Monday 7 November 2011

Now For Burgers And Coke

Hmm, let's see. What's the new tobacco today?

Well, it's fast food and fizzy drinks, as it happens. However, this time it's not just some obscure publicity-seeking crank offering up the nonsense.

A growing body of medical research at leading universities and government laboratories suggests that processed foods and sugary drinks made by the likes of PepsiCo Inc. and Kraft Foods Inc. (KFT) aren’t simply unhealthy. They can hijack the brain in ways that resemble addictions to cocaine, nicotine and other drugs.

“The data is so overwhelming the field has to accept it,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “We are finding tremendous overlap between drugs in the brain and food in the brain.”

Twenty-eight scientific studies and papers on food addiction have been published this year, according to a National Library of Medicine database. As the evidence expands, the science of addiction could become a game changer for the $1 trillion food and beverage industries.

If fatty foods and snacks and drinks sweetened with sugar and high fructose corn syrup are proven to be addictive, food companies may face the most drawn-out consumer safety battle since the anti-smoking movement took on the tobacco industry a generation ago.
This is worrying for the fact that one of the cornerstones of anti-smoking strategy - built up over decades - is that smokers are not making a free choice to enjoy cigarettes. They may think they enjoy them, but it's actually just an addiction.

This is the prime driving force behind the worldwide state and supranational quango attacks on tobacco. It's how governments square their claim of presiding over a free society with increasingly prohibitive legislation which is effectively 'banning' smoking by way of price, availability, denormalisation, and restrictions on where it can be consumed.

The weak case for cost to health services notwithstanding, the assertion that an individual is being forced, against their will, to smoke; that tobacco users all really, really want to give up - and if they don't, they just need more encouragement - is used daily against the free choice of smokers.

Now the template is being utilised to attack people who like to eat Big Macs and suck on a Diet Coke.

They don't just like such products, y'see, they are addicted to them.

“This could change the legal landscape,” said Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity and a proponent of anti-obesity regulation. “People knew for a long time cigarettes were killing people, but it was only later they learned about nicotine and the intentional manipulation of it.”
See what he did there? Calling down images of evil, omni-recognised demons within tobacco companies to help turn bovine minds against food and drink suppliers who have previously been very popular.

Because we have all been duped. That pleasure isn't real pleasure at all, it's just an illusion forced on us by greedy corporations.

Education, diets and drugs to treat obesity have proven largely ineffective and the new science of obesity may explain why, proponents say. Constant stimulation with tasty, calorie- laden foods may desensitize the brain’s circuitry, leading people to consume greater quantities of junk food to maintain a constant state of pleasure.
Education doesn't work. Again, this was a plank of anti-smoking propaganda. Smokers are unable to make decisions based on mere information or warnings, they're addicted and so bullying is the only option!

While anti-smokers have long compared (wrongly) nicotine with Heroin, anti-food campaigners have chosen the same strategy from the tobacco control template ... just using a different drug.

Binge-Eating Rats

The results produced the same brain pattern that occurs with escalating intake of cocaine, [Paul Kenny, the Scripps scientist heading the study] wrote.

“To see food do the same thing was mind-boggling,” Kenny later said in an interview.
Indeed, it's worse than that!

A 2007 French experiment stunned researchers when it showed that rats prefer water sweetened with saccharine or sugar to hits of cocaine
Is your belief in real life suspended yet? Don't worry, there'll be plenty more of this to come, if not.

Little wonder that the food industry is pushing hard on the idea that the best way to get a handle on obesity is through voluntary measures and by offering healthier choices. The same tactic worked for awhile, decades ago, for the tobacco industry, which deflected attention from the health risks and addictive nature of cigarettes with “low tar and nicotine” marketing.
Yes, it worked "for a while", until the incessant barrage of propaganda turned tobacco from a choice which comes with risk, into an almost nuclear substance which will kill people after the merest second or two of exposure.

And just to further prove that this idiocy has been unleashed thanks to the stable door being thrown open to shrill tobacco controllers, here's anti-smoking, arch-lunatic lawyer, John Banzhaf, chasing the potentially lucrative new ambulance (and he'll have plenty of clients, too).


Once free will is destroyed as a concept for perceived unhealthy foods and drink, governments feel perfectly justified in denormalising them for your own good.

Eye-watering taxes, product warnings, advertising bans, demonisation and display restrictions are all clearly on the horizon for the fast food industry. It really is only a matter of time.

Still, at least Aunt Gladys won't have to sniff a wisp of smoke when she has her monthly tea and scone at Wetherspoons, so who cares about the elimination of personal choices as a result, eh?


13 comments:

George Speller said...

"a growing body of evidence . . ." Yup. "e've seen it all before.

Meanwhile (not online) the Telegraph reports:



Fortunately I've learned from you and your fellow bloggers to blow a whole wide open in stories like these. Thanks DP.

George Speller said...

oops!

George Speller said...

"a growing body of evidence . . ." Yup. "e've seen it all before.

Meanwhile (not online) the Telegraph reports:



Fortunately I've learned from you and your fellow bloggers to blow a whole wide open in stories like these. Thanks DP.

George Speller said...

Sorry, DP - you'll have to remove these. It won't let me post properly!

Anonymous said...

Forget burgers ,coke ,lard,crisps,
booze ,salt and crinkly cut chips.
What about the STRESS I suffer at the hands of UKBA arriving back in
England with a few pouches of
Golden Virginia yet down in the cozysouth,murderers,terrorists,
rapists,drugdealers,paedophiles,
pickpockets,
illegal immigrants,perverts,freaks
and other assorted southern jessies are waved through with a welcoming smiles.
One UKBA uniformed chimpanzee spent 3 hours 48 minutes asking why I went to Belgium for cheap baccy. I could have told the Comprehensive educated jobsworth
in 10 seconds if he had allowed me
BECAUSE THEY'RE F*****G CHEAPER

Mind you "all",who is bothered ?


The Saxon Wall

tomsmith said...

I'm losing the will to live with this constant barrage of anti-human insanity. Why do these people hate everything that makes life better?

I went on a course today about fertiliser use in agriculture. Apparently the government is considering pesticide and nitrogen taxes to make people use less of them. They don't appear to realise that pesticides and fertiliser are what make food cheap and plentiful and that this is a good thing. All they can see is pollution and greenhouse gas emission. There comes a point where you realise they are insane.

Trooper Thompson said...

These people are addicted to fucking with us.

Anonymous said...

Aunt Gladys's "tea and scones?" I don't think so! Tea contains caffeine which is no doubt on the shortlist for similar treatment in the future and - well - scones??! Those things contain not just sugar but CARBS - doncha know??!

C'mon, DP. Get with the program, will you? Mineral water and celery sticks ONLY!

smokervoter said...

@tomsmith

Well said. These five words of yours are most concise and powerful:

"this constant barrage of anti-human insanity".

I would only add that they also hate anything that pleases people as well, such as; a cigarette with a pint of beer, munching down an entire super-sized bag of crisps dipped in guacamole in one sitting just because you can and want to.

There are insane lifestyle architects amongst us who confuse building materials with flesh and blood. And typically their one-size-fits-all floor plan for life doesn't jibe with humankind's many passions and quirks.

Barnacle Bill said...

As soon as I hear the words:
The data is so overwhelming the field has to accept it,
I know they're trying to pull a fast one on me.

Lyn said...

Anonymous - I know only too well the stress that the UKBA can induce, but what about the total stress and DEPRESSION recent governments and these bansturbators cause?

After 5 years of hard fought for treatment for depression, brought on by the smoking ban announcement and then inception, I am finally coming out the other side and as a result losing weight!

Whilst in the deeper, darker times, although initially my weight went down, it then piled back on plus a couple of stone more; you see when stressed and/or depressed, at the times you feel like eating it is always the unhealthy foods that offer the comfort and consolation. Now that I am coming out the other side I am not so drawn to these foods. I am finding myself surprised that I don't want chocolate much now when only a few months ago I would happily a large bar or a family size bag of Minstrels or Revels in one sitting.

It is about time that governments realised the far greater harm they are doing to the population and that same harm is exacerbating the obesity problem. They also need to realise that more investment is needed in the Mental Health services.

It took several failed suicide attempts before I started to get the treatment I needed, rather than just the drugs! The team I was seeing also said how their workload had increased by almost 50% with the smoking ban! Says one hell of a lot, don't you think?

By the way, back to the UKBA - we no longer fly from Birmingham! We never liked it anyway as returning to Birmingham Airport was like walking into a flea pit - in fact, I think a flea pit would have seemed cleaner and more welcoming - and that was just the decor!

Xen said...

Surely, the only place we're ultimately going with all of this, is Soylent Green isn't it?

Humph said...

Well I can sort of relate to this. Whenever I happen to accidentally ( and probably illegally, or at the very least a show of morale corruption) have 10 pints or a bottle and a half of Aussie Shiraz, I seem to lose all control of my faculties and I become totally and overwhelmingly obsessed ( obsessed I tell you!) with slotting a bit fat chicken tindaloo, pilau rice and garlic naan.

My hand is controlled by an alien force as I do all I can to prevent it dialling the takeaway number. I MUST have my curry at all costs, neither wild horses nor John Prescott can stop me (unless he eats it first). I will travel to the ends of the earth to make sure I wake up with stained yellow fingers and some empty but possibly useful litle silver container things in the morning.

I'm a fucking outta control confirmed class A addict baby!