health effects. Unfortunately, the site is difficult to navigate, and kind of overwhelming.

The FDA keeps a database of all food ingredients and what they are used for. For such an official and formally put together page, it’s interesting that they couldn’t add a column on potential hazards. I wonder why they would have left that out.

The bottom line from the FDA is that, “Food manufacturers are responsible for marketing safe foods.”

You can also check out what the FDA has to say about color food additives. It’s like they don’t know that we can tell the difference between “subject to certification,” and “tested through replicable scientific rigor.”

Perusal of the page shows pretty clearly how the FDA protects the interests of those with the most tokens, while using language to make the public “feel safe,” without actually working toward their safety. Although food dyes can’t be submitted as GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe), they can if the company claims another function, as a way to slip it through the loophole.

It’s actually necessary to look to a variety of sources. I did a deep search about MSG years ago, and everything I could find said it was safe, and that the hype about it had been nothing but lies. That’s not the whole story. That’s a side of the story that was paid for, with those tokens being amassed by the people on top.

Healthline published a list of 12 additives to avoid and why, and MSG is right there at the top because it is linked with adverse health effects.

Who on earth, with a full-time job and adulty obligations, like feeding a family, or going to city council meetings, or coordinating volunteers for the PTA, has time to do this much research? If we don’t do this much research, then we just eat the diet that is marketed to us, while feeling guilty for how it affects our bodies.

I gotta say, I’m really not cool with that.

That’s why I put my deep dives together like this.

It doesn’t mean I know everything. It doesn’t mean that every word presented here is gospel. I highly encourage you to thoroughly engage in critical thinking over everything I present. Inspect it. Question it. Pull it apart. Interrogate it. Ask who is paying for the information that you’re getting. (I haven’t made a single cent from this blog so far, so I’m definitely not the one with the tokens.) Ask whose agenda it serves. Ask your body how food affects it. Notice what’s being pushed on you, and how often.

We’re really getting somewhere, and I’m really proud of you for hanging in there with me.

Let’s Wrap It Up

Yesterday, we took a very brief look at the coevolution of humans and food.

• Australopithecines- We started out foraging, and spending a lot of time chewing/digesting.
• Cooking- Cooking food meant less time spent foraging, less time spent chewing/digesting, and much higher caloric returns. This created some serious free time.
• Domestication- We started influencing our environments, and not only learned how to grow our food plants more effectively, but we also encouraged the growth of traits that we like.
• Agricultural Revolution- We started maintaining big crops, that could malnourish much larger populations of people. (Population exploded, but our health declined). We became sedentary and started living in villages.
• Specialization– Growing the food to feed large quantities of people doesn’t require ALL of the people, and now that we were living in one place with a group of people, dynamics changed. Instead of each member of the group carrying all of the cultural competence, some people farmed, some people transported, some people sold, some people banked, some people made rules, some people enforced rules, some made war, some educated, some owned other human beings to steal their labors too, as is the case with slavery, prostitution, indentured servants, etc.
• Token Economy- Once it’s too complicated to barter directly, tokens are exchanged to keep the score, and the most powerful people have the most tokens.
• Credit– Situations arise in which people have needs, and wants they don’t have adequate tokens to meet, so they end up owing it, plus some. This gave the people with surplus tokens even more power. (muahahaha)
• Sugarcane Trade- People with the most tokens focused on addictive endeavors. Because sugarcane was so desired, it was heavily traded, and many people were brutally enslaved to accommodate it. These same trade routes carried slaves for similar endeavors of the Cult of the Ego, like tobacco production.
• The Industrial Revolution– Shelf stable foods became central to the American diet. Meat became scarce. People relied heavily on processing, like canning, curing, smoking, salting, drying, and pickling to preserve food and avoid foodborne illnesses.
• Food Apartheid– The government using food to wage war on populations. (Cutting food stamps is a form of food apartheid).
• Food Dessert- Areas where food scarcity constrains populations.
• Processed Foods– The Industrial Revolution mechanized food production, and created desirable foods that take a long time to spoil.

Tomorrow

We’re going to bust into the specifics of Food Addiction. I can’t wait to tell you all of the secrets that I’ve been building up to! (Tomorrow’s the punchline so you better come back. I’m practically bursting here!)

Before we do I want to leave you with one final video. Please watch it. If you think that everything I’ve presented you is a load of hogwash, pretty please watch it. If someone you know is struggling to accept this American relationship with food, please, hound them until they watch it.

Oh, could we have one more little aside before we both go our separate ways for the day?

I was hoping that you’d consider sharing my content.

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you being here, and how much it matters to me that I’m not alone in all of this. You matter to me. You are also truly powerful.

There are algorithms that limit my reach, because I can’t afford to pay for “premium packages” and “premium features.”

I continue to adamantly oppose this pay-to-play system.

For less than pennies a day, you can bring the word of these revelations to a wider audience. You, all on your own, wherever you are, have a tremendous power to change the lives of so many living under the Cult of the Ego, by simply sharing these posts on your social media.

There are so many ways for you to make a tremendous impact for less that the cost of a cup of overprocessed coffee.

In addition to sharing, you can also send these articles directly to people who need the information. You can bring them up in conversation around the water cooler. You can go talk about them in the Facebook Group or the other Facebook Group. You can like, comment, and subscribe to the blog.

For a slightly higher contribution, you can make a donation that will go directly to my efforts to fight The Man. The donation form should be located at the bottom of the page.

Thank you and Bon Appetit!

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