It is common to compare the present struggle over obesity and public health to the state tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s. Many articles and pundits believe that the threat to public health by industrial food companies resembles the threat to public health by tobacco companies.
This comparison may be apt in more ways than one, though. New scientific research shows that chemically and scientifically designed food plays a critical role in the involuntary nervous system. This system is connected to the brain's reward center. Like nicotine in cigarettes, it appears that industrial food contains critical combinations of substances that the brain finds intoxicating and addictive. We know these substance as sugar, fat and salt. This alarming and straightforward information is the subject of the recent book The End of Overeating by David A. Kessler, MD.
Researchers like Kessler have found that industrial food is "hyperpalatable." In other words, it induces eating that happens "outside our awareness" (Kessler 7). In new studies of animal behavior and human brains, eating food appears to be a separate activity than simply nourishing hunger. Scientists and biologists once thought that food regulated hunger in just this way. They used a homeostatic model of regulation to theorize the body's ability to eat and not eat according to when it was necessary. Yet it appears that the biological forces in play during digestion have less to do with the stomach than with the mind.
Since foraging and securing food was a vital task for human beings before the advent of modern food economies, the human brain is wired to motivate eating in the same way that mammal brains wire animals in the wild. Humans and animals rely on emotional rewards for securing food. Emotions are the surest way to motivate behavior, not logic, reason, or even planning. Over time the emotional "reward center" of the brain, which is connected to the release of positive emotional neurochemicals, evolved to connect the most pleasurable chemicals to the substances found least in nature: sugar, fat, and salt. It is a perverse irony of evolution that these same substances are now manufactured cheaply and everywhere. It is not, therefore, a coincidence that food corporations create ever more products with these substances in ever more emotionally rewarding combinations.
Foods that contain these meticulously designed combinations of sugar, fat, and salt are called hyperpalatable. This food stimulates brain circuitry that releases intensely pleasurable neurochemicals, called "opioids," that give bodies a euphoric feeling. They also relieve stress and pain in the body. In study after study in rats, sugar and fat receive the same preferential treatment as cocaine. Dosing oneself with sugar, fat, and salt even has a scientific name: "orosensory self-stimulation" (Kessler 37). When the right combination of sugar, fat, and salt hits the brain, it's called touching the brain's "hot spot" (Kessler 40). This hot spot is the ultimate trigger for the release of opioids into the bloodstream. Hyperpalatable foods are the crack cocaine of the industrial food system.
The human body learns to crave these substances the same way that it craves drugs. Visual cues induce appetite and yearning. Simply seeing foods such as these can set off powerful triggers of desire in the brains of potential eaters. Just like addicts, bodies wired for hyperpalatable foods choose the same locations over and over to "use" them. This conditioned preference for place is common in bodies addicted to nicotine, alcohol, and other drugs. Moreover, over time bodies crave new combinations as the brain comes to "tolerate" certain "tastes." The food industry calls this craving "dynamic contrast." Ice cream must have a hard shell on the outside; pretzels must be added to the ice cream; a powder-sugar coating must be added to a chocolate dip. This lust for variety is the hallmark of addiction. Yet this addiction isn't an analogy, or "like" drug addictions. Industrial food plays the brain the same as other drugs, and it's just as lethal over time.
The health consequences of sugar, fat, and salt are obvious. The human body gains weight and becomes sick from over-eating these substances. Heart disease, obesity, and diabetes have reached epidemic proportions in the United States. The film Food, Inc reports that 1 in 3 children born after the year 2000 will contract early-onset diabetes. The threat to public health is obvious, just as it's obvious that the FDA and the USDA have sided with the industrial food system in the long-term battle over public health versus private profits. Corporations have never been more powerful in US history, or had this much influence over legislation. Therefore new regulatory legislation is just as unlikely to have an effect as it is to be passed by the US Congress.
In Suing the Tobacco and Lead Pigment Industries, Donald G. Gifford reviews the legal frameworks that made it possible for state attorney generals, such as Mississippi attorney general Mike Moore, to begin suing tobacco corporations for harmful products. Overall, Gifford finds that the courts resisted class-action lawsuits brought by ordinary citizens as a way to regulate corporate behavior. It was therefore necessary to have the executive branch, represented by the attorney generals, take on corporate responsibility and malfeasance.
This reveals a precedent for potential new lawsuits, but also a dangerous trend. On the one hand, it is possible to force corporations to take responsiblity for harmful products. On the other hand, the judicial system has essentially nullfied the power of Congress to regulate products -- the executive branch, of all places, is where the last remaining "legal" power of the people resides.
Anticipating the defense of the industrial food corporations is important. In the the tobacco lawsuits, one of the main legal counter-concepts used by the companies to skirt their responsiblity was the common law notion of volenti non fit injuria, or "to a willing person no injury is done." Arguably, people know eating ice cream is bad for them. They know that eating fast food is harmful; they do it anyway. But the new science says that people are addicted to these substances, and use them to self-medicate stress, among other things.
The tobacco corporations lied about nicotine being addictive. This means that the real test for the industrial food corporations is to subpoena them and make them testify about what they know. Do they realize they're designing food people can't stop eating?
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