Eric Edmeades argues that food companies deliberately condition emotional responses through slogans, logos, jingles and product design so people eat for reasons other than nutrition. He uses personal anecdotes and viral-video examples to show how seeing 'feel-good' cues can trigger pleasure chemicals even before eating, then promote products to capture that state; he claims most food in developed countries is consumed for emotional reasons and accuses marketing of being manipulative and deceptive. He promotes a Mindvalley masterclass that teaches the "six core human hungers," saying only one of the six is nutritional and that learning them lets people neutralize cravings and regain control over eating.
Chapters
To feel good. Eat their food, feel good. See their logo, Feel good, hear their slogan, and then pretty soon you can do it the other way around. Slogan, feel good. Eat the food, Feel good. They're trying to condition our systems. I noticed the other day I wasn't feeling very good. And then suddenly I thought about eating something very yummy. And immediately I started to feel good. And I hadn't even eaten it yet. Think about that. I started feeling good before I ate it, when I. Which meant that my body had feel good chemicals in it. You know, feel good drugs. Then I ate the food. I wonder if maybe my feeling good made the food taste better than it really was. Cause suddenly the food tasted amazing and I felt even better. And then I was full and then I didn't feel so good. And I start thinking about this. So have you ever eaten food for a reason other than your health or other than your nutritional sustenance? Have you ever eaten food because, say, you weren't feeling very good and you thought food might help you to feel better? Well, let me tell you something. The vast majority of the food that we eat in the developed world today is eaten for emotional reasons. The vast majority of it. So it's not something for us to feel bad about. It's nothing you have to confess, it just is. And the food manufacturers know this and they use it and they manipulate us. Like, the food companies are so smart and what do they do? They create jingles and they create slogans that are designed to condition us. They want to kind of hypnotize us so we don't have any choice. Like, have you ever been told that you could go to a restaurant to get a happy meal? There's nothing happy about that meal. There's nothing happy about that meal. I'm not mentioning any names here, but I'm just saying that is not a happy meal. And the people that eat it are not happy and they're not loving it either. I was watching a video, I thought it was a viral video on YouTube and it was incredible. All these people doing these amazing random acts of kindness. In one of the videos captured on cctv, this person walks up to a bank machine, gets their money out, drop their wallet, and they walk on. And the person behind them grabs the wallet, taps them on the shoulder and hands it to them, all on cctv. Just a random act of kindness. And it just. It just fills you with hope for humanity. And as you're watching all these videos and you're feeling good and you're producing all these feel Good chemicals. Then what do they do? Boom. A big red logo. Open Happiness. You see, what they're trying to do is condition you to feel good, eat their food, feel good, see their logo, feel good, hear their slogan, and then pretty soon you can do it the other way around. Slogan, feel good, eat the food, feel good. They're trying to condition our systems. I am amazed how easily we've been programmed about this stuff. Have you ever been told maybe in America that you're not you when you're hungry? Satisfies that one. Kind of makes me snicker. It's not true. You are you when you're hungry. You might be dealing with some low blood sugar. And the very food they're trying to get you to eat in that moment is going to spike your blood sugar. Then you're really not going to be you, and then your blood sugar is going to fall even. Not only is the slogan manipulative, but it's deceptive. I remember when I was a child, there was a fast food chain, and the fast food chain had this slogan, and the slogan was, we do it all for you. It was aimed largely, I think, at stay at home moms who were doing all the cooking and all the cleaning. And it was a way of saying, look, it doesn't have to be that way. You can bring your kids here and we'll take care of the convenience. Well, my whole family went to this establishment once, and we went in and we ate food. Well, you know what? Everybody ate the food except my little brother. And he got in quite a lot of trouble for ordering stuff and not eating it. Only the last laugh was with him, because that night, as the rest of us vomited our guts out with food poisoning, my brother didn't get sick. And I remember saying to my mother in the morning, I sure wish they would do this part for me too. Like these slogans. We have to think of them differently. In fact, have you ever been told that drinking a little of this will give you wings? Like, honestly, don't you think about it? Like, isn't that something a drug dealer would say? Snort a line of these, pop one of those, you'll get wings, you'll get high. They're programming us. What I'm really trying to say to you here is that we want to have a level of consciousness about what we eat. They're manipulating us with the ingredients. They're manipulating us with psychology and slogans, and they're trying to take our choice away. When they say, you deserve a break today, what I say is you deserve nourishment, you deserve healthy food that's coming in and you deserve to be in control of your own food decisions. And that is why I've teamed together with mindvalley to create an incredibly powerful and effective masterclass on the six core human hungers. Listen, there are six major reasons that people eat food. Only one of them is about nutrition. The rest of them are about imbalances of some kind. And when you learn about each of these hungers, you'll also learn how to neutralize them. What I'm going to show you is what those hungers are and how you can neutralize them so that you can have a conscious and effective relationship with food. This is not about saying you'll never eat yummy snack foods ever again. It's about saying that when you do, you'll feel good about it because you're the one that's in control. Sign up for the masterclass right now. Learn about the six hungers and get control of your cravings forever. Sam.
