Everyone needs food to survive, but not everyone has the control to limit their intake. The brain tells people’s bodies when they need to eat, but people become pleasingly addicted and ingest more carbohydrates than their bodies need. People’s consumption of food remains one of the very first primitive acts, even as a newborn. There are many ways to be healthy such as exercising but the world still possesses the temptation of food. The media takes advantage of the addictive properties of food and tries to make commercials appeal to certain audiences, and they try advertising mostly in populated areas, such as eating facilities, to get people to buy more and therefore, eat more. The brain produces a chemical known as dopamine that gives the body a satisfying sensation correlated to addictive properties, and often the brain craves more than the body needs. Many can possess the willpower to want to be healthy, but the quote “Where there is a will there is a way” is not that simple. Several believe the answer to being healthy is to merely stop eating unhealthy foods, but this theory is controversial and misunderstood because food is an addiction.
First of all, there remains a substantial amount of evidence of the prevalence of food addiction, and there are several steps to the addiction and many ways to detect the properties, for example, people experience disturbances called cravings that they feel must be satisfied, and when trying to be healthy this is the factor that overpowers many people’s willpower and causes them to lose control. There are various amounts of evidence that people lose control over their food consumption, suffer from repeated attempts to reduce their intake, and are unable to abstain from certain types o...
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...er, their mind and body stand as an obstacle to make the assessment for a healthier life more problematic.
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American health, specifically our obesity epidemic, has grown into a trending media topic. A quick Google search will bring up thousands of results containing a multitude of opinions and suggested solutions to our nation’s weight gain, authored by anyone ranging from expert food scientists to common, concerned citizens. Amongst the sea of public opinion on obesity, you can find two articles: Escape from the Western Diet by Michael Pollan and The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food by Michael Moss. Each article presents a different view on where the blame lies in this public health crisis and what we should do to amend the issue. Pollan’s attempt to provide an explanation pales in comparison to Moss’s reasonable discussion and viable
In the essay “Her Chee-to Heart”, by Jill McCorkle, she discusses about the various difficulties she has encountered of being a junk-food junkie and the struggles of overcoming the guilty pleasures of junk food. Firstly, one of the many difficulties she encounters are her feelings, which ultimately overwhelm her into continuing to eat various types of junk foods. Her feelings of nostalgic memories when consuming such goods as a child, the enjoyment and the savory tastes it grants her, are constantly mentioned throughout the essay, directly contributing a major factor into her desires of junk food. Furthermore, while she is quite aware of the consequences regarding the health side effects of consuming such foods and what the food is ultimately
In Michael Moss’ “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food” he argues that companies have a huge influence on what consumers purchase and have been successfully able to get people addicted to junk foods because one’s willpower does not overpower their lack of adequate information and time, vulnerability to manipulative marketing and formulation of products, and their socioeconomic status.
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McCrady, B S., Epstein, E., Cook, S, Jensen, N K., Ladd, B O.; (Sep, 2011). Psychology of Addictive Behaviors; Vol 25(3); 521-529. Doi: 10.1037/a0024037
The study presented in this presentation focus on four different aspects of the influence of neurotransmitters that have an influence on eating. The first aspect is a 36 amino acid peptide transmitter known as the NPY. The NPY contains five different receptors; Y1, Y2, Y4, Y5, and Y6. Y2 is specifically geared towards memory. Y5 pertains to eating. Y6 is found in some animals, but not really found in humans. The Y1 and Y5 receptors are specifically for eating. The more NPY found within the body, the more a person would eat. A question, which was presented in this presentation, was if certain areas of the brain could be identified as being responsive to the metabolic action of the NPY. In order to study this idea, and experiment was performed where NPY was injected directly into different target areas. From this, it was shown that there were specific areas of the brain that responded to the levels of NPY differently.
Eating the pizza instead of the salad seemed like a good idea at the time, but now one is stuck in this sloth like state hours later. It seems letting cravings control what and how to eat is not the best strategy to healthy living. Mary Maxfield, in her article “Food For Thought: Resisting the Moralization of Food” discusses her views on how people should eat. She believes people crave what their bodies need, therefore, people should eat what they crave. Maxfield claims that diet, health, and weight are not correlated with each other, and because of this, people view obesity as unhealthy, thus forcing them to distinguish “right, healthy” foods from the “wrong, unhealthy” choices.
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Sprouting from American obsessive-compulsive eating habits is a number of disorders and conditions: diabetes, high blood pressure, high c...
Toates, F. (2010) ‘The nature of addictions: scientific evidence and personal accounts’ in SDK228 The science of the mind: investigating mental health, Book 3, Addictions, Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 1-30.
Food is a major part of everyone’s everyday life. It’s hard to imagine life without the chocolate cake on your fingers or a carne asada taco in your mouth. Enjoying delicious desserts and fast food seem extremely magnificent to eat and spend money buying them. Although, there have been many controversies in the United States on how it’s the largest country with the most obesity regarding children, which affects their health, many people are still going throughout their day snacking. Many people in America are having full course meals with thousands of calories in one sitting not knowing the short term or long term side effects that are going to take a huge toll on their lives. Food is delicious, but it comes with a secret behind the savoriness/sweetness.
Leshner, A. (2011) Addiction Is a Brain Disease, and it Matters. Frontiers in Neuroscience: The Science of Substance Abuse.
Through various observations and assumptions, there have been conversations on whether or not overconsumption of food is an addiction. However, many have come to the conclusion that food is an addiction if it is overconsume excessively than it is necessary for an individual’s diet. Nevertheless, food addiction can create health issues that can affect an individual’s body. Even though, many individual may have such knowledge of overconsumption of food; however, many may choose to ignore the consequences that comes with food addiction. Becoming a food addict is harmful and dangerous to an individual’s health.
It became so clear that junk foods lead to a punch of catastrophic diseases like obesity, type two diabetes, vascular diseases and cardiac disorders. Those kinds of diseases cost more than $150 billion annually, just to diagnose, treat people who suffer from them. That disease is chronic and leads to many health-related issues, for example, obesity considers a risk factor for type two diabetes, and high blood pressure, joint disorders and many others (The Denver Post 2012). The key of preventing many chronic problems is nutrition. Low income plays an important role of limiting most people to buy and eat a healthy diet and in the other hand, it is easy for people budgets to purchase junk foods. So controlling the prices of healthy foods to be suitable for all people make good nutrition available for everyone. Adequate diets mean decreasing the epidemic of those serious diseases, and stopping the spread and break the bad sequences that may happen. Long-term exposure to junk foods that are full with chemicals like additives, preservatives have led to chronic illnesses difficult to treat. Also, the chemical added to junk foods are tasted unique and made millions of people becoming addicted to them and are available everywhere for example in restaurants, cafes, lunchrooms (The Denver Post