Quote:
Originally Posted by watcher16
I would say the generation-wide on and off-dieting is showing the magnitude of the problem.
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That's your opinion; mine is different; who knows which of us is right but it's an interesting question. In reference to the above, I don't think it confirms addiction; instead it confirms that we're eating the wrong *kinds* of foods. It doesn't make sense that people in other generations would not have been "addicted" to foods, while we are. Rather, people in other generations did not have processed products from which to choose on shelves.
If it were a simple matter of addiction to foods, then the 20th century would not have been the first century that showed incredible rates of obesity. And yes, prior generations did have white sugar (but more often coarse sugar) and they did have white flour (but again, not as easily accessible and certainly not as easy to make as coarse brown flours). However, they didn't have them as easily, as conveniently and just around the corner at the store. "Refined" items were harder to get and much more expensive by comparison. If anything, it's industry that caused our "addiction"--not our "demand" for sugarey foods. Demand would cause prices to go up--not down. (Supply/demand.) Instead, we are able now to mass-produce these items more cheaply than their unrefined counterparts.
The way it happened was that manufacturers made refined foods cheaper and easier to get *first*. *Then* we had the obesity problem. True addictions don't evolve that way. You don't see the price of cocaine plummeting because people demand more of it. You sure as heck don't see the price of cigarettes plummeting. In a true addiction, you'll walk two miles to the store if your car has broken down and you are out of cigarettes. You'll sell all your personal belongings in order to get your heroin. With sugar so-called "addiction", this has not been the pattern. It was the opposite. Sugar was around for quite some time before it became so cheap but you didn't hear about Jesse James holding up a train in order to get at the sugar.
Addictions, when they're real, don't wait for humans to make them easily available. How easily available is crack? Is it at the grocery store? No, it's bought in secret with furtive glances and it's bought instead of feeding the children. If processed foods were an addiction, you would have heard of sugar "deals", but you don't. You would have read about families gorging on sugar until it was gone, then doing whatever they could to go into the nearest town and get more.
When tobacco was introduced to Europe in the 17th century, it was IMMEDIATELY apparent how incredibly addictive it was. People didn't have it once in a blue moon while it was available and then forget about it the rest of the time. However, with refined sugar, people DID eat it when it was available, then forget about it the rest of the time.
Addictions don't work in reverse. They don't wait until availability to take hold of the human physiology and psyche.
As to the study on the rats above, are those symptoms of withdrawal, or are they symptoms of insulin flooding followed by a downward plummet? Isn't that physical? Isn't that what causes overweight...our bodies needing to be rebalanced after insulin has been rocketed up and then down? Feeling our levels go down again, we rush for more food, and instinct tells us to make that the most easily processed food available. It's an imbalance--a very very real one--but I'm not sure it's an addiction.
Now, when you stop sugar, you do crave. OH BOY do you crave. But is that due to addiction? Just because the symptoms are like withdrawal, doesn't mean it actually is withdrawal. It's my belief that the symptoms come because we suddenly don't have the source of fuel our bodies are used to getting, and the body takes a few days to accept this fact and switch over to burning fat instead of glucose. In the few days before this happens, we're shaky, irritable and headache-ey...which makes sense since we're not burning glucose but we're not burning fat yet either; we're in effect "starving" for those few days. And what do we crave? What ANY body would crave during times of starvation--the food that will go IMMEDIATELY to our bloodstream. That only makes sense. I don't think that's psychological at all. It's very real, very physical and the very normal response of a healthy body looking to save itself.