Junk Food is Addicting and Killing People

Activist Post – by Stephanie Relfe

100,000 people in a town called Tecoma, in Victoria, Australia, are fighting a battle to keep McDonald’s away from their town, where McDonald’s wants one of its junkstores to be built near the school, naturally, because when you push food that addicts people like drugs do, you want to be where you can create customers for life. The people of the town have even taken the fight to Chicago. Their slogan is aptly named BurgerOff. Their website ishttp://www.burgeroff.org/.  

The evils of junk food are even worse than most people know. The following is Chapter 27 from my book You’re not Fat, You’re Toxic, which explains how the growing obesity epidemic, along with increasing diseases such as diabetes, is caused by toxins (like those in junk food from supermarkets, as well as from fast food), NOT by calories, which is what the corporations would like us to believe:

TOXIC FOOD #14, JUNK FOOD = JUNK BODY

Fast food is part of junk food, but it’s not the only source of it, because supermarkets are full of junk food. Since so many people know that junk food is fattening and unhealthy, one would think that all fast food outlets would have closed down by now. However, since so many people still give their money to junk food companies, and because junk food is a major cause of obesity, I thought I would include information on it, not because it’s high in calories, but because it is so toxic, in the hope that this will encourage you to never give them another dollar of your money, until they change their ways. Fast food does not have to be so toxic and fattening.

Why do people keep eating fast food when obviously everyone wants to be slim, so that they can look and feel great? Why do we have to have organizations like “Overeaters Anonymous” for people who believe, as they say on the website, “Our symptoms may vary, but we share a common bond: we are powerless over food and our lives are unmanageable (1).”

It’s because junk food works like drugs. That is, junk food is addictive. People who can’t control their eating are not addicted to food. It’s just that the particular foods that they eat are addictive. When these people make the switch to a diet made of vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds and legumes, with a few other foods such as organic eggs and millet bread, they will see their hunger and cravings go down.

Nature programmed us to want to get the most energy-dense foods. This was designed to help us to stay alive when food was scarce, so that we could pack maximum energy into a small stomach. Therefore, nature gave us pleasure-circuits in our brain that cause feelings of euphoria and excitement when we eat foods that have lots of energy in a small volume (2). The trouble is that now we can increase calorie density artificially, by processing and adding sugar and fats.

The junk food companies know this, but they don’t care, because it makes them rich. I like to think of them as a part of the Food Mafia. They are little more than drug pushers. To make matters worse, companies such as McDonald’s add emotional addiction to the chemical addiction. Why else do they continue to sell so-called “Happy meals” to children, and advertise on children’s programs, if not to addict people at a young age and keep them customers for life? Other methods used include free toys, selling toys in toy stores that are designed by them, and providing play centers.

Every time you think of McDonald’s, they want you to have feelings that are based on happy, fun times. Since most people don’t think about where their feelings come from, these people will have false urges to eat McDonald’s to relive those feelings, until they recognize and refuse those urges.

In the brilliant documentary Forks over Knives, Dr. Terry Mason MD, Commissioner of Health for the City of Chicago, tells us that unfortunately, it’s often poor people who eat fast food. This is particularly sad when you work out that fast food these days is expensive, especially if you work out how much actual nutrition you get dollar for dollar. Five dollars buys one fast food hamburger, or a large amount of nutritious lentils and carrots. Dr. Mason says that unfortunately poor people are poor in everything, not just money, but they are also poor in health and poor in their choices.

If you eat any junk food, or smoke cigarettes, realize that you are a slave to the multinational companies. They are living off your work and your body so that they can be rich. And, of course, they are killing you while they do it.

I was shocked with what I saw on a TV show run by a doctor, that was meant to be about health. This same doctor had done some good work previously telling people to avoid GMOs, and therefore to not eat any dairy that was not organic. But on this particular show, the doctor asked two other doctors to go and find a healthy fast food meal. (Is that possible?) Strangely, only three fast food outfits were chosen for this task; McDonald’s, Domino’s Pizza and Subway. Nothing else was considered. I wonder if those companies paid for the privilege, just as most authors have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to appear on all the top talk shows?

The overweight heart surgeon picked chicken McNuggets. That was unbelievable! There are few things as toxic as McDonald’s chicken McNuggets. First of all, there is little chicken in them. They are 56% corn, mostly GMO corn (3), and the chickens are also fed GMOs and other toxic stuff, including their own manure. Then the McNuggets are super heated in toxic oils, so that they are full of trans fats and AGEs. Worst of all, there are a massive total of 38 ingredients, including tertiary butylhydroquinone, a lighter fluid (4). Are chicken McNuggets really food?

Moral of this story: Keep an eye on who is benefiting financially when watching any so-called ‘health show’.

The other doctor chose pizza with pepperoni. Pepperoni is embalmed meat. And this piece came just after a part where the doctor had restaurant insiders admit that pizzas have sugar added to them.

If you ever eat any fast food at all, please watch the fabulous movie Super Size Me. While it’s mostly about McDonald’s, many of the lessons learned in this movie apply to all fast food outlets. Even if you have seen this documentary, you may have missed some of the more important points, as I did on first viewing the movie. So I will outline some of them here.

In the documentary Morgan Spurlock, writer and director, begins with a court case where two overweight girls, one 14 years old, 4’10” and 170 lb and the other 19 years old, 5’6” and 270 lb, sued McDonald’s in 2002, for making them fat. The girls ended up losing the court case. But, just in case something like this happened again, in 2004 congress passed the ‘cheeseburger bill’ which made it illegal for people to sue food companies for making them obese. You see, Congress currently works to protect corporations, not you.

The judge said the lawsuit was “frivolous” because “the dangers of eating its food is universally known.” Yet, despite this, McDonald’s has 30,000 outlets in over 100 countries. 46 million people are served daily, even in hospitals! No wonder obesity is global.

The judge further said that if the plaintiffs could show that McDonald’s intend for people to eat McDonald’s every meal of every day, and that doing so would be reasonably dangerous, they may be able to state a claim.

So Morgan decided to go on a diet of nothing but McDonald’s food and drink, three times a day, for one month. During the month, he ate everything on the menu. In addition, since most Americans don’t get any exercise, he got very little exercise as well. This was ground breaking research because it was being done on a real human in a real-life situation, not just a few rats in a lab. And the research was independent of any large organization that might interfere with the conclusions. Morgan definitely showed that, for him, it was very dangerous.

First he visited three medical professionals, including a cardiologist and General Practitioner, as well as an exercise physiologist. His blood pressure was normal and his blood tests were excellent. His general health was determined to be outstanding. The doctors thought that the McDonald’s diet would be no big deal. The cardiologist thought that his triglycerides would go up but nothing else would change. The MD thought his cholesterol and weight would ‘probably’ go up. They were all in for a massive shock, because it did not occur to any of them how bad this diet would be for him, or that it would prove to be incredibly toxic. In fact, it became so toxic that it became life-threatening! Here are some of the results for Morgan after only 30 days:

• He gained 25 lbs (185 to 210).
• Body fat percentage (BMI) went from 11% to 18%.
• Cholesterol went from 65 points to 230.

At day 14, two different liver enzymes skyrocketed. One enzyme went from 21 to 130, the other went from 20 to 290. The massive increase in liver enzyme activity showed that the diet was highly toxic. The MD said after just day 14, “If someone was doing this with alcohol, they could theoretically wipe out their liver”. (Note: If you don’t have a functioning liver, you are not going to get rid of fat, assuming you stay alive).

At day 21 the MD said after a blood test, “For the first time we’re seeing uric acid elevated. The danger of this is gout and kidney stones”. (Note: Gout, a very painful disease ‘of the past’ is now on the rise). “The results for your liver are obscene beyond anything I would have thought….My advice to you, as a physician, is that you’ve got to stop. You’re pickling your liver. And you’re kicking it while it’s down…If you were an alcoholic, I’d say, “You are going to die.”

I guess the doctor did not want to say the obvious on video: That means that McDonald’s can kill you.

Despite this warning, and feeling chest pains and depressed and moody most of the time, which was unusual for him, Morgan completed the 30-day McDonalds’ diet. Perhaps most importantly of all for anyone who wants to get thin, he noticed that he got hungry soon after eating. Whereas, when you go on a wheat-free, soy-free, whole-foods plant-based diet, with lots of raw plant food, you will notice that you seldom get hungry. The more totally raw meals you have, the less hungry you will get.

In just 30 days, Morgan ate 30 lb of sugar from the food alone, not counting drinks. That’s one pound a day, because nearly everything on the menu has sugar added to it, even the salads. You see, sugar is addictive, and cheap, so that makes good financial sense. During the month, Morgan craved the food more and more, and got massive headaches when he did not eat it. Those are signs of addiction.

After the McDonald’s diet, Morgan went on a vegan diet to detox (5). It took 8 weeks for his cholesterol and liver to go back to normal. Then he gave up being vegan. It took him 5 months to lose 20 pounds, and another 8 months to lose the last 5 pounds.

It was truly amazing and sad that after this fantastic documentary came out, it barely made a difference to any fast food outlets, except that they made a little effort to appear as though they were offering healthier food, by adding a few salads with toxic dressing, but they did little if anything to alter the basic toxic menu items.

We have to break the addiction to junk food. Addictive food is high in calories and toxins. Unfortunately, there are two kinds of addiction that we get from fast food.

TWO KINDS OF ADDICTION FROM JUNK FOOD

1. Chemical addiction

Dr. Neal Barnard MD, of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, has this to say (6),

There is a drug used in emergency rooms called naloxone. It’s used for heroin overdose. A guy comes in overdosed on heroin, comatose, he’s going to die. If you inject him with this drug and it blocks the opiate receptors in the brain, heroin doesn’t work, he wakes up. If I give that same drug to a real chocolate addict, a person who just shovels it in, you find the most amazing thing. They lose much of their interest in chocolate. They take a bite, they set it back down.

In other words, it’s not the “taste in the mouth” feel, it’s the drug effect of the food in the brain which keeps us coming back.

Dr. Barnard further explains –

If you look at the menu at a fast food restaurant, they use all of the addicting components. They’ll take a slab of meat, cover it with cheese – cheese, of course, which is filled with casomorphins, the opiates that are found in cheese protein. And then they serve it with a sugary soda, which has the addictive power of sugar, with plenty of added caffeine. (Caffeine is a highly addictive drug. Plus, you learned in the chapter on wheat that wheat also has opiate-like substances in it).

This chemical addiction is so bad, that scientists found that rats fed nothing but junk food from the supermarket (bacon, sausage, cheese cake etc.) for long enough, not only got obese – they voluntarily starved themselves when later offered nothing but healthy food (7).

We need to make new laws where addictive food is concerned. As Pediatric Endocrinologist Dr. Robert Lustig says, free speech does not work with addictive substances, especially where children are concerned (8).

2. Emotional addiction

Be very, very wary of anyone who has a story of getting thin from a fast food outlet, rather than preparing their own fresh food at home. Subway is a case in point. They have this guy Jared who says he lost hundreds of pounds from eating their food. Note that he went from doing no exercise to doing quite a bit of walking (10). I wonder how much? Subway had nothing to do with that.

It broke my heart to watch a young, very overweight 14-year-old girl say about Subway, in Super Size Me, after listening to a speech by Jared;

It’s kind of hard. I can’t afford to go there every single day and buy a sandwich two times a day. And that’s what he’s talking about. That’s the only solution….But I can’t do it.

The only solution? Telling people that eating a whole lot of baked wheat and meat will work for them? This is terrible. So many people have big guts from the many toxins in wheat, and whatever else they add to the bread that makes it so fluffy.

However, pictures of Jared in 2009 show the weight coming back on (11). That was no surprise to me, since he said he had caffeine and diet drinks, and anyone who lives off a diet of food that is not prepared at home will end up getting toxic, and therefore putting on weight, in the long run. (See my chapter “Health is like a bank account”).

Please, anytime you hear anyone saying that they lost weight from eating a particular brand of food, ask yourself how much money that person makes from telling you that.

MOST SCHOOL FOOD IS JUNK FOOD

It’s no wonder that, for the first time in history, children are getting obese,. When you watch Super Size Me you will see that schools now serve up cakes, chips, fries, Gatorade (which is toxic sugar plus other toxins), sugared drinks, candy bars and pizza. For many students, that’s all they eat. Fresh fruit cannot be seen, and even if healthy food is offered as an alternative, when children have been addicted to junk food, the changes are not going to happen by themselves.

Who profits from junk food? Super Size Me shows an example of one such company, Sodexho, which serves 400 school districts, as well as prisoners.

There is one public school in the USA where this is not the case. The Appleton Central High School, Wisconsin, used to have children who were out of control. Children even brought weapons to school. But in 1997. a private group called Natural Ovens installed a healthy lunch program. Fast-food burgers, fries, candy and sodas were replaced with fresh fruit and salads, baked rather than fried meat and whole grain bread and good drinking water arrived. The teachers saw a major change in the children.

As reported in a newsletter called Pure Facts, “Grades are up, truancy is no longer a problem, arguments are rare, and teachers are able to spend their time teaching.” And while they did not mention it, you can bet that these children are not going to have weight problems as serious as those where junk food is the norm.

Surprisingly, the cost is about the same. So why aren’t all schools doing this? Paul Stitt MS, Founder of Natural Ovens Bakery, explains:

There’s an awful lot of resistance from the junk food companies that are making huge profits off the school system at this time. They don’t want to be kicked out of the school system. They want to be there to addict the children for life.

What a great scam! Get taxpayers to pay for their companies to addict children to their cheap, toxic and fattening junk food, for the rest of the children’s lives! It sure beats advertising.

If only accurate muscle testing was taught in all schools. I have found that when I show children, especially small children, how junk food is weakening, rather than just ‘bad’ for them, they become very committed to not consuming that product any more. Some children like being bad, but no child wants to be weak. (Please see Chapter 12 on kinesiology and muscle testing, for more information).

The food industry is an enormous business in the United States. It therefore employs very well-paid lobbyists, who work with the government to make you eat more of their product. I strongly believe that one of the best ways to counteract the effects of the wrong messages we are being sent from big corporations and government, as well as from the addictive toxins in our food, is for each and every person to learn how to do accurate muscle testing of food. Even children as young as 12 years old or less can learn how to do this. Children as young as six years old can be muscle tested. When a person has experienced for themselves how just thinking of a toxic food makes their arms and legs go weak, their brain often finds the extra willpower that is needed to take personal responsibility, and to eat and drink only healthy food instead.

Remember, wild animals keep slim by eating the food that nature designed them to eat. That’s what you need to do. You are a herbivore. Eat plants. That is, fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds and legumes, as unprocessed as possible. And also have as much raw food as possible. People need to learn new ways of shopping and preparing food. Please see my shopping list in this book. Learn how to prepare food by going to the Internet and searching for a vegan and/or raw recipe for the food you bought. The recipes in this book will give you a good place to start. And boycott the Food Mafia whenever you can.

REFERENCES:

1. www.oa.org/newcomers/about-oa/
2. Forks over Knives documentary
3. www.alnyethelawyerguy.com/al_nye_the_lawyer_guy/2007/03/so_what_really_.html
4. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan, 2007
5. www.HealthyChefAlex.com
6. Super Size Me documentary
7. www.cbsnews.com/2100-204_162-6343889.html
8. www.psmag.com/health/robert-lustig-sugar-obesity-diet-50948/
9. Super Size Me documentary
10. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Fogle
11. www.thatsfit.com/2009/12/02/subway-guy-falls-off-the-diet-wagon/