2. Engineered “Hyperpalatable” Junk Foods
Today, foods are often little more than refined ingredients mixed in with a bunch of chemicals.
These products are engineered to be cheap, last long on the shelf and taste so incredibly good that we just can’t get enough.
By making foods “hyperpalatable,” the food manufacturers ensure that we eat a lot and decide to buy and eat them again and again.
Most processed foods today don’t resemble food at all. These are highly engineered products, with massive budgets spent on making the foods taste so good that we become “hooked.”
3. Food Addiction
These highly engineered junk foods cause powerful stimulation of the reward centers in our brains (2, 3).
You know what else does that? Drugs of abuse like alcohol, cocaine, nicotine and cannabis.
The fact is that junk foods can cause full-blown addiction in susceptible individuals. People lose control over their eating behavior, in the same way as alcoholics lose control over their drinking behavior.
Addiction is a complex issue with a biological basis that can be very difficult to overcome. When you become addicted to something, you lose your freedom of choice and the biochemistry in your brain starts calling the shots for you.