Are You Really Choosing Your Food?
When was the last time you went an entire day without seeing a single food ad? The marketing spend for food and drink amounts to $14 billion annually. The strange thing about advertisements is the disparity with how much we ignore them and how much money continues to fuel them every year. Never do we imagine a scenario where we see an ad for a burger and have an immediate desire to stop by the drive-thru to pick one up. The assumption is that maybe other people are more inspired and we’re simply not the target audience. Instead, the goal of advertising is not to create an immediate need for a product, but to plant a seed for an association of a particular brand with positive thoughts and feelings. Have you ever seen an obese person in a fast food ad? I haven’t, despite nearly half the population being obese. Obesity doesn’t trigger happy thoughts. It’s always young, slim attractive people with burgers that a food artist spent hours expertly crafting. The fact that the actual product looks like dog diarrhea is neither here nor there. Through this means, products find their way into popular culture, which then increases their demand as the seed sprouts and grows.
Labels are another clever means by which positive feelings are provoked. Research has shown that the presence of labeling, whether related to the taste or health of the food product, directly impacts our emotional response to that food. Whether or not we consciously notice a difference, the difference can be measured in the amygdala of the brain. So even when our conscious intelligence knows that label claims are usually nonsense, they work on a deep subconscious level. If this is the case, is mandatory nutrition labeling really worth the trouble? Suddenly, creating food products becomes a game to find out how much calorie and sugar counts can be manipulated with the addition of artificial sweeteners, or adding the right vitamins to present an illusion of quality.
It begs the question: how many of our food beliefs today are truly culturally organic? There’s no quantifiable exact answer, but because nutrition science is far from solved, following the crowd feels safe, while trying to decipher scattered disagreements among so-called experts seems as fruitless as proving one religion over another. A change in habits feels dangerous, unfamiliar, and threatens to usurp daily rituals of no particular meaning other than everyone else is doing it. As the most socially cooperative species to ever exist, humans have a survival instinct to follow the crowd that has proven its usefulness time and time again. At the same time, the wisdom of crowds with regards to nutrition obviously fails when the data is scrutinized. With 38% of the adult population being pre-diabetic, 74% being overweight, and almost half having high blood pressure, the typical food belief system starts to resemble a dangerous cult. The problem with cults is that internally, their extreme dogma is both normal and accepted. Only by stepping outside can a trapped soul really see what is happening. In the cult of American food culture, alarmingly high rates of illness are normal. A century ago, these same numbers would have been outlandish, but luckily, now we can take medications to make our numbers look better while never curing the diseases.
Probably the most dangerous belief of all is what constitutes healthy food. We are told to accept that only unhealthy food tastes good while healthy food is bland. Don’t defy the cult of Kellogg’s and McDonald’s lest you suffer in an eternal damnation of eating broccoli and lentils. Dismissing this misunderstanding as an honest mistake would be easier if 95% of the people writing the dietary guidelines didn’t have a conflict of interest with food and pharmaceutical companies. Like most cults, common sense is ignored in favor of following the visions and scriptures of prophets, until those visions and scriptures become the new common sense. That is the world we find ourselves in, and only through proper education and scientific understanding do we have a way out.