How To Avoid Falling Prey To Food Marketing

If you don't have a vision for the type of life you want to lead, if you don't have visions or goals for your health, other people are going to hijack and put their visions of what they want you to do in your head.

Hi, I'm Louis, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy Podcast. Establishing a strong vision is the first step to creating optimal health and a life that you love. It is also an essential piece of being a conscious consumer. the food industry designs our food to be addictive and then spends billions of dollars marketing it to us and to our children. Dr. Hyman and Mark Bittman, a food writer and leader in the food movement, recently explored the current state of food marketing in the United States.

We have to stop marketing junk food to children. This is really bad. We are teaching young children that soda is a cool thing to drink, even before they can talk, even before they're even marginally able to understand what's coming at them. We're teaching them soda, sweetened juice, sweetened breakfast cereal, cookies, da-da-da-da-da. These are the things that make life worth living, right? 50 years ago, there was noise being made about that. The Federal Trade Commission, which was on the verge of doing something about it, was effectively silenced. Congress was effectively bought off. No one even raises the issue anymore. You can't even get the national government to talk about this stuff. Every year that passes that we are not teaching four-year-olds how to eat well means that 20 years from now, we're gonna have 24-year-olds, and 40 years from now, we're gonna have 44-year-olds who are struggling with their diets, who are coming to see you and other doctors and saying, gee, I'm overweight, I can't control them. Why is that? Well, the reason is not that you're a bad person. The reason is that you were trained as a young person to eat badly and that you're surrounded by not the most ideal food that you should be eating. In fact, you're surrounded by the opposite of the ideal. And every place you go, David Kessler has always talked about this, this sort of, I mean, the silly scientific term is obesogenic environment, but basically what it means is that we are in A permanent carnival of junk food.

Food swamp.

Right. And food swamp is much better than food desert. Everywhere you go, there's cotton candy and marshmallows and Cinnabon and double cheeseburgers and it's all screaming, eat me. And when you were a little kid, you were being told, this is the cool stuff.

Yeah, I remember.

Not like stir fry with broccoli and tofu, but this stuff.

It's tough.

And the average kid sees between six and 10,000 ads for junk food.

A year.

A year. A year.

And if you spoke to your kid three times a day at every meal about healthy eating, you could not compete.

Right.

That would be one thing.

And then I think even today, it's worse because that was based on traditional media. Now we have social media.

Social media has been designed to be addictive and to keep us obsessively clicking away. Earlier this year, Dr. Hyman sat down with Cal Newport, expert in the field of technology and author of Digital Minimalism. to talk about health consequences associated with our increased social media use.

No, you're the product. There's a reason you're not paying for this. They have their clients, which are the advertisers, and you're the product. And they wrap you up nicely. I mean, anyone who has a small business or a large business who's advertised on social media will tell you it's wonderful. And this is why, is because they have something close to a billion users worldwide that are clicking on this thing obsessively. It's like an advertiser's dream. I mean, what I argue is that your digital life is as complicated and as important as, say, your physical health. And we learned when it comes to our physical health, we learned during the 20th century when our diet changed and we got the advent of a lot of highly processed food and food abundance, people started to get really sick. We got heart attacks. We had people, you know, this was, this was people got unhealthy. And we learned that this issue is more complicated than just maybe throwing some tips at it. You're like, well, you just try to eat healthier, maybe not eat too much. That didn't work. Almost every guest on your show is that this is very complicated. So we had to get much more sophisticated in how we thought about our relationship with food. And we had to have whole philosophies developed that people could subscribe to. You would say that I'm now primal or paleo or something like this or vegan or vegetarian, but we had a whole philosophies arise about different food and what's the right way in this values-based. And I think, of course, we need this in our digital life because we're having the same same type of health issues, they're just cognitive happening as this digital technology spiral out of control. It's the same thing as fast food and processed food coming in the early 20th century. We can't just throw tips at it. That's all we're doing now. Just take Sundays off. How many times do I hear someone say, Turn off notifications? Like that's going to solve the underlying problem. I mean, it's like whatever, telling people, Don't buy too many Doritos or something. There's deeper problems. So my idea was to get healthy in our digital life. We need the same type of thoughtful, sophisticated philosophies we have in, say, physical health. And so digital minimalism is one such philosophy. And if it's not this, you should have another, but you should take it that seriously. That you should say, this is my philosophy towards my digital tools. I've thought about it. It's based on my values. And I can follow it. I can use it to push back, make a bulwark against these sort of addictive forces trying to get at my attention. And so that's the motivation for us. Digital minimalism is one such philosophy. Start with your values. figure out how to use technology to help them, ignore the rest.

Establishing a strong vision of who we want to be helps us readily overcome roadblocks and letdowns. Vishen Lekian, founder of Mindvalley University and A-Fest, expanded on these ideas in his.

Podcast interview with Dr. Mark Hyman. In the world today, in any given day, you're being bombarded by 300 advertisements. If you don't have a vision for the type of life you want to lead, if you don't have visions or goals for your health, other people are going to hijack and put their visions of what they want you to do in your head. They're going to tell you to eat this or drink this or that this substance is what you need. You have to start with your own vision. If you lack a vision for your health, for how you want to feel, how you want your body to operate when you're in your later years and even like next year, you're going to end up being bombarded with with advertising, with subconscious manipulation, with bull ideas, and people are gonna hijack your brain and make you do things that they want you to do so that they can get money out of your wallet. So the first thing is you gotta have health goals. You gotta set goals for how you exercise, how you eat, for the type of body you want, for the type of energy levels you want, and then you gotta get educated. I personally think, Marc, and I'm not just saying this 'cause I'm on your show, but I've been reading a ton of books on longevity, your book, Food, what the Heck Should We Eat? should be the first book that everyone should read. It's such a useful digest. Now the other thing that you wanna know, so the first thing is have goals. Second thing is study, study, study. Listening to this podcast is good, reading your book is good. The third thing is spread the word. I mean, you've heard the idea that we are the sum total of our five closest friends, right? And studies now show that if your closest friends are obese, you are more likely to be obese. But likewise, if your closest friends are fit, you're more likely to get fit. So we influence each other. And so as you start getting educated, if you start creating these health goals, share them with your friends, share them with your family, share them with your company. Without being annoying.

Without being annoying.

Right, right, right. Without being annoying. And you show them by example.

You show them by the changes you make in your life. Exactly.

You show them health enlightened ideas. spread, lead by example. And I think if we do these three things, we can go a massive way towards basically improving the health of our planet, but also improving the health of our own individual body.

Being intentional with our social media use and creating a vision for our lives allows us to live in alignment with our values. This will help optimize our overall health and well-being. If you enjoyed this mini episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy, please consider taking a moment to leave a comment or share it with your friends and family. Until next time, thank you so much for tuning in.