Junk Food Junkies

was a waste land of of bad food. And you know, and I my dad was was a dentist, so you know, I feel like we we didn't have as much of the whole, eat everything you want candy bowl kind of environment that a lot of households had, but that still I remember drinking a lot of colas. I remember eating a lot of magic metal, the cubler of cookies that had a chocolate e center and a short red outside that they eventually quit making, and it was a very

cheerful event. I remember eating tons of Twizzlers, and even even to this this day, I have I've been able to to shut out a lot of junk food from my life, at least overt junk food. And still if someone offers me twizzlers, I end up falling into the trap of accepting them. You know what mine is? What is it? Chip? Which? Chip? Which? It's the chocolate chip cookies with the ice cream middle chocolate chip cookie. Oh,

like an ice cream sandwich. Yeah, yeah, Which turns out is we're going to discuss, has all the elements of like an addictive food because you have the texture, you have, you know, the different ingredients contrasting and the creaminess. And so I'm kind of powerless if if you put a chip which in front of me, well, luckily it has that frozen aspect to it. So it's it's not the kind of thing you would necessarily find on a table at work, like left there by someone who was just

trying to remove the curse from their own life. Um, something frozen has to be hidden away in a freezer or offered directly from a chilling advisum. You're right, I could if I could just turn away from it for like twenty minutes, then I could just Yeah, but we are going to talk about this. These powers, the hold that junk food has over us, and the fact that it's not accidental. There's a lot of money in research and development into making the perfect junk food to trip

the sort of hardwired desires that we have for it. Yeah, it's kind of chilling because it's it's easy to just think, well, chocolate chip cookies are delicious, you know, my mom makes my grandma makes them. Whatever. There's something kind of natural and wholesome about that. And and even if it is super normal stimuli and its own right, it's still doesn't

seem that nefarious. But when you start looking at at the way that these companies create these items and the way they tweak their game plan and just and and really gain the food item in their favor economically, then it kind of gives you the willies. Yeah, because you're like, all of a sudden, you you realize that that chip which has been engineered in a lab somewhere with some

really expensive equipment. And we'll get to that, but first let's talk about this influence of food on our behavior, because not just like, hey, we we desire this and therefore we take the actions to secure it and eat it. It's something a little bit more and a good example of this is the power of freshly baked bread. Yeah, this is really really interesting. And and it involves bread, which is an artificial food. You know, for the most part, it's uh, it's not something you're going to pick out

of a tree. It's a it's a product of human ingenuity. And yet it seems wholesome enough, right. I mean I I even find myself at the store sometimes picking up bread and forgetting that that it could contain it could contain high fruit dose corn syrup until I actually bring the bread home and I'm like, oh crap, it's wheat bread, but it has high fruit dose corn serpent. But there's something, there is something safe feeling about the bread and it's been a part of safe rituals for a long time.

I mean to take of bread and salt in Eastern cultures. Uh, bread and salt were eaten uh with an oath that was taken. Um. You know, there's the the just the idea of the breaking of bread being away to to to ease grievances. You have the ritual of the Eucharist in the Catholic tradition and uh and and uh, you know, and basically throughout Christianity, the idea that you know, you're gonna eat this bread and it's the the flesh of Christ and all that. I mean, it's still it's it.

That's that's bread breaking and it's most ritualistic. Yeah, I mean, that's some deeply ingrained troops right there, ingrained, ingrained, right there you go. And we even see it show up in the hardest rebel world of Game of Thrones, that's right, uh, George R. Martin's universe there, of of wester Ross and beyond. You see that ritual of breaking bread, of having bread

and salt when say, two warring families meet. In fact I specifically remember no spoilers, but a specific specifically remember a scene where two very antagonistic groups are meeting and one of the characters is very insistent, let's get the bread out, let's get the salt out. Let's go ahead and break that bread, because that that alone maybe what could prevent us all from dying here. So taking that information and knowing that it might you know, flavor ha

ha um. The way that we behave this study about altruism and bread is really interesting because it turns out that the room is so influential that Researchers at the University of Southern Brittany and France found that its mere presence amped up altruism and strangers passing by a bread shop. We're talking about seven seven percent of people who passed a bakery with a robust smell of bread emanating from it. Those people stopped to help a person pick up their

glove or handkerchief or tissue. In contrast with people passing by a closed store, of which only fifty of those um who stopped to help that confederate that person in the study retrieve their snotty rag. It's amazing. It's it's as if it ties into this this primordial food sharing sort of vibe that we have. You know, something, something just buried deep in the hind brain where there's a smell of bread in the air, the smell of food,

a smell of sustenance. Therefore, maybe I should start being nice to everyone, or at least a little less awful on the chance that I could have some of that bread, because ultimately that's part of my my whole genetic programming is I need to eat, I need to breed, I need to keep going. Ah, So you're saying that altruism could be connected to the pleasure circuit, which we'll talk about in a second. What I is, do you does

that actually affect crime statistics? Like if somebody's looking to rob a fast food restaurant, do they go into subway and suddenly feel a little like, I don't know, these guys look like decent folks. I don't want to, uh, you know, do a stick up job here. I'm going to go down the street to the burger place. Yeah, maybe maybe they grab a sub and they go down to Burger, Burger King or Burger King. Would I would be interested in seeing the results of such a study.

All right. Um wanted to point out that neuroscientists David Lyndon said in an interview with Terry Gross fresh Air that the average weight of an American between ninets and sixty and now has gone up by an astonishing twenty six pounds. And he says that's not because americans genomes have changed significantly. It's because we have these thirty two sodas and fast food and food corporations realizing that certain

combinations of flavors and textures produce craving. So again, it's sort of like take the bread example, um that elicits this idea that we're going to have this reward, that there's a certain pleasure in that smell, there's a certain sustenance. So I also wanted to point out that there is

a twenty thirteen survey by market research firm Technomic. They looked at twenty two thousand, four d fifty nine adults and they found of people who eat outside of the home are prompted by cravings, and seventy who visit restaurants more than once a week do so for a specific dish that they crave. And can you guess the restaurants

that people hit up the most. It was interesting to to look at the findings here because they're not necessarily the places that I would crave, but the number one on this list on the chart rather than the highest

ranking one Krispy Cream Donuts. And while I like to believe I'm immune to the temptation of chris be Cream Donuts today, I do know that there is a there is an upscale donut place just down the street from where I live, and I do feel a little bit of the temptation to drop by there, uh not in part because I know that it would be delicious. But also there's just sort of the uh, you know, the you're like a hero if you bring donuts somewhere, do

you bring you bring really nice donuts somewhere. I mean, not not for my son. I wouldn't let him have one of these things, but you know, just to bring bring one home to some to the family or to two friends and say, look, i am the bringer of

doughnuts and therefore I'm an okay guy. I've noticed that an office culture, right on a Monday morning or Friday morning, if you bring in a bunch of donuts, it's kind of like this grand gesture and everybody's like, wow, donuts, like you know, like like it's the Victorian Agency when brought in oranges. Um. But yeah, that that there's a

certain kind of power there. So it makes sense that Krispy Kreme is occupying the top slot because they have everything, and it's not just Krispy Creme, but donuts in general. You've got the sweet, you've got the fatty, the bretty, um, even the even some of the meat flavoring. Now, I mean you can get the like one of the donuts is really popular with the place I was talking about has.

It's like a like a a caramel sea salt caramel topped with with not bacon DIBs per se, but bits of bacon and uh and so yeah, you're getting the salty, you're getting the sweet, you're getting the bretty, the fatty, the meaty, all in one super stimuli lump of food. Yeah. And you know what, I'm immune to the donuts and I live around You're lucky, immune to the charms of the donut, and I live by the way around the corner from that place that you're talking about. And that's

because as an angsty team. My first job, or one of my first jobs, was at Duncan Donuts, working the six am to two pm shift on the weekends with the conveyor belt. No no in the store. Like, I didn't make the donuts. Um one of the best jobs I had, but I smelled donuts and and then it was disgusting and so getting pulled over all the time. Yeah, people are just started sniffing me and licking my hair. Uh So anyway, for me, donuts don't hold that power.

But I did think about something on this list. After cold Stone Creamery, you have red Lobster as the first kind of like restaurant restaurant. And I'm not a big red lobster fan, but I have had those Cheddar Bay biscuits, and I understand this. This might be my crave item if I were to go out and seek something from a restaurant each week. I agree because I'm the same way you mentioned red lobster to me, and I'm instantly

gonna think seafood drowned in butter. I don't really want any, but then I'm gonna remember that those those those biscuit things, those Cheddar biscuits were so good. Now, why is this gaming us in such a way. Well, it all has to do with the metal or brain pleasure circuit. And this is the region of the brain which is dependent upon the neurotransmitter dopamine. And um, this is really essential to our evolutionary survival if you look at it this way.

So it's a very ancient region of our brain, and it exists originally because we want eating food and drinking water and having sex to be pleasurable in order to repeat this, to have children, to propagate our genes, survive and pass on this to the next generation. Um, it means that our ancestors could quickly identify which foods had the dense caloric value that their bodies needed to support

what what are really like huge daily energy expenditures. So, as we saw in our episode about addiction, the problem about hitting this kind of supernormal stimuli, as you say over and over again, is that those dopamine receptors, those D two receptors, they start to decrease and they need more and more in order to get that same effect of dopamine in your brain. So it's the same sort of situation you see with someone who is addicted to

to to various drugs, to various illicit substances. There they need more to get the fixed because because the circuits are breaking down kind of under the load of this, uh, this colossal stimuli. Yeah, when we looked at that World Science Festival panel on addiction, they showed those three brains right the um I think it was a meth addict, Um, it was an obese person and then a heroin addict, and they all had a lack of D two receptors.

And so the interesting thing about this is that something like of cases of severe BC are food addiction, with only ten having to do with a metabolic defect. So and you can see this power of these foods and as kind of going to them over and over again creating those pathways of addiction. So again, what's going to make the brains sing the most with openmine? That's super normal stimuli. And that's where I'm like that that's why something like the Cheesecake Factory exists because I was like,

what is a good example of this cheesecake? Um, what's an even better example a restaurant that fetishizes it? And according to their website they have something like thirties seven different types of cheesecakes available. And just to add I think a little bit of injury to insult, they offer something called the Skinny Liscious Menu, which I'm going to assume is a wave too for people to eat like maybe dinner with less calories and then rationalize that giant

cheesecake or yeah, I was, I was. I was wondering is there going to be a smaller piece of cheesecake or what? And do they have all types of cheesecake? Did they have like savory cheesecakes? Because I had an alligator cheesecake once in New Orleans? Who was tell me, what do you mean? You had an alligator cheesecake, like a cheesecake with with alligator, and it's it's everything that is a cheesecake except savory and meaty via the meat

of an alligator. How was it? It was good? It was really good and exceedingly rich, and it made you feel like a bad person after you ate it. That it's such like an Americana thing right there, alligator cheesecake exactly shrinking bit of American If you're an adventurous eater, look it up there. There are a few different places to get it down there, all right. So it would make sense that we have this this reaction to food.

And it would also make sense that when it comes to engineering junk food that scientists leave nothing to chance. And we're gonna take a quick break. When we get back, we're going to talk about the techniques and the technology. Hello there, won't you join me on the information elevator this week? Ben Bullen of Stuff they Don't want you to know, car stuff and brain stuff, will join me on the elevator and we'll look at whether or not he is a lire lire pants or fire. You can

find the Information Elevator on mind Stuff Show on YouTube. Hey, we're back. Um, you know, I was thinking I mentioned earlier the whole breaking of the bread. We talked about how that the scent of the bread, the aroma of the bread is pleasing and therefore inspires altruism. And we mentioned Game of Thrones and the idea that you have to rival houses coming together, and that smell of bread and the ritual of the bread maybe all that keeps

them from tearing each other apart. It occurred to me after you mentioned donuts in the office, when another situation where you see this kind of peace offering made. And that's when there's bad news in the office, or some sort of major transition or some major pain in the butt giant meetings HR stuff, or or in our case, when our our our company recently changed corporate masters from one dark overlord to another. And uh, not to imply that they're they're dark or get your meaning, but you

know they're they're overlords. And and so what happens when the transition is announced instantly there's some sort of baked good in the office, right, big good fruit and some coffee and some orange juice, but especially the smell of bread. Get that bread smell in there. So that nobody kills anybody well, and everybody feels like it's okay. Yeah, it's

okay because there's bread. You know. I wonder if law firms should begin to use this tactic when mediating cases, right, if they're trying not to go to court with the case, maybe everybody shows up at the table and they break bread. Would this actually, in fact, uh dial down the animosity between the parties. What if when a police officer makes an arrest, before they duck their head into the patrol car,

they stick a Kaiser roll in their mouth. You know, I feel like there might be a lawsuit really arising from that. Well, we would need to be gluten free and it would need to be vegan, right, but some sort of bait good. I mean, we are a litigious society. I mean, I states so or a police baton that's

actually a French French bread. I love that. I love the image now and now I'm thinking about bobbies in the UK, you know, yeah, alright, um, alright, So how do these these food scientists get to that extra itchy

place in our brains? According to New York Times magazine article The Extraordinary Science of Junk Food Freedom lay had a formidable research complex near Dallas were nearly five hundred chemists, psychologists, and technicians conducted research that cost up to thirty million year, and the Science Core focused intense amount of resources on questions of crunch, mouth feel, and aroma for each of

these items. And one of the items that they used is a forty thousand dollar device that stimulates chewing to test imperfect chips, which we'll talk about later. Chips is like sort of like the old standard of junk food um, which gets us to this whole chewing thing. Yeah, the idea of how much chewing is optimal, right, because because apparently the whole situation is you want some chewing because you need to be needed chew your food. Chewing the food is part of the enjoyment of it when we've

taste it. And this is an interest. If you ever really stop and think about a food that's pleasing you and try to dissect why it's pleasing you, it's almost an unanswerable question. Have you ever done that. There's a there's some sort of dish you're looking forward to, it's in your mouth, and then you're trying to break it down. Why am I enjoying this. Am I enjoying it? Do I enjoy? Why am I going to swallow it? Like?

Because once I swallowed, I can't taste it. Yeah, And it's funny because we don't think about it in slow mode. But if you did, you would realize that that saliva is actually releasing some of the aromas of the food and that in and in and of itself, is making

a more pleasurable experience. But most of us kind of just rushed through it, and um, the problem without is that the faster you rush through chewing, the less your stomach has a chance to kind of catch up with feeling sated and send signals to the brain that says

stop right. But this is one of the key tactics in food engineering or junk food engineering, is if you can reduce the amount of chewing, you can stuff more stuff into your your gaping maw, and you can feed the addiction more and you can get to the bottom of that chip bag faster. And companies kind of want you to do that, right, because then you're just going to buy more and more of the thing. Yeah, I mean, they have to put that suggested serving on the side,

but really they don't want you to stop. They want you to to plow through bag after bag, and if it takes forever to chew each each kernel, each chip, each families fun sized piece, then it's gonna take forever. And that's gonna cut into how much fast food they can sell you and how much fast food they can put in that mount. Yeah. Oh. Dr Lennon, who wrote

the I believe it's called the Compass of Pleasure. In an interview again with Terry Gross is a separate one, Um said that much of the meat in chain restaurants has been mechanically tenderized and injected with marinite to dissolve in your mouth, and it's lubricated for swallowing by high water content, and so he says, in essence, the factory has done half of your chewing and swallowing for use

that you can eat more. And he says that's one of the things that chain restaurants have figured out now. Gail vance Seville, who's the founder and president of Sensory Spectrum, this is a consumer research firm, says that in the forty five years that she's been in the food business, they used to have foods that they chewed fifteen times and twenty times and thirty times before they were swallowed. But now she says, there's rarely a food out there outside of say, like a sweet chewy candy you have

to chew more than twelve times before it's gone. And so the idea is that you you're getting these quick hits and you're onto that next pleasure or seeking that pleasure. And I thought that was not fascinating because probably a good example of this chicken McNuggets, which is if you've ever looked at that processes, you know, the meat is basically turned into a paste and then it's just molded and cooked. And that is that it's made like that because you can consume it faster, Yeah, and you can

make more from the chicken. It's just it's it's like a lot of our our meat products out there. It's it's what's left and what can we do with that that can then be sold as a food product. And then when it's kind of patted down like that, you have more surface area to put all of the fatty bread crumbs on it to even amp up that product more so that your brain is like, oh, nice, deep fried,

I'll take more. And then some sort of gelatinous sugary substance that you can dip it into and then and you go yeah, now, um cola companies are looking at something called sensory specific satiety, and this is the tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which makes the brain kind of say whoa, that's that's enough, and it depresses the desire to have more. So they have to keep this in mind when coming up with just the right blend of sweetness and flavors. And they're trying

to reach something called the bliss point. Like this is an actual industry term and um that's a term that came up in research and development for Dr Pepper's Vanilla soda. It's that that point where the project is firing on all cylinders on your brain, but it's not overwhelming you, right yeah. And and similarly in economics that it's seen is that the point of consumption where any further increase

would make the consumer less satisfied. So in a sense, whether you're talking about flavor or quantity, it's it's that point where it's good, but before you hate yourself. Like if this, if you're ever eating something, this is great. If it was a little more sweet, I would hate myself. Then you are at the bliss point. Yes, you're right, it's like before you go into the shame spiral. It's

just a couple just before that. And the funny thing is is that the companies can back off just aspect from that sugar, and just respect from that sugar means that they can you know, if you're especially if you're manufacturing billions of ounces of the stuff, you're actually gonna have cost savings. So they're doing it for both the satiation point, but also so that they can save a

couple of pennies, you know, parounts. Well, that's interesting, the one area where a junk food company would want to cut down on the sugar just for pure cost reasons. Yeah. And the funny things is that it's so miniscule that it really doesn't affect like that the actual um health or nutrition of a drink. Yeah, because ultimately there's so much sugar and most of these products that even even backing out up a little bit is really doing nothing to the overall potency of the thing. Um. I mean,

it's just ridiculous. I was eating a lot of these, you know, snack bars until recently and even though you know, you look at it and you start breaking down the contents of those things, even the ones that are more greenwashed and healthy sounding are actually like it's like eating a candy bar. It is. And even something like yo play yogurt is chock full of sugar, and in fact they're serving is has more sugar in it than Lucky

Charms cereal. And this used to be just like a humble yogurt that people would have for breakfast, and they transformed the whole yogurt industry by adding sugar into it and making it much more of an addictive go to thing for people. Yeah, it's the yogurt just becomes a vehicle for the sugar you're having for for breakfast or your snack. Yeah. And the yogurt has that creaminess element too in some cases the fat in it that really makes it even more desirable. Um, that's because it creates

this kind of mouth feel. I'm sure you've heard that in foodie terms, for the mouth feel is creamy and and the funny thing about this is that that creaminess and that fat contributes to a smooth, an even bullest of masticated food in your mouth, and that is pleasing all right, because it's the idea that this, uh, the food has taken the form that it needs to carry on through my digestive system and so that I can absorb its nutrients and therefore it's almost like it's pre

chewed and therefore pleasurable. Yeah, and it's lubricated, it's ready for action in your digestive The mother company has spit has spat it directly into my mouth, and now it's traded to swallow, which, by the way, is something that people have done through the ages, is to premasticate food for infants. But anyway, that's neither here nor there, but maybe it is. Maybe there's there's a sort of hard

wired feeling of that with this um premasticated food. Really now, there's something called the Malliard reaction that the industry uses, and this is I did not know about this. This is cooking carbohydrate rich foods that temperature is high enough to produce that yellow or brown surface, that kind of roasted quality, it kind of toastedness basically. And that's what

kind of horrified at me about this. When I first started reading about it, I was like, oh, great, now I can't I can't even eat toast the science science of nutrition and carcent gene has ruined toast for me. So what is left if I can't even toast some bread? It's not quite as simple as that. And really, what we're the real villains in the in the situation are going to be you're deeply fried foods, not not as

much some lightly brown toast. Yeah, because what it does is it produces something called a churlamide, and this is a known cancer causing agent when when it's consumed at higher levels, and it is potentially a dangerous chemical. And you could argue that there's probably not enough of it on say you're cheetos to warrant any danger. But has anyone ever taken like a tenure survey of people who eat Cheetos, you know, two packs a day, to see what that effect might be in their bodies? I don't

think so. Yeah, after I read over, the material I feel like they take home is not a void toast, but rather, here's another reason to think twice about going too often to the fried food trough. You know, it's one more reason on the list of reasons to maybe keep French fries or fried onion rings a special treat as opposed to a daily indulgence. Well, and it's even baked too, like cheetos um, which this was kind of

horrific to me for some reason. I don't know why it makes sense to me, you know how they kind of melt on your tongue. Let's which ones are Cheetos? Are those the ones that have a lot of air in them? Are the ones that are look kind of like there's one that kind of looks like orange um marsupial kind Yeah, I mean it's like a pool noodle that's been that's toasty looking. Yeah. Yeah. The Cheetos has

more has more structure. Okay, I'm confusing with the cheese puffs. Yeah, because cheese puffs are the ones that are mostly air and then the other ones look like like something. But you're right, cheese puffs have what is called a higher vanishing caloric density than cheetos becausecheetas you have to break down a little bit more, although they still kind of melt.

And this is something that food scientists try to achieve in a product since the melting quality of the food fools your brain into thinking that there's no calories in it and that you can just keep eating it. Forever. So it's gaming your brain to think like, oh, yeah, I can eat the whole pack. You're not gonna you know, fill up from this. So it's just the same appeal of ice cream. Then in addition to ice cream, sugar noose and fattiness and and and and mouth feel and

everything else. I think, so, Seth, I would wager about that the fat is probably detected more by the body and so you can't eat as much of it. But if you're looking at something like a cheese puff in particular, which is full of air and it melts really quickly, then your brain is going to be like, oh, I didn't realize that. You know, It's ten minutes later and I'm at the bottom of this package and I'm looking

for like a little bits and pieces of it. All right, But now let's we've talked about cheetos, we talked about cheese but best, but let's return to the granddaddy of all junk food items, the potato chip, which I can go weaken the niece for if it's the salt and vinegar kind. Yeah, that's There are some really nice chips out there, and some of them are you know, their upscale, they're a little artsy, they're they're a little greenwashed, and therefore you look at me like this is all natural?

I can I can get a whole bag of these, Yeah, And it turns out a lot of people do. There's a two thousand and eleven study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and it's all about weight gain. What they did is they looked at a hundred and twenty thousand, eight hundred and seventies of then men and women who were all professionals in the health field. So presumably these people would have a sort of a base knowledge of of of what is good for you

and what's not. And using data back to the researchers monitored everything that they ate, as well as their physical activity and smoking. And what they found is that every four years, the participants exercised less, they watched TV more, and they gained an average of three point three five pounds every four years. So the top contributors to weight gain included red meat, processed meats, sugar sweetened beverages, and potatoes including mash and fredge fries, but the largest contributor

was potato chips. Like that that right there tells you how addictive these little crisps are. Yeah, I mean, I mean it's the cliche, right that they almost enforced the idea that you just can't stop eating them once you

open that bag. And and and there's a lot going on here, a lot more than I thought, because you know, if you'd ask me previously, I would have said, all right, with the pitch of obviously you're getting salty, obviously you're gonna get you can get some oil, and then there's some market either the fat, and then there's some marginal vegetable content there as well. But but there's there's a little more, yeah, that you get the sugar that exists not as an additive but in the actual starch of

the potato potato itself. And so starch in turn causes the glucose levels in the blood to spike, and that can cause more of that craving in your brain for it. Um. So the other thing about this is that there's a sort of physics to the potato chip that is very appealing. So you remember that device that we talked about that

choose and premasticates food. That device has also helped the industry to try to understand that people like a chip that snaps with about four pounds of pressure per square inch, and so you could say that there's definitely an arn't to a kind of physics to it. And Mary Roach actually talked about this in the New York Times article

called the Marvels of the Mouth. Yeah, I mean the the idea that you when that when that I think we've talked about this before a bit, when you crunch into that chip, when it when it crunches in your mouth, Um, we're getting a sense. The brain is getting a sense that we're eating something fresh, so like like yes, like salary. The brain is saying this is basically celery we're eating here, and therefore we should eat a lot of it because it's fresh and it's not going to be fresh forever.

Chow down. Yeah. To get that kind of snap, that fracture, you need crack speeds of the chip of three hundred meters per second. That's the speed of sound. And so Mary Roach describes it as the sonic boom inside of your mouth. And then uh Dr Tom Vanpolet, who has been studying the crunching of chips for seven years, had said that as just as you say that crispiness, that crunchiness appeals to us because it has that sort of freshness that our ancestors would have sought out in vegetables

and fruit. So not only is the chip um very appealing to us because of the sugar content and the salt and the fat, but because it's mimicking something that would have been important to us um in our ancestral survival. Yeah. And and and on top of that, and this was in some materials that you you sent me earlier. Just the the crinkliness of the bag piz into that it's almost like a harbinger of the of the crispiness of

the chip. You hear the bag crinkling, and and and that makes you start thinking about the crunchiness of the of the chip. It's almost like you're you're again, you're reaching in with your caveman hands into some crisp, crunchy plant to to grab your your lunch. Yeah. And that's what gets us to this idea of sound symbolism. And in two thousand and four, Charles Spence and neuroscientists at Oxford University had subjects bite into all told about one

and eighty potato chips. And what he did is he manipulated the that bite or crunch sound with directional microphones and found that when researchers amplified the crunching sounds, that the subjects rated the chips as crisp ear, but when he muffled their crunching noises, they scored the chip as less crisp. So it is really the full experience that you're bringing to the food. And that's that sound stabolism

of oh this is fresh, it's good. Yeah, the chip that is so crunchy that you have to turn up the television set while you're while you're watching it because the sound is deafening in set your own skull. So think of all that when you the next time you open a bag of potato chips, Because this is an item that has been gamed, that has been manipulated to get the maximum response out of you the user. Yeah, free do lay thirty million dollars in that one year to try to create the perfect chip for you to

return to over and over again. And for the most part, you think, oh, well, probably this isn't a big deal. I mean a lot of this is just you know, little power. But we've talked about this before. We've talked about how these pathways are created in the brain. It's very hard to try to get over these types of addictions, so you know, it takes a little bit more than just knowing that it's bad for you. And I wanted to bring up this example of microwave popcorn, especially that

will yield butter flavor. That you see, it uses flavoring chemicals like diacutle and pentadeon which are dissipated into the air by the heating process. Not something you want to breathe in, right. Well, Um, a guy named Wayne Watson was awarded seven million dollars when he seed the manufacturer and retailers of microwave buttered popcorn that caused him to develop something called popcorn lung after he ate two bags

daily for ten years. So you could argue that it's just it's not it's not even just an obesity issue. Sometimes it's it's some of the chemicals that are affecting us in adverse ways. And clearly here it's the artificiality of our food. You know, I mean, this is not a matter of saying, oh, all that butter on the popcorn was bad for you. This is a matter of

the butter flavoring. It was, there's a careful chemical concoction had this dire effect on him, Which brings us to this analogy of cigarette which isn't a perfect analogy, but if you consider that cigarette manufacturers have been known uh, you know particularly, I think it was in the eighties that this came to light that for a number of years they were amping up some of the addictive chemicals in the cigarettes to further addict their customers. Could you

say this tame of junk food. Yeah, I would think so. I mean your starting I think basically you're starting point is uh is a little less evil, but you're still ramping it up. You're still trying to make it more addictive and and in opening yourself to the situations where someone ends up eating your product product exclusively and then

paying the price for it. So, about fifteen years ago, vice president of Kraft, Michael mud He went to a industry meeting process food industry meeting meeting, and the meeting was meant to talk about the rising obesity and the manufactured foods that they were creating, and he was hoping that that all the members of these various companies would be open to this idea of regulating their foods um. Unfortunately that was not that did not happen at that meeting.

But I thought it was striking because fifteen years ago he presented, uh, this whole idea of what they were doing and how it was affecting people. And he included the following quote in this presentation from Yale University professor of psychology and public health Kelly Brownel, which is quote, as a culture, we've become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit oddly by while the

food companies do the very same thing. And we could make claim that the toll taken on the public health via poor diet rivals that taken by tobacco fifteen years ago, before we really even saw this huge expansion of obesity statistics that we have today. It's a little startling, it is. So tell me this, Yes, this evening, after my son goes to bed, I am going over to a friend's house to play board games. And said friend, let's call him Greg, is going to inevitably have two bags on

the table. One is going to be normal Twizzlers and one is going to be this other variant of Twizzler that include no, no, no, it's rainbows and each one has like a creamy filling. So what what am I to do? How am I going to resist having that first twizzler and then the subsequent u you know, thirty twizzlers? You know, honestly, I think that you you eat pretty healthy, right, Yeah, it seems to me. I feel like that's not a

huge risk for you. What I see is that the problem is is that fast food, junk food is so inexpensive and easy now for manufacturers to produce that a lot of people are going to this as their mean sustenance. So if you were like, man, I'm hitting up the KFC again today, kind I pick you up something, and this was happening all the time, I might be like Robert, dude,

remember the kraal mind um? But you know, I really think that's that's the problem, and that is also the problem for people who are um in lower income brackets is that it's a lot easier and convenient to go to these foods instead of fresh foods, which are more expensive. And of course availability also placed into that the whole idea of of having food deserts, where whereas an individual does not have access to those healthier foods, even if they are a little bit more expensive than the than

the unhealthy options. And you're talking about food desserts in that there there have been plenty of studies that will show you that in lower income areas there are not grocery stores as readily available. Therefore, you know you could hit up that KFC or that McDonald's a lot easier than you could to travel the ten to twenty miles

to find a grocery store exactly. All right, So there you have it, junk food, a little more insight into why we love that, why we cannot resist it, what it's doing to us, how it's gaming us, and of course about the dark masters of dark food that engineer it to dominate us. I know that everyone has some comments to make on this, so we'd love to hear from what what fast food item holds the most influence over you? What fast food items have you managed to defeat?

Fast food or junk food. I'm kind of using the two words that interchangeably for some reason, but but let us know. Share your stories, share your tips, share your alternatives, and because we would love to hear from you, and we'd love to share some of your content on the show. Yeah, I'd also like to know if commercials affect you. I was thinking about this that I think there's one of

the Kardashians did a Roy Junior Burger ad campaign. I don't know if I've got that chain right, but I think I was like, you know, skimpy bathing suit with the burger, with like the sweaty bacon falling out of it and like the listening orbs of her breasts, and I thought, if there's nothing more super normal to me

live than that? Yeah, I mean that actually ties in directly within with a study I was looking at recently that I've blogged about, and I have a video coming out about the the idea of what did they call it. It's not the bikini effect, um, but it's something that

to to that effect. And the idea is that if a male UM in this case, say a heterosexual male, looks at a picture of a model on a bikini, sees a woman in a bikini, or even just handles a braw their willpower lessons like there's it makes the primal male, you know, want to to mate, to to to give into his impulse, but that impulse will will then manifest itself in the form of say, um, buying some some junk food that they know they don't need, eating some junk food in the office place, or ordering

something off of Amazon that they normally would have the willpower to resist. Now that's not surprising to me if I especially think about it in the context of the bread example and altrsm. You know something that's simple changing your behavior in tapping into that pleasure circuitry. So very interesting. Let us know your thoughts on that. We definitely want to hear it, and uh, you can find us at the Mothership, Yes, Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

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