Rich Bello explains how food companies exploit the brain's pleasure and pain-avoidance systems to sell harmful products. Sugar triggers dopamine and serotonin like an addiction. The same manipulation that drives obesity also fuels the opioid epidemic by masking pain instead of fixing its source.
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So now onto the third bug in the system. I call this one the pleasure hack. If you knew that somebody was addicted to a drug, would you entice them with that drug to get them to buy something that was profitable for you but deadly for them? Hopefully not. But that's exactly what's happening in the processed food industry today. That's their job. That's also exactly why obesity has surpassed tobacco as the number one killer. Both are preventable, which literally means we're choosing to die instead of foregoing our habits. Right, These particular habits, of course, we're being manipulated by profit motivated companies to make these deadly choices. That's their job. They're in business to sell their products. Nothing wrong with that's their mandate. They're in business to sell their products. They're not in business to keep you healthy. Right. So companies started to understand that the best way to market and sell their products was to understand human, human behavioral psychology. That's what we're talking about here. If they understood what motivated people, that is right, the desire to avoid pain and the desire to seek pleasure, they could hack this motivational system to get you to buy their products. In essence, buying their products equaled survival to you, right? When in fact the opposite is true. These companies understood that for survival, we're programmed to and have a strong desire to eat the most calorie rich, dense foods we could get our hands on. That's high sugar foods, right? Why do we have this programming? Because one of the greatest threats, not only for our personal survival survival, but for survival of the species, was starvation. And it still is for many people around the world. But I suspect for most people who are watching this, that's not the case. The human race almost became extinct a number of times because we didn't have enough food. Therefore, we're programmed to, in other words, have the desire to eat foods that are calorie dense. We, which usually means high in sugar. That's actually fine in our old environment where the sugary foods meant fruits, right? Which is a natural sugar and healthy for you, especially if you're moving around a lot. It wasn't the white refined sugar that the Great Architect had in mind when he or she programmed us. Right? So as the processed food manufacturers know all too well, the brain unfortunately can't tell the difference between these two types of sugar. So it's attracted to and literally, literally addicted to sugar. How does this addiction work? Well, as a reminder, we're motivated in the pursuit of sugar because that pursuit itself releases serotonin which puts us in a good mood, right? It's literally a drug. And the eating of the sugar, the reward, if you will, releases dopamine, our motivational systems way of saying good job. Which also puts us in a really good mood, right? These neurotransmitter doses, remember, are the real underlying natural addictions. Eating and overeating. This type of sugar leads to obesity. We are literally killing ourselves by not being conscious enough of this manipulation, such that we allow these hackers to do their work. Now, another way that our survival mechanism has been used against us has been the manipulation of the motivation to avoid pain. Now, this motivation on its own is of course well designed and well intended and has operated perfectly in the old environment, but in the past 50 or so years has been manipulated for profit and now actually works against our survival in a couple of different ways. Number one, painkillers are the easiest and coincidentally likely the most profitable treatment for any ailment that has pain associated with it. These can either be prescription or over the counter, or even from the local drug dealer. These drugs literally block the neurotransmitter pain signal that our internal guidance system is trying to send to put us back on the path to health. Right? Survival, you're off the path. Get back on the path right now. One consequence, and there are many others, is of course, the great opioid epidemic. It's cost literally hundreds of thousands of lives over the course of just the last few years. In addition to addiction and overdose, there's a huge list of such side effects and longer term damage caused by the use of these pain killing drugs, not just opioids. An additional complication of our desire to avoid pain is treating the pain, not the cause. In other words, instead of figuring out what the cause of the pain is and removing the cause, we block the pain signal through various drugs and never figure out the cause until it's too late. We may never even know it, so we may not feel the pain, but whatever it is that was causing us ill health is still present. This is the same as what an enemy does to a guidance system. It hacks the guidance system by jamming it. You go off course and then death. It's always best to find the cause and deal with that than to hack the system and blind us to the cause. I found that the cause of most ill health resulting in pain is usually due to poor nutrition. I'm not a doctor or nutritionist, but that's just my personal experience. When we block the pain, we no longer have an incentive to seek the cause that has been, and in many instances is literally killing us. Usually slowly, slowly, so we don't even notice the compound effects. Sometimes we even know the cause of our pain. But if we can take a painkiller to avoid the consequence of that pain, then we will continue the behavior that has been harming us. And eventually we'll suffer a more serious consequence. Easy example for that. Somebody has a few drinks of an alcoholic beverage every night. The next morning, what do they have? Oh, they've got a headache, a little hangover. They take some form of painkiller. Your painkiller of choice, right? To alleviate the pain. Meanwhile, over time, they develop cirrhosis of the liver or other bad things. And now it's too late. They die. Had they not taken the painkiller and forced to suffer through the headache all day, they likely would have changed their behavior and stopped drinking so much and avoided the deadly disease. Very often the pain is a message from your body telling you to stop doing that. You're hurting me. Don't cover it up. Deal with the cause, please. That's what we call prevention. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of anybody cure, right, Ben? That's from Ben Franklin.
