Food is Killing Us
Food is becoming the next cigarette in the addiction world. A statement that is not unfounded nor untrue, food companies with teams of psychologists, scientists, and food experts use refined processed measures to engineer food that’s sole purpose is to addict. Similar to the designs of the tobacco companies, the food companies are using advertising and manipulation of mental stimulation and visual cues to hook their victims first with sight and then with physiological addiction, which keeps the victim on as a consumer for life. An experimental study conducted by Allison Meyers and others at multiple University affiliations, including the City of New York and Queens College, in 2017 dug into these truths by linking the effects of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) with metabolic dysregulation and altered dopamine pathways, which can give rise to obesity and obesity-related health risks. In America alone, over 35 percent of adults are obese (Flegal et al. 2016); with the rate of obesity at over one-third of the population and growing, modern medicine may not be able to keep up with the rate of deterioration. Thus, making obesity a national epidemic and a growing healthcare crisis for the country’s future.
Obesity is on the rise, and this is a problem that almost exclusively infects first-world countries. As the authors of the article state, “Obesity has increased dramatically in recent decades, a phenomenon widely associated with the so-called ‘western diet’: energy-dense, highly palatable foods with high fat and sugar content” (Meyers et al. 2017, p. 1). This should give concern to the citizens who live in first-world countries, especially America, because the western diet is more or less our own. Due to unnatural man-made, chemically constructed food, obesity is now the fifth leading global cause of death, killing more than 2.8 million people annually (Obesity 2021). This is one of the first articles to attempt to gain further insight into the root cause of why this is happening. At the basal level, the article examines how the relationship between food addiction and the processed food chemical that cause the disease, as well as the physiological consequence of ingesting these foods over extended periods, acts as a precursor to obesity.
All Previous research has only been focused on a causal relationship between the input (processed food) and the outcome(obesity); the research can only definitively confirm that there is a link between HFCS and weight gain due to what is known as western diets, (Bray 2004), but more importantly whether those increased rates of obesity are caused HFCS or other processed chemicals in western diets had yet to be identified. Also, a pretext of why obesity occurs or what the direct physiological cause of obesity was, had never been well established before. The chemical HFCS has always been a concern for researchers, but the effects had never been isolated, and there was a general sense of ambiguity left among the scientific community. This study primarily focused on HFCS and how its individual properties affected the physiology of the body. Over extended periods of time, more specifically, how the dopamine pathways within the dorsal striatum and glucose regulation within the body were altered. From previous research, we know that Reduced dopamine signaling is related to compulsive eating, addiction, and lack of energy (Volkow et al. 2017), as well as the dorsal striatum, being the center of reinforcement behavior, feeding behavior, habit, and addiction (Palmiter 2008). The previous research gave the foundation for the experimental study by Allision Meyers and others to find the physiological adaptive changes within the body as a potential reason why people not only become obese but stay obese as well.
The methodology of an experimental study is the process by which an isolated variable is tested to find the natural occurrence of its effects. The previous researchers, Volkow and Palmiter, gave the researchers a foundation of where to look for the potential reason of why obesity is occurring and is so hard to beat. The process used to conduct the experiment was two sets of mice, a control group that was fed normal food known as chow and water; the second group was an experimental group that was fed chow the same as the control group and a solution of water containing 10% HFCS. All potential variables besides the experimental variable of HFCS were held ceteris paribus. For example, one particular variable they held constant was the food, part of the study was to demonstrate that HFCS causes physiological regulatory damages without weight gain. Another variable held ceteris paribus was stress; they kept all mice on the same cycle of daylight and housed them in groups of two to four. With extraneous variables held constant, they were able to test HFCS effects with two individual tests used to gather data from the experimental variable. The first one was the Glucose challenge; the other was fast scan cyclic Voltammetry. Each of the tests was used as a measure of physiological change within the body due to HFCS.
The glucose challenge was similar to a standard blood test for humans, the mice fasted for 6 hours, and blood was drawn for a baseline glucose level; then they were injected with dextrose, and blood was redrawn at 15, 30, 60, 90,120 minutes to see how high the blood sugar spiked as well as how fast it was reabsorbed. This gave the researchers the ability to determine metabolic dysregulation within the two mice groups.
The second test was the fast-scan cyclic voltammetry which is an electrical device used to produce dopamine or other hormones in different areas of the brain. For the purposes of this experiment, the brains of the mice were tested at 5hertz, 20 hertz, and 60 hertz, which gave the researchers data about how much dopamine was released. Then using statistical tests and the demon software and data from the scan shows how much “evoked dopamine” (Meyers et al. 2017 p. 3) was released within the brain of the mice groups.
The testing revealed results that were previously assumed by most in the scientific community, such as Bray and others 2004, although their assumption had not been backed by the support of primary evidence. This evidence is the first real support for those assumptions. The first test, which was the glucose challenge, showed a higher peak of glucose as well as a lower clearance level in the HFCS when compared to the mice in the control group (Meyers et al. 2017 p.4); this means that there was higher blood sugar absorption with alteration in metabolic regulation for glucose. This may give reasoning behind why diabetes rates have also increased as well as obesity (Basu et al. 2013). The second test, which was the fast scan cyclic voltammetry, revealed that the HFCS group had reduced evoked dopamine release in the dorsal striatum than those in the control group (Meyers et al. 2017 p.5), which means that due to HFCS, there was less of the hormone dopamine, which from articles by Palmiter in 2008 and the article by Volkow and others in 2017 had previously associated low levels of dopamine with higher levels of eating disorders, addictive behavior, and obesity.
So, what do these results mean? The altered glucose regulation demonstrates that HFCS can cause metabolic dysregulation without weight gain, which is a vital step in showing that the effects of HFCS are independent of obesity, which indicates that extended consumption of HFCS is a precursor to obesity. The altered dopamine pathways showed in the study from HFCS means that part of the consumption once affected is beyond individual willpower the addictive behaviors controlled by the dorsal striatum are affected, and with a lower amount of dopamine in the brain, there is lower energy expenditure, lower inhibition, and increase compulsive eating. “…changes in glucose regulation and dopamine function induced by HFCS may precede and contribute to obesity in the long-run.” (Meyer et al. 2017 p.8). The results are indicative of physiological changes leading to precursors of obesity, finally giving evidence that these food companies are manipulating the human body to addict their victims.
Although this study is a major breakthrough in understanding why obesity is so prevalent and by what methods the chemicals used by food companies are affecting the human body, as with any experimental study, there are limitations to its application. This is not indicative of unreliable results but rather a lack of power to which conclusions of the limitations could be drawn from this study alone. One of the limitations that the authors recognized was whether or not sex is a major cause of differences in dopamine pathways and glucose regulation (Meyers et al. 2017 p. 7), which means that could some accountability between the experimental group and control group be attributed to the difference in how the females versus males’ natural occurrence of dopamine pathways and glucose regulation. Another limitation that I found was whether these effects of this particular sweetener, HFCS, could be applied to other common sweeteners such as natural sugar, added sugar, and aspartame or artificial sugar, fructose, sucrose, etc. All of these may have different or similar effects that may have a greater or lesser impact on the dopamine pathways and glucose regulation. Also, a third limitation of the study was the comparable value of the significance of the results. From the study, we cannot know the value or amplitude of the significance of the results; we can only know that they are statistically significant. Meaning that we know they are meaningful, but by how much should they or do they matter? Regardless of these limitations, the results of the study are a step toward uncovering the truth of the physiological effects of HFCS and how they contribute to obesity.
Obesity is on the rise and is affecting the lives of people in our own country, not a third world country or the middle east, but western countries. A problem that is not a future threat to our civilization but a real-life killer that is killing friends and family at a rate of 2.8 million people a year, and that number is growing. Not only is this an ethical and public health catastrophe, but there is the economic strain put on the public to keep up with health care costs associated with obese patients as well, in an article from 2010 says, “…medical spending may amount to as much as $147 billion annually for adults and $14.3 billion annually for children.” (Hammond and Levine 2010 p. 294). The economic and public health tradgies associated with obesity are pushing on society as a whole, and getting to the reason why this is happening is crucial to creating policy to control the spread of this disease. It is not just a matter of willpower to control the urge when there is a physical change within a person due to food companies manipulating their consumer to consume more and more. This study reveals that processed chemicals used by food companies to artificially over-sweeten food can physically addict their victims, which leads to a life of obesity and obesity-related health conditions. These results need to be taken further to see what other processed chemicals are being used to control the victims that consume it and make the western diet food a collapsing crutch of the western world.
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Featured Image Source:
Linder, Rachel.2021.this Is The #1 Most Popular Snack Food in the World [digital Photograph].Eat This, Not That!.[accessed 2022 Spetember 21].https://www.eatthis.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2020/05/snacks-in-america.jpg?quality=82&strip=1