For a whole host of economic and distribution reasons, the food industry often promotes food addiction. We’ve been brainwashed into thinking that buying and eating so many unnatural, refined-food products along with animal products that we would never have natural access to in such ways and in such large amounts as we have them, with key “healthier” sounding words and phrases on them, makes these food stuffs healthy.
Shelves upon shelves of food stuffs proclaim to be 98% Lean, Fat Free, Reduced Fat, Low Fat, Sugar Free, Diet and with No Added Sugar. However, these “healthier” phrases couldn’t be further from the truth.
They should read…
- Fat free, but chock full of refined and added sugar and chemicals.
- Reduced fat, but completely devoid of micronutrients and excellent at making sure your immune system doesn’t work at full capacity.
- 2% fat by weight, but over 35% or more “unhealthy” fat by calories.
- Sugar free, but filled with artificial sweeteners that have been shown to cause cancer in lab animals.
- “Healthier”(less toxic) than what most people eat, but basically just a healthier version of a SAD (Standard American Diet) food.
- Highly addictive, nonetheless.
Why does nutritional marketing seem to deceive us?
The food industry is an industry and while In many cases it’s an industry that does many good things towards ensuring the 7.046[1] billion people on our planet today have some thing to eat at least 3 times per day; make no mistake, it’s an industry that understandably wants to promote food consumption in a competitive market and that means getting people addicted to their food.
Because of the strength their marketing dollars (those that supply the most addictive foods with the largest customer bases – think candy), the foods most of us are eating up to 90% or more of the time each day are addictive, and very convenient but are not healthy. And the thing is, it never needed to be that way.
With each passing year over the past 100 years, to keep customers consuming their foods, companies have focused on getting us addicted[2] to their product and ultimately the nutritional value of what we eat, as a population, has dramatically decreased despite eating more calories than ever before.
The food industry, at a level unlike many other industries, has therefore depended on the mass nutritional ignorance of people who will believe it’s claims; It’s only recently (the past 10 years or so) as childhood[3] and adult[4] obesity and disease rates have skyrocketed that people are noticing the need to change the way they eat en masse.
And now, those people who were once seeking great taste and convenience alone, and rarely considered the nutritional value[5] of the foods they were eating, want to eat healthier. What they still don’t understand though, is the extent to which nutritional marketing tactics are really not true.