Carbohydrate Addiction is Epidemic........Part3 Conclusion
Novel Flavor-Enhancers May Also Contribute to Food Addiction
Another guiding principle for the processed food industry
is known as “sensory-specific satiety.” Moss describes this as “the
tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm your brain, which
responds by depressing your desire to have more.” The greatest
successes, whether beverages or foods, owe their “craveability” to
complex formulas that pique your taste buds just enough, without
overwhelming them, thereby overriding your brain’s inclination to say
“enough.”
Novel biotech flavor companies like Senomyx also play an important role.
Senomyx specializes in helping companies find new flavors
that allow them to use less salt and sugar in their foods. But does that
really make the food healthier? This is a questionable assertion at
best, seeing how these “flavor enhancers” are created using secret,
patented processes. They also do not need to be listed on the food
label, which leaves you completely in the dark. As of now, they simply
fall under the generic category of artificial and/or natural flavors,
and they don’t even need to be tested for safety, as they’re used in
minute amounts.
How to Combat Food Addiction and Regain Your Health
To protect your health, I advise spending 90 percent of your food
budget on whole foods, and only 10 percent on processed foods. It’s
important to realize that refined carbohydrates like breakfast cereals,
bagels, waffles, pretzels, and most other processed foods quickly break
down to sugar, increase your insulin levels, and cause insulin
resistance, which is the number one underlying factor of nearly every
chronic disease and condition known to man, including weight gain.
By taking the advice offered in the featured study and cutting out
these high-glycemic foods you can retrain your body to burn fat instead
of sugar. However, it’s important to replace these foods with healthy
fats, not protein—a fact not addressed in this research. I believe most
people may need between 50-70 percent of their daily calories in the
form of healthful fats, which include:
1. Olives & Olive oil
2. Coconut and Coconut Oils
3. Natural whole fat butter
4. Organic raw nuts, especially macadamia nuts, which are low in omega-6 fat.
5. Organic pastured eggs and pastured meats
6. Avocados
A growing body of evidence also suggests that intermittent fasting
is particularly effective if you’re struggling with excess weight as it
provokes the natural secretion of human growth hormone (HGH), a
fat-burning hormone. It also increases resting energy expenditure while
decreasing insulin levels, which allows stored fat to be burned for
fuel. Together, these and other factors will turn you into an effective
fat-burning machine.
Best of all, once you transition to
fat burning mode your cravings for sugar and carbohydrates will
virtually disappear, as if by magic... While you’re making the
adjustment, you could supplement L-Glutamine (1,000MG) before each meal
and 3,000-6,000 MG at bed time. This will help reduce cravings.
Other tricks to help you overcome your sugar cravings include:
Exercise: Anyone who exercises intensely on a regular basis
will know that a significant amount of resistance exercise is one of
the best "cures" for food cravings. It always amazes me how my appetite,
especially for sweets, dramatically decreases after a good workout. I
believe the mechanism is related to the dramatic reduction in insulin
levels that occurs after exercise.
Organic black
coffee: Coffee is a potent opioid receptor antagonist, and contains
compounds such as cafestrol -- found plentifully in both caffeinated and
decaffeinated coffee -- which can bind to your opioid receptors, occupy
them and essentially block your addiction to other opioid-releasing
foods. This may profoundly reduce the addictive power of other
substances, such as sugar.
Carbohydrate Addiction is Epidemic........Part 2
The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food
Previous research has demonstrated that refined sugar is
more addictive than cocaine, giving you pleasure by triggering an innate
process in your brain via dopamine and opioid signals. Your brain
essentially becomes addicted to stimulating the release of its own
opioids.
Researchers have speculated that the sweet
receptors located on your tongue, which evolved in ancestral times when
the diet was very low in sugar, have not adapted to the seemingly
unlimited access to a cheap and omnipresent sugar supply in the modern
diet.
Therefore, the abnormally high stimulation of
these receptors by our sugar-rich diets generates excessive reward
signals in your brain, which have the potential to override normal
self-control mechanisms, thus leading to addiction.
But it doesn’t end there. Food manufacturers have gotten savvy to the
addictive nature of certain foods and tastes, including saltiness and
sweetness, and have turned addictive taste into a science in and of
itself.
In a recent New York Times article, Michael
Moss, author of Salt Sugar Fat, dished the dirt on the processed food
industry, revealing that there’s a conscious effort on behalf of food
manufacturers to get you hooked on foods that are convenient and
inexpensive to make.
I recommend reading his
article in its entirety, as it offers a series of case studies that shed
light on the extraordinary science and marketing tactics that make junk
food so hard to resist.
Sugar, salt and fat are
the top three substances making processed foods so addictive. In a Time
Magazine interview discussing his book, Moss says:
“One of the things that really surprised me was how concerted and
targeted the effort is by food companies to hit the magical formulation.
Take sugar for example. The optimum amount of sugar in a product became
known as the 'bliss point.' Food inventors and scientists spend a huge
amount of time formulating the perfect amount of sugar that will send us
over the moon, and send products flying off the shelves. It is the
process they've engineered that struck me as really stunning.”
It’s important to realize that added sugar (typically in the
form of high fructose corn syrup) is not confined to junky snack foods.
For example, most of Prego’s spaghetti sauces have one common feature,
and that is sugar—it’s the second largest ingredient, right after
tomatoes. A half-cup of Prego Traditional contains the equivalent of
more than two teaspoons of sugar.
