Food and Addiction

Addiction for anything can be acquired and be harmful. Ordinarily, society only cares for something that shows obvious signs of pain and unhealthy state – like drugs and alcohol. But there are other addictions as well, which are as much, if not more harmful. Whether you consume drugs uninhibitedly or food, the result is the same – Death!

Recently saw this program by Jamie Oliver, who is a celebrity chef in UK and who has made it a mission to get people to healthy eating and off the bad foods. Recently, ABC aired this show which had him visit Huntington, W. Virginia – the unhealthiest town in the world. People there were unbelievably fat and unhealthy. He tried to introduce better food in schools, but clearly had a tough time as the US Food laws for schools LEAD to selling useless food to the kids. The adults are also helpless – since they have been used to eating such bad food as kids. One Mom was shown how she was feeding her kids to death – by giving them all junk food, yet she couldn’t stop herself. She could not make anything fresh.. instead was feeding her kids on a diet of “Brown and Dark Brown” stuff (fried and deep fried)!

Now comes the claim that food can be as addictive as Cocaine and be hard to kick off as a habit.

The experiment involved 3 groups of rats who were given different diets:

One of the groups was fed regular rat food. A second was fed bacon, sausage, cheesecake, frosting, and other fattening, high-calorie foods–but only for one hour each day. The third group was allowed to pig out on the unhealthy foods for up to 23 hours a day.

The third group became obese for obvious reasons. Even when they were subjected to pain, still these rats kept on eating, as if they felt no pain!

They began to eat compulsively, to the point where they continued to do so in the face of pain. When the researchers applied an electric shock to the rats’ feet in the presence of the food, the rats in the first two groups were frightened away from eating. But the obese rats were not. “Their attention was solely focused on consuming food,” says Kenny

This shows what result food can have on people and their bodies.