I don't want to be an American idiot. Flow me here on seven hundred Wlwe are at that time of year now, probably started with Halloween, but with Thanksgiving looming here literally on the horizon. We can see it, we can smell it, we can teach it, we can almost touch it. And that is the amount of food we're going to eat. A lot of food, and a lot of it not good for us, a lot of ultra processed foods. And there's something called the bliss point. You
wonder why you don't stop beating when you're full. You only stop beating when you hate yourself, and that is because of the confluence of fat, salt, and sugar. Food scientists are a long time have been developing that they've cracked the code years ago, and when those three things are together in the right balance and the right harmony, you literally unlock the code to get people to gorge themselves, stuff themselves silly. And that's what we face, the science
behind that. Doctor David Bissonette is here, is a nutritional scientist and joins the show on seven hundred Why doctor, how are you?
I'm very well, God, very good good.
Hopefully I just had that correctly between fat, salt, and sugar.
Yeah, job, yeah, yeah.
But it's interesting because this is this is literally decades and decades and decades of research to come up with what they call the bliss point.
Yep. Yeah, they're they're developed in sensory evaluation labs in these corporate headquarters and labs, and they determine where it is, like you said, where the high excitation points are for different foods combinations of assault, sugar, and fat. And they indeed it dick people and it causes what they call repeat acquisition behavior going back to it because you love it,
but like you said, it's really bad for you. So I described this, I investigate this in the book Insatiable Nations, Unpeasable Hunger.
And that's it right as we have Yeah, for the longest time, I mean, food was okay, I eat to live, to work, and then I eat some more to fuel. So because I'm working physically, and in the modern era in America, in the modernized world, that's changed, right, we are largely sedentary, and yet food has now become entertainment. It's also become delicious, which we didn't have. Is probably as recently as a couple generations ago.
I guess, oh yeah, you got that right. We were very complex and we eat for emotional reasons, and the research is now showing that this is actually caused by depression and anxiety. We see that prevalence still high depression, high anxiety emotional eating. We have stress eating, and we have we call mindless habit driven eating. And this is where it becomes potentially disastrous for kids to be introduced to these foods early on, because they carry them forward
and that's exactly what they do. It's mindless eating. It's a default and it's terrible.
How did we get to that point? I mean, if you think about how absurd it is that I would get home after a long day of work and have dinner and hour whatever it is. Okay, I'm going to open a box of cheese Doritos and sit there and watch TV and shovel them in my face unconsciously, just loading myself with calories. And it's you know what, I don't know about you. It's awesome, but.
You're doing it. It's often for the time you're doing it, but remember you feel lousy after. So we have two basic mechanisms to control appetite. One's called the homeostatic mechanism. It's balanced in the body. It's based on energy reserves, and that normally should suffice right to say, Okay, you've got enough fat reserves, and it has all kinds of you know, hormones to sort of stop the eating. And
it's a pretty good mechanism. But we also have what they call the hidonic eating, right, the pleasure centered eating, which you know really is in the frontal lobe of the brain. And that explains why it is a Thanksgiving that we fill ourselves with turkey and really say we couldn't eat another bite, yet when the pumpkin pie comes out, we have one and two pieces. So that is basically what's happening, is that our hedonic center, the pleasure center,
is causing us to overeat beyond what we need. And like you said, we enjoy it, but only for a short time.
Yeah, because the misery lasts longer. You're miserable for days after you stuff yourself with thanks Kim. And it's the best when you're eating, and then after you feel like hell, and you know you don't eat, you don't you don't eat till you're full, You'll eat till you hate yourself.
Yep. Yeah, and we do that consistently, even though we say, all right, next time, I'm not going to do this. But you know, it's very enticing and it's part of you know, it should be part of a you know, sort of a almost like a moral base behavior fixed on temperance. Right, It's kind of like a discipline that we need to sort of exercise more in our lives. But this is really difficult to do because the food
industry promotes right with very sophisticated ads. Give you an example, nineteen ninety seven, Madison, Madison Street and Madison Avenue advertisers are spending seven billion dollars in advertising foods of all sorts. The USDA's budget was three hundred and thirty three millions, and so the co and that was to promote healthy food. And when you have this kind of dichotomy, right, you
can't overcome it easily. And that's why my book Insatiable I talk about radical shifts in the you know, in our lifestyle and in our diet that we need to sort of promote. One is, you know, stop the soda pop. Right, It's not a negotiable because it's too addictance.
You can vilify certainly the fast food industry, the quick food industry, the premie food industry, you know. But but I guess I don't know. I was almost said, this is kind of like a negative to capitalism. But you know, they've got to increase their margin, they've got to make money. They got to find ways for people to buy more food. And for people to buy more food, they have to consume the food that they're eating. And so you want to sell more pop and chips and candy and things
that are processed. I get that all point. It's up to us to show some restraint, but it's difficult the way is formulated. I get that whole model. I guess. The other side before someone takes away is, you know, this is bashing big food and everything. You know, look that we have done for for example, you don't see people starving to death anymore. You look at all of the you know, you look at all of the maladies that our generations before us suffered from malnutrition wise, and
brain development and bone density and all those things. And you know that's in the rear view mirror in the modern world. Now, that downside is we're killing ourselves with that same knife and fork, we've gone to the other extreme. But you know, because of the ready available of food, because the prices have dropped because of that technology, it's eliminated starvation, which was a scourge for the world for most of the time humans have been on this planet.
Well, it's an interesting point you're making, but what we don't really realize is that back in the nineteen thirty America is teppered with malnutrician and that was within the era of the industrial revolution and mass production. So we actually did not solve the problem back then. It took a while to get onto the concept of fortification. But we're really fortifying food and that's what they were doing that were ultimately so highly processed that they were workless.
Yeah. Yeah, and you see that a lot today too, I guess is this setting up to be By the way, doctor David Bissonett, he's a professor of nutrition, a doctorate nutritional science, writes about insatiable, about what's called the bliss point, and that is food manufacturer's process with manufacturers have developed
and it depends obviously on the product. Because this has been researched and focused group to death that they have found the exact correct proportions when the salt and sugar and fat in a product to get you to eat as much as possible so they can sell more and make more money. And that is capitalist dynamic right there, for good or for bad. But this is starting to sound like it's setting up to be maybe a lawsuit developed like we saw with big tobacco, right is, hey,
we made a product that's highly addictive and dangerous. You can make that case with these types of processed foods, can't you?
Oh you can? Then. In fact, it's very interestingly, these very tobacco companies that got their hands slapped are the very ones that bought Nubisco General Foods, and they mastered obviously the advertising, and they're applying the same concept to food as they did to tobacco. They own the food company.
Yeah, yeah, sure, and it's like, okay, we can do that only with food. Now. I think it's a more i don't know, improving in course. So, for example, we know that tobacco, you know, by itself, is less now I'm gonna say safe, but it's less dangerous until you start adding chemicals and all sorts of things to make it more didictive and consumable and preserve it. And that's what happens when you come buys tobacco, because now you've got tire and nicotine, and nicotine gets you. But there's
no nicotine in food. How do you make the connection between national physical addiction to something like tobacco and then try and translate that to potato chips. It's that element's not there, you know.
Yeah, it's very It's just I mean, truly, the food that we eat is very high in sugar, and we have the food industry has vehicles to get that in. Just to give you an example, two thousand and eight, the soda pomp industry flooded, you know, the American landscape really with about the equivalent of fifty four gallons of available soda pomp for person per year. And that's incredible, and we were big consumers and that brought in extra calories,
and these calories aren't good. I remember teaching down in Kentucky and there was a student team to me and said, listen, I drink fourteen twelve ounce doctor pepper the day and that feeling good? Yeah? Do you have recommendations? And so.
The band stupid, there's your recommendations. You're fatally stupid.
He he was addicted. It was sugar highs and this is you know, has a certain part of the population
affected by this. You'd be very surprised how many people actually consume so of pop. But also you know, sweetened sweetened beverages as well, and you know also chips, which are very high in fat, and our society mechanism doesn't really kick in the same way for liquids and for high density things like chips, so they you know, they don't give us the signal okay, you've had enough, even though we may have you know, consumed twelve hundred calories and chips.
Yeah, and it doesn't seem like it when you're eating it. That's the thing. It's calorically that it's dense, but it's not filling, it is correct.
I've seen students down a full twelve ounce bag of potato chips and top that off with a pizza. Yep.
Yeah. But it's great to have that younger person's metabolism. That's the thing, right, because when I was younger, you know, you're playing sports or whatever. Yeah, you sit down, you could kill a two liter of pepsi in needle, half a loaf of bread and an entire package of balgoney and be hungry an hour later.
Well, this is true, but what we don't realize is these foods that are you know, high and fat actually cause damage to the body. We have a new phenomena, right, it's a non alcoholic fabby liver disease. And this is leading. This is going to lead in the next decades to higher needs for liver transplants. We are sickening our people because of that. We think, oh, we have a high metabolism.
Not so. That level of intake actually causes accelerated synthesis of fat in the liver, coming primarily from hyper corn syrups some theory, but certainly it's from the sugar, the hygherger loads that we're eating. So no, this is not about an issue of high metabolism and how lucky we are. You're setting up those young people for a chronic life of you know, chronic disease.
Well there lies the problem, doctor, right is it? You know you can you need more calories when you're growing, obviously, and that's why you know you look at a teenage boy and it's my god, how much money and food am I? This is great? I got to work a third job in order to afford just the food. But the problem is you continue those eating patterns, and many people when they get to their late twenties orly thirties,
maybe forties, continue to eat like they're a teenager. That's when the weight gets packed on.
Well, yeah, absolutely. But the thing that you're not mentioning here that's in the equation, yeah, is this high coloric load that's required is usually tied to the youth, absolutely, and to the high activity traditionally tagged to youth. This is not the case anymore. We actually have a condition called secentism. It's a new disease that's being investigated by physiologists because it's the high degree of inactivity in the youth. They're actually developing old people's disease.
Yeah, I mean we have one something, yeah, something like one and four. I think I just read a stat on one and four young people between twelve and nineteen are pre diabetic.
Oh yeah, yeah, it's it's an epidemic absolutely. And the thing about diabetes is that you know, type two diabetes is that it's you know, ninety five percent associated with waking right though, with obesity. So the only way to solve it, of course, is to eat leaner. And again, you know the book. If you go to insatiablewe dot com, which is the website, you'll get more information about the book, but also certain other ideas. I've got videos up there and stuff that tackle different subjects.
Yeah, gotcha. There's the thing though, because it sounds like one may listen to you, doctor and Gold. So what you're saying is make food less delicious.
No food is supposed to be delicious. Using spices and herbs, it can be incredible. What happens is we've overstimulated our taste buds. And if you're going to make that radical shift to normal food, it takes a little while, but not that long. It takes a week or two getting off those highs and really realizing. You know, you know people say to me, oh, I can't get off soda pop. Well, you know these were patients of mine previously, and you know, within a week they say, oh my god, I feel.
So much better.
Yeah, and I don't have craving for sugar like I used to. So it's actually not that difficult, and it's really the stress of disengaging from that high level of sugar. It's really short lived. And the same thing goes for the food. Our evolutionary genes were not meant to be adapted to this high level of tape sensation.
If we keep eating this way, though, doctor Bissonette, want our genetics change. I mean we all adapt to the environment. So if we continue to eat like we eat, don't dount our bodies just simply change. And it may take centuries, but don't we have.
All look more at it in terms of thousands of years. Okay, but really what we know in terms of epide genetic changes that take place in uteral For example, a mother that an expected mother that eats poorly, that's overweight, she passes on epigenetic changes to the baby, who then becomes
prone to obesity and a variety of chronic diseases. So this genetic story really doesn't pan out correctly, right, It does appear that we can have a formula like a code for help, and we can't really deviate from it unless we don't become chronically ill. And the United States is very chronically ill. You know, we have a healthcare expenditure of about three point seven billion dollars and seventy five percent of that is tied to chronic disease. Just think about it.
Yeah, well, I mean you believe it. You see it all over right. We are literally the diseases we used to die. If you look back one hundred years, even as fascinated by as stuff you don't you forgot existed in this country, you have to look up the definition of what it means hundre years ago. It's the exactly apple to day everything is. Largely everything is based on what we consume. Whether it's a cancer, uh, some forms
of lymphoma, but most certainly heart disease and things. It's because of what we're putting in our bodies as opposed to what we're not putting in our bodies.
Yeah, there's high correlations to that, you know, quantic disease, colding cancer, very high association with you know, low fiber and poor dietary habits and lack of exercise as well.
Yeah, well that's all the hard stuff, right. I mean, you know, eating whole grains and it doesn't taste as good as a bag of doritos. I mean, you know you admit that, would you? I mean if you had a bag of doritos and I had a bag of kale chips, what would you ride now, you know, you'd eat the kale chips, But you can't tell me that the doritos are. The doritos are one hundred times more delicious than any cal chips.
Well, listen, I go into the pub. But but but ultimately you shouldn't be eating chips. That's one of the radical changes. Chips have invaded our food supply in such a way that we have really caused a massive obedience in food behavior. Chips have virtually no nutritional value, yet, like you say, they're various good and again a radical shift roup you know, stop, you know, to stop eating these will open up your case buds actually to appreciate
the more subtle cases of fruit and vegetables. We see this problem in children who are brought up on chips and things of that nature. They will not eat fruits and vegetables. We hear mothers complain about it all the time. Well, what happened is they introduced it too early, right, and they for you know, they forever captured their trillren so to speak into you know what it ends up to being, uh, you know, a weight management problem. They can never get out of the Now, all.
Right, I gotta get gone, but I appreciate the time. Doctor David Bissonette, he's an Associate Professor Nutrition uh doctor in nutritional science and writes about this and insatiable the nation's unappeased hunger. It certainly is the scourge of well, not just our generation, I think the past one, in future ones as well. Doctor, all the best, thanks.
Again, well, thank you very much.
Also, I hope that none of this, whether the conversation, would dissuade you from eating like you're on death row, because I plan on doing that on Thursday myself. It's just interesting information and it's marketing and it's so American that we have developed food to make us eat, us eat past the point of being full, so we buy more, we eat more. If you know that, do with that information what you wish? I'm with you. I look, gluttony is it really should be?
There?
Should just be the sixths, especially this time of the year. Can we just table the gluttony for hey, we're just pumped the brakes on that, shall we? Slooney seven hundred WLW