Junk food is engineered to addict you to chemical ingredients

(NaturalNews) Regular readers of Natural News, as well as scores of others in the U.S. and around the world, have long since known of the health dangers of junk food
- foods that can most generally be described as those which contain
empty calories and excessive amounts of substances known to cause harm
to the body.

But why does junk food remain so popular? What makes tens of millions of people consume it daily, even if
they are well aware of its health and dietary pitfalls? Well, part of
the reason is by design - that is, the way such foods were designed
to appeal to our senses. Think of the old Lay's potato chip
commercials; "No one can eat just one." In many respects, that's what
junk food does: It is designed to create a sort of can't resist
mindset, which is a) why junk food makers have thrived, even in a
culture of health; and b) why so many Americans (and increasingly,
citizens of other countries) are seeing epidemics of obesity, diabetes,
heart disease and other medical conditions.

Digest that for a moment and consider the following examples, as laid out by Michael Moss, author of Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us:

Ever wonder why so many people can't put down a bag of Cheetos? The answer to that is simple - Cheetos were designed to be consumed by the bag/pound,
not eaten slowly, over days, a few at a time. In fact, some food
scientists believe the Cheeto is a modern miracle, of sorts, in terms of
pure junk food. Writes Moss:

"This,"
Witherly [a food scientist] said, "is one of the most marvelously
constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure." He ticked
off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But
the one he focused on most was the puff's uncanny ability to melt in the
mouth. "It's called vanishing caloric density," Witherly said. "If
something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there's no calories
in it...you can just keep eating it forever."

The "cheese that goes crunch" now comes in no fewer than 17 flavors.

Junk food makers have perfected a process known as subverting "sensory-specific satiety." According
to the author, this is a key food industry concept that can create a
"tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which
responds by depressing your desire to have more." He writes that the key
to avoid that natural tendency is to create junk food recipes that circumvent it:

Sensory-specific
satiety also became a guiding principle for the processed-food
industry. The biggest hits - be they Coca-Cola or Doritos - owe their
success to complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be
alluring but don't have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells
the brain to stop eating.

The junk food industry, by the way, knows its products are harming our society.
Sadly, but not so surprisingly, the junk food industry has known (at
least since 1999, says Moss) that it is contributing to the declining
health of society.

"Moss' piece opens with a secret meeting that
year of the industry's top executives wherein evidence of severe harm
from the industry's aggressive marketing of junk food - and a comparison
to the tobacco industry - was laid out by concerned mid-level execs," Mother Jones
reported. "The CEOs explicitly decided to ignore the evidence and
reject a plea for reform, Moss reports. Instead, they focused their
companies on more of the same."

Like other industries, junk food makers have become good at pitching questionable "solutions" to self-created problems.
Consider this example. The industry fills most all of its products with
salt, but one of the industry's chief demographics, baby boomers, are
aged now and trying to cut back on excessive salt. Is that a problem? No
- an opportunity. Rather than genuinely lower salt content, per se,
junk food makers are seeking to develop a "designer sodium" which they
hope will reduce salt in their products by as much as 40 percent. If
that occurs, baby boomers will reason that, hey, salt content is much
lower so we can eat more junk food and feel better about it.

Other deceptive concepts include:

-- Finding a product that sells, then finding the cheapest ingredients
you can to make it profitable (think Lunchables, which were developed
in the 1980s and initially lost money until Philip Morris, which
invented them, began filling them mainly with iterations of corn and
soy).

-- Your brain, surprisingly, reacts to sugar and cocaine in
much the same way, so when you say things like, "This [fill in
chocolate bar name here] is like my candy crack!" that is closer to truth than most people realize.

--
The breakfast drink Tang was not developed for the U.S. space program
but was used by NASA nonetheless because it was the perfect low-fiber
drink (General Foods developers only perfected the taste of Tang after
removing all the vitamins and minerals normally found in real orange
juice).


Source:-
http://www.naturalnews.com/039600_junk_food_addiction_ingredients.html