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Put down that Quarter Pounder. The fast food consumer is now being compared to drug addicts and compulsive gamblers.
The comparison is made in a book authored by David Kessler. Burger King, McDonald's and Wendy's don't serve up food....they are more akin to a drug store. This is the suggestion Kessler makes apparently.
From the Windsor Star:
Listen to David Kessler and you will learn that Oliver is up against much more than cultural resistance. The former head of the United States Food and Drug Administration is in London promoting his new book. In it he describes how our exploding waistlines (on current trends 40 per cent of Britons will be obese by 2025) are due to something much more sinister than greed and the development of the TV remote control.
The food we eat, or rather the ubiquitous, processed, ready-made, fast food we eat, is not really food at all, he says. It's a drug, in its own way as addictive as cocaine.
But why stop at cocaine?
"We are all wired to be focused on the most salient stimuli around us - like alcohol, tobacco, sex, gambling," says Kessler. "And what is the most socially acceptable stimulus? Food.
"The basis of the modern food industry is to take fat, sugar and salt and put it on every corner of every street and make it into entertainment. It captures the neural circuits and hijacks the brain. We develop habits around our favourite foods and become aroused when we anticipate them. A pattern develops: cue-activation-arousal-reward. The circuits involved - memory, learning, motivation, habit - are those affected by addictive substances or activities.
"I was talking to a guy in publishing who told me how the hardest thing he had to do each day as he travelled to and from work was to get past the news-stand selling KitKats. It wasn't any other kind of candy, it was just KitKats. The news-stand acted as a cue; and that red wrapper acted as another cue. He hasn't even eaten the KitKat and he's already stimulated."
Gambling911.com Staff
