Obesity is one of the biggest health problems in the world.
It travels with various other diseases, which combined kill
millions of people per year.
These diseases include diabetes, cardiovascular
disease, cancer, stroke, dementia and various others.
1. Genetics
Obesity has a strong genetic component. Offsprings of obese parents are
much more likely to become obese than offsprings of lean parents.
This is not to say that obesity is completely predetermined because our
genes aren’t as set in stone as you may think… the signals we send our genes
can have a major effect on which genes are expressed and which are not.
Non-industrialized societies rapidly become obese when they start eating
a typicalWestern diet. Their genes didn’t change, the
environment and the signals they sent to their genes changed.
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2. Engineered “Hyperpalatable” Junk Foods
Today, foods are often little more than refined ingredients
mixed in with a bunch of chemicals.
These products are engineered to be cheap, last long on the
shelf and taste so incredibly good that we just can’t get enough.
By making foods “hyperpalatable,” the food manufacturers ensure
that we eat a lot and decide to buy and eat them again and again.
Most processed foods today don’t resemble food at all. These are highly engineeredproducts, with
massive budgets spent on making the foods taste so good that we become
“hooked.”
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3. Food Addiction
These highly engineered junk foods cause powerful stimulation of
the reward centers in our brains.
You know what else does that? Drugs of abuse like alcohol,
cocaine, nicotine and cannabis.
The fact is that junk foods can cause full-blown addiction in
susceptible individuals. People lose control over their eating behavior, in the
same way as alcoholics lose control over their drinking behavior.
Addiction is a complex issue with a biological basis that can be
very difficult to overcome. When you become addicted to something, you lose your freedom of choice and the
biochemistry in your brain starts calling the shots for you.
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4. Aggressive Marketing (Especially Towards Children)
The junk food companies are very aggressive marketers.
Their tactics can get unethical at times and they constantly
market very unhealthy products as if they are health foods.
The food companies make misleading claims and they spend massive amounts of money sponsoring scientists
and major health organizations to influence their research and guidelines.