Americans Are Right: We Can’t Trust Some Major Institutions

Big Food Makes Your Kids Sick

I went to a medical school largely funded by Big Tobacco money and my mother’s family had a farm. Their major cash crop was tobacco. When I was a small boy, I pulled tobacco off curing barn sticks to make a little spending money. Everyone in my mother’s family used tobacco. I had every reason to be conflicted when Dr. David Kessler and others began their work to protect Americans from a predatory industry, but by that time I was already a physician and the evidence was clear. Tobacco smoke is a deadly, noxious poison that kills and disables many who use it and even has an impact on others nearby. I have always supported efforts to protect Americans from the tobacco companies that target vulnerable communities and children. They altered their products to make them even more addictive. You can’t trust big tobacco companies. They have been able to continue their predatory activities because of extensive political lobbying and public relations. Facts, evidence, the truth, and the courage to step up like Dr. Kessler did are the only way the make progress and protect Americans. Politics is entirely about power and money. That’s it. When politicians face an effort to protect your health they start squawking about the “nanny state” to protect their good old boy donors. That squawking is designed to take your eye off the ball so they can get even more power and even more money.

My last post described a three-fold increase in heart diseases related to obesity and once again Dr. David Kessler has worked out the root cause. It you want to protect your children and family from obesity, related diseases, premature disability, and early death, his book The End of Overeating is excellent. It has helped me lose almost 70 pounds and keep it off. Kessler’s insight is simple. There are ten times as many adults with type 2 diabetes per 1000 Americans today as there were 50 years ago because Americans changed what they eat. We used to eat real food prepared at home. Now we eat fast food and highly processed food. As with Big Tobacco, Big Food knows how to make their products more addictive by combining sugar, salt, fat, and carbs in combinations that are addictive. The taste and texture of a potato chip are so good that many of us really “can’t eat just one.” It is the same with hamburgers, fries, soda, and milk shakes. Of course, it tastes better. It is so highly pleasurable that it lights up the same areas in the brain as cocaine—and sugar is the worst.

“The third section of the book, which examines the phenomenon called “conditioned overeating,” is in some ways the most important, because it describes how overeating can, over time, become automatic. People will eat more and more food to experience the same feeling of reward, and thus, overeating can become truly an addiction, like gambling and substance abuse. Conditioned overeating explains why simply driving by a restaurant can lead us to crave the foods they serve, why trying to avoid thinking about a particular food we like can increase our desire for that food and how emotional states (stress, anger, anxiety) can lead to overeating”.

The cigarette industry targeted kids with their Joe Camel cartoon ads. There is nothing they won’t do for power and money. Big Food is doing the same thing today. Sit down with your kids watching their cartoons some day and just watch the ads—juices and soda loaded with high-fructose corn syrup, sugar coated cereals, and fast food. Your kids become addicted to this food and won’t eat real whole food. You can’t get them to eat it because Big Food has captured them just like big tobacco did. Big companies make your kids overweight to get more money and power. There should be a ban on marketing foods that makes kids sick just as there is for cigarettes. That is the least we can do. That is not the “nanny state.” Children are powerless against these ads that play on their emotions. The first duty of government is to protect Americans.

There are other important policy changes that should be made. We spend 5 billion a year subsidizing sugar farmers to keep prices low. We spend $30 billion a year subsidizing large farms owned by wealthy people to grow corn, wheat and soybeans. This is welfare for the good old boys. If we are going to subsidize anything, we should support smaller farmers who grow fruits and vegetables and make them more available to poor and disadvantaged people.

There are plenty of real answers to real problems that we can implement now. The increases in diabetes and heart disease are not genetic. They are not hereditary in the usual sense. They are related to changes in gene regulation caused by  fast food, processed food, and weight gain. They are driven by family food culture and the related changes in gene regulation that can be inherited. Changes in national policy can make a big difference. We should protect our children. If we don’t use facts, evidence, and the truth to guide us we will fail.