3 Sinister Reasons You're Addicted To Junk Food

The addictive quality of food isn't something incidental that companies just happen to benefit from -- they're aware of the phenomenon, and they've been playing the market in the exact same way drug pushers do. Within Coca-Cola, the 20 percent of customers who drink 80 percent of their product are actually known as "heavy users," and the company has made it its mission to specifically target them. And the goal has always been to get you more addicted. They're basically drug-dealing supervillains from a Michael Bay movie, only better written.

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The only better racket would be convincing people to pay you for aging.

Eighty percent of food sold in America has processed sugar, and processed sugar has 56 different names. So even if you're deliberately trying to avoid processed sugar, odds are you won't even know you're buying it unless you write down "galactose" and "rapadura" on some flash cards and quiz yourself like you're studying for the goddamned MCATs.

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"Let's just market it as 'orgasmatol.'"

Even if something doesn't taste "sweet," it can still be packed with chemicals that your body will immediately turn into sugar. And taking that junk out makes everything taste like bullshit to us, because our taste buds have been numbed with salt and sugar our entire lives. One journalist described the taste of sugar- and salt-free Kellogg's cornflakes as like trying to eat his own fillings -- and that's cornflakes, the kind of food that seems like it has barely any sugar to begin with.

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This is what it looks like to live life on the edge.

But at least you're avoiding high fructose corn syrup, the most common form of processed sweetener and the bane of anybody nominally interested in wellness, right? Good luck with that -- neuroscientists recently observed that exposing lab rats to high fructose corn syrup brought about behavioral changes similar to those produced by addictive drugs like cocaine. Somewhere out there, Mrs. Butterworth is sitting languidly at a mahogany desk, slowly dunking her face into a giant vat of syrup while "Push It to the Limit" blasts at 130 decibels.

However, the scientist concluded the interview by saying that technically the food didn't have the exact same chemical effect on the rats' brains as addictive drugs, so the headline became "junk food might not be addictive." See, market analysts know that once something is generally considered to be "addictive," people will actively prevent their children from being exposed to it.

And the entire business model of major food companies is to get you chemically dependent on their product from early childhood, so as long as fast food chains and soft drink corporations and the like keep dumping billions of dollars into advertising deals with mass media conglomerates, we're likely to see this information continue to be downplayed or flat-out ignored for years to come. Might as well go have a Coke and a smile.

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"I'd be a corporate whistle-blower, but the clown and the violet ogre put a bomb in my brain."

J.F. Sargent is writing a sci-fi comedy action story you can read for free. You can also reach him on Twitter, his website, or Facebook.