Processed foods today have changed the way we taste things. Food science uses our inborn food preferences when making processed foods. Almost all processed foods are designed in a way to get you to eat more of them and then buy more of them. They do this by using the ingredients and tastes that humans are predisposed to love – sugar and fat. Processed foods play on your instincts; in nature, you would hardly ever encounter fat and sugar in the amounts you can find them in processed foods, and that is why we like processed foods so much. To quote Michael Pollan again, “You won’t find a fruit with anywhere near the amount of fructose in a soda, or a piece of animal flesh with quite as much fat as a chicken nugget”And there is another big problem with eating so much sugar and fat: we get used to it. We get used to eating a lot of fat and a lot of sugar; it seems normal. But it is not normal. The book The Pleasure Trap compares the this type of high-fat high-sugar diet to a drug addiction: “Food, like drugs, can stimulate dopamine cascades in the pleasure centers of the brain. But there is food—the bounty of nature that we were designed to eat, and then there is magic food—the stuff that we have created. And they are fundamentally different in their effect on health and happiness” The Pleasure Trap explains that the processed foods we eat today are designed to hyper-stimulate the brains pleasure centers. When we eat processed foods, we experience them as being more satisfying than real, whole foods. This is not surprising because they have been designed to be more satisfying. As a person eats more and more processed foods, his or her tastes adapt. He gets used to the rich taste of processed foods and they no longer taste as good as they once did. And yet we continue to eat more and more processed foods and we believe that we can no longer enjoy real, whole, healthful foods.

But the good new is that you can retrain your brain to enjoying real food again! And it may be tough at first, but it only takes about 30 days of abstaining from those bad foods. More details on the “instinct diet” and one woman’s story on how it worked for her in the article below.  (more…)