The fraudulent scientific research of Big Pharma is rife, and has been acknowledged as untrustable by medical journal editors, professors, doctors, government officials and former Big Pharma insiders.
Fraudulent scientific research is rife throughout the world due to the power of monetary influence wielded by Big Pharma, the giant cartel of multinational pharmaceutical corporations started over 100 years ago by the Rockefellers. This fraudulent scientific research is now so widespread and pervasive it is become an open secret. There is a long list of medical journal editors, doctors and professors on the “outside”, former Big Pharma employees and executives on the “inside”, as well as government officials somewhere in between, who have stepped forward as whistleblowers and acknowledged the fraud. Money buys favorable research. Period. This is not really surprising, given the history of Rockefeller Western medicine and the fact that Big Pharma’s business model is based on “managing” disease, “treating” symptoms and keeping patients on the hamster wheel, rather than actually healing them completely.
Everyone Knows How the “Game” Works
Whistleblower Dr. Peter Rost, former vice president of Pfizer, a giant Big Pharma company, spelled it out. In the video clip embedded above, taken from the documentary One More Girl, he reveals that everyone knows how the “game” works:
“Universities, health organizations, everybody that I have encountered … are out there …. begging for money. (Big Pharma corporations) use that money to basically buy influence … (Big Pharma provides) grants for various kinds of research … make sure they (scientific researchers) became beholden … Everyone obviously knows this is how things work.”
“They (scientific researchers) are not going to continue to get money unless they’re saying what you (i.e. Big Pharma) want them to say. They know it, you know it, and it’s only maybe the public that doesn’t know it.”
In this way, the almost the entire medical scientific community has been compromised and has become thoroughly untrustworthy.
Fraudulent Scientific Research Exposed by Medical Journal Editors and Professors
Look at what numerous key experts are saying about this epidemic of fraudulent scientific research. Dr. Richard Horton is the current editor-in-chief of the British Lancet journal, which is respected as one of the best peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. He came out and stated:
“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”
Then look at what Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the esteemed New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), had to say about the pervasive fraudulent scientific research:
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines … I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”
Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis, a professor of disease prevention at Stanford University, published a study in a PLoS One paper entitled Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. He found that research conclusions are less likely to be true when study samples sizes are too small, when effect sizes are even smaller, and when there are major variances in study designs, definitions, outcomes and analytical modes. He highlighted the corrupting influence of Big Pharma and concluded that:
“There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false … it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true.”
Fraudulent Scientific Research Exposed by other Big Pharma Whistleblowers
The pervasive fraudulent scientific research shows that most “solid medical evidence” may in fact be quackery.
Fraudulent scientific research has also been exposed by former executives and employees of the Big Pharma machine. In addition to Dr. Peter Rost, another Big Pharma whistleblower include Dr. John Virapen, author of Side Effects: Death. Confessions of a Pharma-Insider, who admits in this book that he “bribed a Swedish professor to enhance the registration of Prozac in Sweden.” Virapen worked for 35 years in the pharmaceutical industry internationally (most notably as general manager of Eli Lilly and Company in Sweden) where he was responsible for the marketing of several Big Pharma drugs (all of them with side effects). He exposes how Big Pharma invests more than USD$50,000 per physician per year to entice them to prescribe their products, how more than 75% of leading scientists in the field of medicine are “paid for”, and how illnesses are invented by the pharmaceutical industry to increase profit.
Another Big Pharma whistleblower is Gwen Olsen, a former Big Pharma sales rep who really knew how to push for a hard sell. She reveals the underhanded tactics she was taught by Big Pharma executives to ensure doctors were prescribing their drugs. After her niece killed herself while taking antidepressants, she changed her tune and exposed the tactics. Olsen admits that she used bribery and personal connections to sell Big Pharma meds, because she found it very difficult to sell drugs on their own merit, that the true purpose of pharmaceutical drugs is social control, that Big Pharma buys up real cures to disease, or sues companies not to release genuine cures. She also reveals how drug effects or side effects were often separated to avoid full disclosure, e.g. if the effect was on the CNS (Central Nervous System) then Big Pharma would break it down to say dizziness, fatigue, etc. so effects would look smaller.
Sadly, patients were harmed or killed due to Olsen’s (and other drugs reps like her) intentional sidestepping/misinforming physicians about a drug’s effects. Olsen refers to the “Revolving Door Syndrome”, meaning patients who are hospitalized continue to come back repeatedly, and each time lose more of their bodily functions. The drugs were brain damaging, could induce violence and were slowly killing them. Meanwhile, many drugs are found to be not more efficacious than a sugar pill (placebo).
Fraudulent Scientific Research Exposed by Governmental Whistleblower Too
Lastly, it is also useful to note that fraudulent scientific research has been acknowledged by governmental officials too. Dr. William Thompson of the CDC (the US Center for Disease Control) made headlines last year when he bravely came forth to publicly admit that he had cooked the books and fudged the data regarding vaccines. Here is an excerpt of his public statement from August 27th, 2014:
“My name is William Thompson. I am a Senior Scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where I have worked since 1998.
I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed.”
Many people were harmed (or killed) by this instance of fraudulent scientific research, especially young black baby boys under the age of 3. Consequences for Thompson or the CDC for this fraudulent scientific research? Basically none. Obama gave him legal immunity – but that’s not surprising since he also singed the NDAA (claiming the right to imprison any American indefinitely without charge or trial) and initiated his weekly Kill Lists.
Don’t Fall for Appeals to “Scientific” or “Clinical” Research when Fraudulent Scientific Research is So Rife
The lesson in all this is clear: don’t believe it when you are told by anyone involved with the Western Medical Establishment that their products are based on sound, valid, scientific, clinical evidence. Fraudulent scientific research is so widespread you can’t know anything for sure. Maybe you have to use Western Medicine, or maybe you don’t, but don’t go in blindly believing everything you’re told.
The fraudulent scientific research of Big Pharma is rife, and has been acknowledged as untrustable by medical journal editors, professors, doctors, government officials and former Big Pharma insiders.
Fraudulent scientific research is rife throughout the world due to the power of monetary influence wielded by Big Pharma, the giant cartel of multinational pharmaceutical corporations started over 100 years ago by the Rockefellers. This fraudulent scientific research is now so widespread and pervasive it is become an open secret. There is a long list of medical journal editors, doctors and professors on the “outside”, former Big Pharma employees and executives on the “inside”, as well as government officials somewhere in between, who have stepped forward as whistleblowers and acknowledged the fraud. Money buys favorable research. Period. This is not really surprising, given the history of Rockefeller Western medicine and the fact that Big Pharma’s business model is based on “managing” disease, “treating” symptoms and keeping patients on the hamster wheel, rather than actually healing them completely.
Everyone Knows How the “Game” Works
Whistleblower Dr. Peter Rost, former vice president of Pfizer, a giant Big Pharma company, spelled it out. In the video clip embedded above, taken from the documentary One More Girl, he reveals that everyone knows how the “game” works:
“Universities, health organizations, everybody that I have encountered … are out there …. begging for money. (Big Pharma corporations) use that money to basically buy influence … (Big Pharma provides) grants for various kinds of research … make sure they (scientific researchers) became beholden … Everyone obviously knows this is how things work.”
“They (scientific researchers) are not going to continue to get money unless they’re saying what you (i.e. Big Pharma) want them to say. They know it, you know it, and it’s only maybe the public that doesn’t know it.”
In this way, the almost the entire medical scientific community has been compromised and has become thoroughly untrustworthy.
Fraudulent Scientific Research Exposed by Medical Journal Editors and Professors
Look at what numerous key experts are saying about this epidemic of fraudulent scientific research. Dr. Richard Horton is the current editor-in-chief of the British Lancet journal, which is respected as one of the best peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. He came out and stated:
“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”
Then look at what Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the esteemed New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), had to say about the pervasive fraudulent scientific research:
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines … I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”
Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis, a professor of disease prevention at Stanford University, published a study in a PLoS One paper entitled Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. He found that research conclusions are less likely to be true when study samples sizes are too small, when effect sizes are even smaller, and when there are major variances in study designs, definitions, outcomes and analytical modes. He highlighted the corrupting influence of Big Pharma and concluded that:
“There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false … it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true.”
Fraudulent Scientific Research Exposed by other Big Pharma Whistleblowers
The pervasive fraudulent scientific research shows that most “solid medical evidence” may in fact be quackery.
Fraudulent scientific research has also been exposed by former executives and employees of the Big Pharma machine. In addition to Dr. Peter Rost, another Big Pharma whistleblower include Dr. John Virapen, author of Side Effects: Death. Confessions of a Pharma-Insider, who admits in this book that he “bribed a Swedish professor to enhance the registration of Prozac in Sweden.” Virapen worked for 35 years in the pharmaceutical industry internationally (most notably as general manager of Eli Lilly and Company in Sweden) where he was responsible for the marketing of several Big Pharma drugs (all of them with side effects). He exposes how Big Pharma invests more than USD$50,000 per physician per year to entice them to prescribe their products, how more than 75% of leading scientists in the field of medicine are “paid for”, and how illnesses are invented by the pharmaceutical industry to increase profit.
Another Big Pharma whistleblower is Gwen Olsen, a former Big Pharma sales rep who really knew how to push for a hard sell. She reveals the underhanded tactics she was taught by Big Pharma executives to ensure doctors were prescribing their drugs. After her niece killed herself while taking antidepressants, she changed her tune and exposed the tactics. Olsen admits that she used bribery and personal connections to sell Big Pharma meds, because she found it very difficult to sell drugs on their own merit, that the true purpose of pharmaceutical drugs is social control, that Big Pharma buys up real cures to disease, or sues companies not to release genuine cures. She also reveals how drug effects or side effects were often separated to avoid full disclosure, e.g. if the effect was on the CNS (Central Nervous System) then Big Pharma would break it down to say dizziness, fatigue, etc. so effects would look smaller.
Sadly, patients were harmed or killed due to Olsen’s (and other drugs reps like her) intentional sidestepping/misinforming physicians about a drug’s effects. Olsen refers to the “Revolving Door Syndrome”, meaning patients who are hospitalized continue to come back repeatedly, and each time lose more of their bodily functions. The drugs were brain damaging, could induce violence and were slowly killing them. Meanwhile, many drugs are found to be not more efficacious than a sugar pill (placebo).
Fraudulent Scientific Research Exposed by Governmental Whistleblower Too
Lastly, it is also useful to note that fraudulent scientific research has been acknowledged by governmental officials too. Dr. William Thompson of the CDC (the US Center for Disease Control) made headlines last year when he bravely came forth to publicly admit that he had cooked the books and fudged the data regarding vaccines. Here is an excerpt of his public statement from August 27th, 2014:
“My name is William Thompson. I am a Senior Scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where I have worked since 1998.
I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed.”
Many people were harmed (or killed) by this instance of fraudulent scientific research, especially young black baby boys under the age of 3. Consequences for Thompson or the CDC for this fraudulent scientific research? Basically none. Obama gave him legal immunity – but that’s not surprising since he also singed the NDAA (claiming the right to imprison any American indefinitely without charge or trial) and initiated his weekly Kill Lists.
Don’t Fall for Appeals to “Scientific” or “Clinical” Research when Fraudulent Scientific Research is So Rife
The lesson in all this is clear: don’t believe it when you are told by anyone involved with the Western Medical Establishment that their products are based on sound, valid, scientific, clinical evidence. Fraudulent scientific research is so widespread you can’t know anything for sure. Maybe you have to use Western Medicine, or maybe you don’t, but don’t go in blindly believing everything you’re told.
Corporatocratic surveillance has taken another creepy step with the introduction of Amazon Key. Like Walmart, Amazon wants access to your front door lock. Image credit: Amazon
Corporatocratic surveillance (i.e. the broad spread surveillance of the public by the corporatocracy) has become even more creepy and invasive with the advent of new programs by Amazon and Walmart which allow these corporations to enter your home when you are not there. That’s right: Amazon is rolling out a new program called Amazon Key which will launch on November 8th, 2017. Amazon wants you to not only set up equipment to monitor yourself and your home, but also to pay $250 for their kit which includes an Amazon security camera (the Cloud Cam) and a “smart” lock for the privilege of doing so. This is an obvious continuation of the smart deception and smart invasion. As usual, this corporatocratic surveillance is being sold as trendy, useful and convenient; none of the grave privacy concerns of literally handing over the keys of your house or apartment to giant corporations are addressed.
Amazon Key: Amazon Wants Access to Your Front Door Lock
The Amazon Key system is quite a staggering leap forward in corporatocratic surveillance. Amazon literally wants to be able to send in its agents through your front door without you being there. More than that, it wants to set up a system (on its servers, of course) where you can remotely open the door for anyone, even if they don’t want work for Amazon, e.g. house cleaners, pet sitters and dog walkers. This means Amazon gets all the footage of the inside of your house. This article explains how it works:
“You order something for delivery and click the “in-home” shipping option. When the delivery driver arrives, Amazon verifies the address and delivery time and allows him or her into your home. You can watch from your phone as the camera records the whole thing. Amazon says the delivery driver will not be given an access code or key. The service isn’t just for deliveries. Amazon says you can also use it to let family and friends into your house when you’re not home. And it will work for certain services like home cleaners, pet sitters and dog walkers.
Amazon Key will be available in 37 U.S. cities to start, and Amazon says it will add more.”
Amazon is not the only corporate behemoth to begin such programs of remote delivery access. Walmart has also been testing a service that allows a delivery driver from the startup Deliv into your home (mostly for groceries) by teaming up with smart lock business August Home. The Walmart agent gets a one-time passcode for a smart lock and access to your fridge; as with Amazon Key, you are allowed to watch the delivery agent on your smartphone via the security cameras you installed in your home.
Want corporatocratic surveillance in your living room?
Corporatocratic Surveillance: The Future of Online Shopping?
If you think this is just some kind of side experiment, think again. This is the future of delivery as planned out by big online retailers, as this article states:
“The move, in the works for more than a year, may help Amazon capture sales from shoppers who could not make it home to receive an order in person, and did not want the package stolen from their doorstep. It also signals Amazon’s ambitions in the growing market for home security devices, where Alphabet’s Nest Labs … competes.
“This is not an experiment for us,” said Peter Larsen, Amazon vice president of delivery technology, in an interview. “This is a core part of the Amazon shopping experience from this point forward.”
…
It is unclear if such protections will persuade customers that the service is safe to use. Larsen said theft was “not something that happens in practice,” based on early tests of the Amazon Key program. He added that if a problem arises, “You can call customer service, file a claim and Amazon will work with you to make sure it’s right,” reimbursing customers in some cases.”
Will you willingly set up surveillance cameras inside your front door, just so you can have the convenience of Amazon Key?
Frogs in the Boiling Pot: Will You Hand Over Control?
Amazon, Walmart, Google, Facebook and others are already inside your home in many ways. If you have Echo, Siri, Alexa or any other gadgets, they are listening in on your calls. In a recent Activist Post article, Nicholas West revealed how many smart devices have already snitched on they owners by automatically calling 9/11 or some kind of law enforcement agency without the owner’s knowledge or consent. The owners were later arrested, charged and in some cases fined and imprisoned. Staggeringly, the evidence was deemed admissible in court by various judges, which is a full frontal onslaught against the 1st, 4th and 5th amendments to the US Constitution.
Each and every time these retail/tech giants roll out new programs, our privacy and freedom is diminished, step and step. We have well passed the point of saturation with convenience. Now it’s just convenience for convenience’s sake. Do the risks of allowing unknown people and giant corporations access to your living room and kitchen outweigh the possibility your package may get wet or swiped? What if the courier accidentally lets your pets out? What if your pets attack the courier? What about thieves who are able capitalize on this access to break and enter? What about opportunistic thieves who see an opening into someone else’s home? What happens if the courier gets injured during the delivery? Who is liable? What happens if the courier breaks and steals something of yours?
Why Do They Want Access?
Have you asked yourself: why do Amazon, Walmart and the whole corporatocracy wants such reach into your lives, that they literally want the keys to your home? Is it because they truly want to serve you and make life easy? Or is something else afoot here?
How much is your view of the world shaped by what you see on television? On average, Americans spend more than 150 hours watching television every month, and it is called “programming” for a reason. If you allow anyone to pour ideas and information into your mind for five hours a day, it is going to change how you look at reality. Everyone has an agenda, and every single news program, television show and movie is trying to alter your views. Sadly, our society has become absolutely addicted to media, and the mainstream media is completely dominated by the elite. In fact, about 90 percent of the programming that comes through your television is controlled by just 6 gigantic media corporations. Most of us are willingly plugging ourselves into this “propaganda matrix” that is completely dominated by the elite for several hours each day, and that gives them an enormous amount of power over the rest of us.
In Part I and Part II of this series, I discussed how the elite use money as a tool to dominate the planet. Today, we are going to talk about how they use information. If you control what people think, then you control a society. And through their vast media empires, the elite are able to shape how we all think to a frightening degree.
Just think about it. What do we talk about with our family, our friends and our co-workers? To a large extent, those conversations are about movies, television shows, something that we just saw on the news or a sporting event that just took place. The reason why we talk about certain things is because the mainstream media gives those things attention, and other things we ignore because the mainstream media does not make them seem to be important.
The mainstream media literally sets the agenda for our society, and it would be difficult to overstate the power that is in their hands. And as I mentioned above, the mainstream media is almost entirely controlled by just 6 colossal corporations. The following list of these 6 corporate giants comes from one of my previous articles, and this is just a sampling of the media properties that they each own…
Comcast
NBC Telemundo Universal Pictures Focus Features USA Network Bravo CNBC The Weather Channel MSNBC Syfy NBCSN Golf Channel Esquire Network E! Cloo Chiller Universal HD Comcast SportsNet Universal Parks & Resorts Universal Studio Home Video
The Walt Disney Company
ABC Television Network ESPN The Disney Channel A&E Lifetime Marvel Entertainment Lucasfilm Walt Disney Pictures Pixar Animation Studios Disney Mobile Disney Consumer Products Interactive Media Disney Theme Parks Disney Records Hollywood Records Miramax Films Touchstone Pictures
News Corporation
Fox Broadcasting Company Fox News Channel Fox Business Network Fox Sports 1 Fox Sports 2 National Geographic Nat Geo Wild FX FXX FX Movie Channel Fox Sports Networks The Wall Street Journal The New York Post Barron’s SmartMoney HarperCollins 20th Century Fox Fox Searchlight Pictures Blue Sky Studios Beliefnet Zondervan
Time Warner
CNN The CW HBO Cinemax Cartoon Network HLN NBA TV TBS TNT TruTV Turner Classic Movies Warner Bros. Castle Rock DC Comics Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment New Line Cinema Sports Illustrated Fortune Marie Claire People Magazine
Viacom
MTV Nickelodeon VH1 BET Comedy Central Paramount Pictures Paramount Home Entertainment Country Music Television (CMT) Spike TV The Movie Channel TV Land
CBS Corporation
CBS Television Network The CW (along with Time Warner) CBS Sports Network Showtime TVGN CBS Radio, Inc. CBS Television Studios Simon & Schuster Infinity Broadcasting Westwood One Radio Network
If nobody tuned in to their “programming”, they would not have any power over us.
But according to a report put out by Nielsen, Americans are plugging into “the matrix” more than ever before. The following is how our daily use of media breaks down by device…
Live TV: 4 hours, 31 minutes Time-Shifted TV: 33 minutes Radio: 1 hour, 52 minutes DVDs: 8 minutes Video Game Consoles: 14 minutes Multimedia Devices (Apple TV, Roku, etc.): 13 minutes Internet on PC: 58 minutes Smartphone: 1 hour, 39 minutes Tablet: 31 minutes
When you total those numbers up, it comes to 10 hours and 39 minutes.
In essence, Americans are spending most of their waking hours plugged in to something.
And if you only add together “live television” and “time-shifted television”, Americans are spending an average of more than five hours each day just watching television.
Of course many of us spend countless hours on the Internet as well. It has been estimated that 54,907 Google searches are conducted, 7,252 tweets are posted, 125,406 YouTube videos are viewed, and 2,501,018 emails are sent out every single second.
You may have guessed this already, but most of the news and information that we consume on the Internet is also controlled by the elite…
Overall, the top 10 publishers — together owning around 60 news sites — account for 47% of total online traffic to news content last year, with the next-biggest 140 publishers accounting for most of the other half, SimilarWeb found.
The biggest online news publisher for the U.S. audience was MSN, owner of MSN.com, with just over 27 billion combined page views across mobile and desktop, followed by Disney Media Networks, owner of ESPN and ABC News, with 25.9 billion.
This is why the “alternative media” is so important. All over America and all over the world, people are waking up and realizing that they aren’t getting the truth from the mainstream media, and they are hungry for truly independent sources of information.
The only way that we are ever going to be able to throw off the insidious system of control that the elite have established is by winning the information war. We are literally in a constant battle for hearts and minds, and the good news is that we have made a lot of progress. Over the past decade we have “red pilled” millions upon millions of people, but we still have a long way to go.
Faith in the corporate media is dwindling, and the elite are deeply concerned about this. The Internet has allowed ordinary people like us to communicate on a mass scale, and this has never been the case before in human history. We have a window of opportunity to fight back against the elite, and we must not let this opportunity pass us by.
We are literally engaged in a battle for the future of this planet, and let us never waver in our pursuit of victory.
The science is in: Processed food is addictive, can make you extremely unhappy and will prematurely kill you. How did this happen? And how have food manufacturers been able to deceive the world about these facts? Dr. Robert Lustig has written a new book, “The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains,” in which he explains how and why this occurred.
He is perhaps most well-known for his brilliant research into sugar and obesity, and his previous book, “Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity and Disease,” was a New York Times Best Seller. Lustig is an emeritus professor of pediatrics in the division of endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco, and a member of the Institute for Health Policy Studies. Since the last time I interviewed him, he’s also completed a master’s in public health law.
The Genesis of ‘Hacking of the American Mind’
The motivation for “The Hacking of the American Mind” began some 30 years ago, while still a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience at Rockefeller University. There, he learned about the interaction between dopamine and serotonin in the brain. At the time, only basic correlational data existed, but there appeared to be a very specific interaction going on between these two neurochemicals.
“As I was researching the data for ‘Fat Chance,’ four years ago, it became very clear that the data had come in on the role of diet and behavioral health,” Lustig says. “In addition, we also now had neuroimaging studies. I realized everything was falling into place — that this issue, dopamine and serotonin, was actually at the core of what had now become our depression and opiate crises.
At the same time, I was giving Psychiatry Grand Rounds at a U.S. medical school in 2014. The woman who ran their outpatient treatment program took me on a tour of their facility. She was a recovered addict herself. She said something to me that was so jarring. She said, ‘When I was shooting up, I was happy. What my new life has brought me is pleasure.’
I thought to myself, ‘That’s wrong. That’s exactly turned around.’ But I didn’t say anything to her. I went home and talked to some psychiatry friends. They said, ‘Oh yeah, a lot of people seem to get addicted with this concept in mind.’ I said, ‘Well, there’s a book there.’ That was the genesis of this book.”
Why Processed Food Diets Fuel Depression
Tryptophan, which is the precursor for serotonin, is one of the rarest amino acids in our diet. But it’s a mistake to think the answer to depression is as simple as taking tryptophan to boost serotonin. The reason for this is because most of the tryptophan is converted to serotonin in your gut, and it does not freely travel into your brain. Lustig explains:
“Tryptophan is the only amino acid that can be converted into serotonin. Tryptophan is the rarest amino acid in our diet. Eggs have the most. Certain poultry and other avian species have some [tryptophan]. There’s very little in vegetables. Obviously, carbohydrates have virtually no tryptophan whatsoever.
It’s actually pretty hard to get tryptophan into your body to start with. Take processed food on top of that, then it’s even harder because it tends to be tryptophan-depleted. [Moreover], 99.9 percent of the tryptophan you ingest either gets turned into serotonin in the gut for your gut’s purposes, or it goes into your platelets to help your platelets help you clot. [So] very little tryptophan actually gets to the brain.
Top that off with the fact that tryptophan has to share an amino acid transporter with two relatively common amino acids: phenylalanine and tyrosine, which, by the way, are the precursors for dopamine. You can see that the more processed food you eat, the more dopamine you will make because you will have the precursors for that.
They will actually crowd out the ability to get tryptophan across the blood-brain barrier … Yet, serotonin is the nidus of contentment, of happiness. It explains why diet is so problematic … “
Face-to-Face Interaction Has Neurochemical Effects
Many try to bolster their happiness through certain food choices, but this actually does not work, and Lustig provides compelling arguments that the foods you crave drive up dopamine and drive down serotonin. Rather, it’s experiences that make you happy. People can make you happy. You can make yourself happy. In his book, Lustig outlines a number of different strategies to become happier.
“Ultimately, the goal is [to increase] your serotonin,” he says. There are four ways to boost your serotonin, and they’re all free. They’re also things your grandmother likely told you to do. First and foremost is making human connections.
“Turns out that Facebook does not count as connection. When we’re talking about interpersonal connection, we’re talking about eye-to-eye,” Lustig says. “The facial emotions of the person you’re talking with activate a set of neurons in your brain called ‘mirror neurons,’ which are the drivers of empathy and specifically linked to serotonin.
To be able to generate a feeling of empathy, which ultimately turns into contentment/happiness, you actually have to connect. You can’t do it over the internet. You can’t have a connection with ‘anonymous.’ It just doesn’t work.”
On the contrary, social media generate dopamine, associated with pleasure, and hence can drive addiction. The main problem is that when dopamine goes up, serotonin goes down. So, online communication is actually a major causative factor of unhappiness.
Lustig also elaborates on how companies — both food manufacturers and electronics companies — capitalize on the biology of dopamine versus serotonin to get us addicted to their products. There’s even a book on this topic written by Nir Eyal, called, “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.”
Dopamine Versus Serotonin
It’s important to realize that the dopamine (or reward-generating) pathway is the same no matter what your source of pleasure is. It can be a substance, such as nicotine, alcohol, heroin or junk food; or it can be behavior, such as internet surfing, shopping or pornography. The problem, in a nutshell, is that dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter, and in excess is neurotoxic.
When dopamine is released, and the neuron on the other side accepts the signal, it can damage that neuron. Over time, excitatory neurotransmitters can cause cell death. To protect itself from damage, the postsynaptic neuron employs a self-protective mechanism — it downregulates its receptors.
By having fewer receptors, the dopamine cannot do as much damage. So, each time you get a “hit” or rush of dopamine, the number of receptors decrease. As a result, you need increasingly larger doses or “hits” to get the same rush. Eventually, you end up with tolerance, a state where even a large dose produces no effect. Once the neurons start to actually die off, you’re a full-blown addict.
“The point that you need to know is that it takes three weeks for the receptors to repopulate. The cravings can go on for upwards of a year when you’re addicted. This is a long-term process that sometimes requires medical intervention and medical management by physicians who understand addiction medicine,” Lustig says.
Serotonin, on the other hand, is not an excitatory neurotransmitter. When it acts on the serotonin-1a receptor (the “contentment” receptor), no damage occurs. Hence, happiness does not lead to addictive behavior. Keep in mind that dopamine downregulates serotonin, so it’s basically impossible to achieve happiness (related to serotonin) through pleasure-seeking behavior (related to dopamine).
One of the cheapest pleasures that stimulates dopamine is sugar. Many reach for sweet junk food when they feel down, thinking it’ll help them feel better, but neurochemical science reveals this simply cannot happen. Add the stress hormone cortisol to the mix, which downregulates the serotonin-1a receptor, and you have a recipe for both addiction and depression. “That’s what we’re seeing throughout all of civilized society, not just in America, but around the world,” Lustig says.
Other Serotonin Boosters
There are three other ways, besides connecting, that boost serotonin and happiness. The remaining three of the four Cs are:
1.Contribute: Meaning the act of contributing to something greater than yourself; making a contribution to society. “You can get happiness and contentment from your job, but there are certain criteria that have to be met,” Lustig says. “Most people, unfortunately, have a boss who is not contributing to their happiness. The workplace is not usually the best place to achieve meaningful contentment.”
2.Cope: Lack of sleep, insufficient exercise and multitasking are all causes of unhappiness. Sleep is extremely important for healthy serotonin production. Here, avoiding exposure to electronic screens is important, as blue light inhibits melatonin production, thereby making sleep more elusive. Electronics will also disrupt your sleep and deteriorate your health by exposing you to unnecessary microwaves, discussed in this recent article on depression.
3.Cook: If you cook, you’re likely going to increase your tryptophan, reduce your refined sugar intake and increase your omega-3 fats (anti-inflammatory) and fiber. Overall, this will result in improved gut health, which has tremendous impact on your mood and mental health.
“Numerous investigators … have shown that your gastrointestinal flora tell your brain what they want through signals that go through the bloodstream, and potentially even neural ones as well. If you do not feed your bacteria, you cannot get happy. Eating real food you prepare yourself is super important,” Lustig says.
Eating Real Food Helps Optimize Tryptophan and Other Vital Brain Nutrients
As mentioned, a big part of the happiness equation is to increase serotonin by optimizing tryptophan. However, the dilemma is that most of the serotonin produced in the gut is used there locally. It does not enter your brain. Lustig explains:
“There are many diversions for tryptophan away from the brain. It can be metabolized in the intestine itself. It can be metabolized in the platelets. It can be turned into kynurenine, which is a secondary metabolite in the liver. It may not be transported across the blood-brain barrier because of phenylalanine and tyrosine taking up the aromatic amino acid transporter.
In addition, of course, your serotonin neurons must be functional. There are things that will kill off serotonin neurons, including party drugs. For instance, MDMA, or Ecstasy, is a famous dopamine and serotonin killer … Once you’ve lost those serotonin neurons, it’s pretty hard to get any sort of happiness signal.”
So, how do you boost systemic tryptophan? One of the keys is to eat real food, and to make sure you include high-tryptophan foods, the highest of which is egg whites. You also need omega-3 fatty acids, especially DHA, which is a component of every cell in your body. More than 90 percent of the omega-3 fat found in brain tissue is DHA.
“Omega-3s are probably the single most beneficial thing you can put in your body. They are anti-inflammatory. They are anti-Alzheimer’s. They increase membrane fluidity. Therefore, they increase neuronal distensibility, which means it’s less likely that any given neuron will die,” Lustig says.
“The problem, of course, is that when we took the fat out of the food, we took ALL the fat out of the food. It’s been a real chore to get the medical cognoscenti to turn around on this. I do want to do a shoutout to the American Heart Association, because they have now debunked their long-standing cholesterol-fat hypothesis.
They now recognize that saturated fat was not the demon they made it out to be, and that there are seven classes of fats, and that you actually have to consume omega-3s. You have to consume monounsaturated fats. In fact, you do have to consume some saturated fat because it’s a major component of membranes.”
The Corporate Takeover
So, how have food companies contributed to the problems of food and drug addiction? According to Lustig, “If you look at the Supreme Court decisions that took place between the mid-’70s and mid-’80s, they took away individual rights and loaded up corporate rights in a very distinct fashion.” In his book, he describes four specific Supreme Court decisions, one of which basically deregulated corporate speech.
Corporations can say anything they want, whenever they want, regardless of whether it’s actually true. Our current epidemics of opioid and food addiction are outgrowths of corporate dishonesty.
“We are now seeing the advent of the post-truth society because of how the Supreme Court chipped away at our own individual rights,” Lustig says. “By doing so, corporations have affected our ability to experience pleasure and happiness. They’ve actually inserted propaganda into our limbic system, our reward generating system, so that we constantly seek reward at the expense of our own happiness.
This is why we currently live in the world we live in. The late political philosopher from Princeton, Sheldon Wolin, wrote a poignant book called ‘Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism,’ [in which] he envisioned that corporations and government … would become one and the same.
If you look at what’s going on in the White House today, you can see that Wolin’s nightmare scenario has been realized. It’s fascism in the sense that we don’t seem to have a voice of our own. It’s not fascism in the sense that it’s corporations that’s told us what to do. It’s that we’ve basically abdicated our own responsibility for our own health and safety.”
The EatREAL Trust Mark
Speaking of living in a post-truth society, you might not realize there’s no regulation against restaurants blatantly lying about what they’re serving you. Larry Olmsted, in his book “Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating and What You Can Do About It,” addresses this. There are no consequences, no regulatory action, for lying to customers. The deception will only enrich them — until or unless they’re publicly outed and perhaps boycotted.
One way to protect your interests when eating out is to make sure the restaurant is affiliated with Responsible Epicurean and Agricultural Leadership, better known as EatREAL, a nonprofit Lustig helped create. It teaches restaurants what they “should be doing,” and provides a trust mark to the public — a green fork.
The High Cost of Added Sugar
Processed fructose, mostly in the form of corn syrup, has become a major contributor to the $3 trillion health care budget in the United States, and there’s clear data linking sugar consumption to de novo lipogenesis — a disease process associated with fat accumulation in the liver, causing insulin resistance, hyperinsulinemia, metabolic syndrome and associated diseases. That includes Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, lipid problems, cardiovascular disease, cancer and dementia.
“We have the mechanism by which this occurs. In fact, our paper in Gastroenterology1 demonstrates that if you take sugar out of the diet of children with metabolic syndrome and substitute starch — calorie for calorie exchange, glucose for fructose exchange with no change in calories … — in 10 days, you can reverse metabolic syndrome.
You can reverse the insulin resistance. You can reverse the liver fat. You can reverse the burden on the pancreas. Basically, all of the metabolic perturbations go away. This is the smoking gun,” Lustig says. “In addition, we have a paper in BMJ Open2 which models what could happen in terms of health care expenditures and disease rates if we reduced our sugar consumption by 20 percent, which is what taxes would do.
Or if we reduce sugar consumption by 50 percent (which is what the United States Department of Agriculture suggested we do), for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease alone … the United States, over the next 20 years, could save $103 billion, just on that disease alone. Ultimately, this is where the money goes. This is why health care will be defunct. This is why Medicare will be broke by the year 2026 …
We have to deal with health. Health is going down the tubes. There’s no amount of health care that can fix what’s wrong with our diet, unless we fix the diet first … The bottom line is we are in trouble. But you can’t fix a problem until you recognize what the problem is. This book, ‘The Hacking of the American Mind,’ demonstrates how the science, how the biology, ultimately has influenced not just our health, but in fact, our policy.”
More Information
In the past, people had a much better understanding of happiness and pleasure. Lustig’s book describes how these terms have been purposely conflated and confused by businesses and governments because it helped sales. To turn the trends of addiction around, you have to understand the difference between the two.
“So, what’s the difference between pleasure and happiness? There are seven differences: Pleasure is visceral; happiness is ethereal. Pleasure is short-term; happiness is long-term. Pleasure is usually achieved alone; happiness is usually achieved in social groupings. Pleasure is taking; happiness is giving. Pleasure can be achieved with substances; happiness cannot be achieved with substances.
The extremes of pleasure all lead to addiction, whereas there is no such thing as being addicted to happiness. Finally, pleasure is dopamine and happiness is serotonin.
Understanding the difference between the two is something, for some reason, that the American public just never got. We have to make them get it in order to turn this problem around. Academics don’t get it. Businesses don’t get it. The federal government certainly doesn’t get it. We have to make them get it. That’s why this book is so crucial.”
“The bottom line is it’s about the science,” Lustig says. “There will be detractors who will say this is garbage. But the bottom line is there are 600 references to the primary literature to demonstrate that this is not gobbledygook. The science actually predicts the phenomena that we see and the society we’ve become.”
The science is in: Processed food is addictive, can make you extremely unhappy and will prematurely kill you. How did this happen? And how have food manufacturers been able to deceive the world about these facts? Dr. Robert Lustig has written a new book, “The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains,” in which he explains how and why this occurred.
He is perhaps most well-known for his brilliant research into sugar and obesity, and his previous book, “Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity and Disease,” was a New York Times Best Seller. Lustig is an emeritus professor of pediatrics in the division of endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco, and a member of the Institute for Health Policy Studies. Since the last time I interviewed him, he’s also completed a master’s in public health law.
The Genesis of ‘Hacking of the American Mind’
The motivation for “The Hacking of the American Mind” began some 30 years ago, while still a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience at Rockefeller University. There, he learned about the interaction between dopamine and serotonin in the brain. At the time, only basic correlational data existed, but there appeared to be a very specific interaction going on between these two neurochemicals.
“As I was researching the data for ‘Fat Chance,’ four years ago, it became very clear that the data had come in on the role of diet and behavioral health,” Lustig says. “In addition, we also now had neuroimaging studies. I realized everything was falling into place — that this issue, dopamine and serotonin, was actually at the core of what had now become our depression and opiate crises.
At the same time, I was giving Psychiatry Grand Rounds at a U.S. medical school in 2014. The woman who ran their outpatient treatment program took me on a tour of their facility. She was a recovered addict herself. She said something to me that was so jarring. She said, ‘When I was shooting up, I was happy. What my new life has brought me is pleasure.’
I thought to myself, ‘That’s wrong. That’s exactly turned around.’ But I didn’t say anything to her. I went home and talked to some psychiatry friends. They said, ‘Oh yeah, a lot of people seem to get addicted with this concept in mind.’ I said, ‘Well, there’s a book there.’ That was the genesis of this book.”
Why Processed Food Diets Fuel Depression
Tryptophan, which is the precursor for serotonin, is one of the rarest amino acids in our diet. But it’s a mistake to think the answer to depression is as simple as taking tryptophan to boost serotonin. The reason for this is because most of the tryptophan is converted to serotonin in your gut, and it does not freely travel into your brain. Lustig explains:
“Tryptophan is the only amino acid that can be converted into serotonin. Tryptophan is the rarest amino acid in our diet. Eggs have the most. Certain poultry and other avian species have some [tryptophan]. There’s very little in vegetables. Obviously, carbohydrates have virtually no tryptophan whatsoever.
It’s actually pretty hard to get tryptophan into your body to start with. Take processed food on top of that, then it’s even harder because it tends to be tryptophan-depleted. [Moreover], 99.9 percent of the tryptophan you ingest either gets turned into serotonin in the gut for your gut’s purposes, or it goes into your platelets to help your platelets help you clot. [So] very little tryptophan actually gets to the brain.
Top that off with the fact that tryptophan has to share an amino acid transporter with two relatively common amino acids: phenylalanine and tyrosine, which, by the way, are the precursors for dopamine. You can see that the more processed food you eat, the more dopamine you will make because you will have the precursors for that.
They will actually crowd out the ability to get tryptophan across the blood-brain barrier … Yet, serotonin is the nidus of contentment, of happiness. It explains why diet is so problematic … “
Face-to-Face Interaction Has Neurochemical Effects
Many try to bolster their happiness through certain food choices, but this actually does not work, and Lustig provides compelling arguments that the foods you crave drive up dopamine and drive down serotonin. Rather, it’s experiences that make you happy. People can make you happy. You can make yourself happy. In his book, Lustig outlines a number of different strategies to become happier.
“Ultimately, the goal is [to increase] your serotonin,” he says. There are four ways to boost your serotonin, and they’re all free. They’re also things your grandmother likely told you to do. First and foremost is making human connections.
“Turns out that Facebook does not count as connection. When we’re talking about interpersonal connection, we’re talking about eye-to-eye,” Lustig says. “The facial emotions of the person you’re talking with activate a set of neurons in your brain called ‘mirror neurons,’ which are the drivers of empathy and specifically linked to serotonin.
To be able to generate a feeling of empathy, which ultimately turns into contentment/happiness, you actually have to connect. You can’t do it over the internet. You can’t have a connection with ‘anonymous.’ It just doesn’t work.”
On the contrary, social media generate dopamine, associated with pleasure, and hence can drive addiction. The main problem is that when dopamine goes up, serotonin goes down. So, online communication is actually a major causative factor of unhappiness.
Lustig also elaborates on how companies — both food manufacturers and electronics companies — capitalize on the biology of dopamine versus serotonin to get us addicted to their products. There’s even a book on this topic written by Nir Eyal, called, “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.”
Dopamine Versus Serotonin
It’s important to realize that the dopamine (or reward-generating) pathway is the same no matter what your source of pleasure is. It can be a substance, such as nicotine, alcohol, heroin or junk food; or it can be behavior, such as internet surfing, shopping or pornography. The problem, in a nutshell, is that dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter, and in excess is neurotoxic.
When dopamine is released, and the neuron on the other side accepts the signal, it can damage that neuron. Over time, excitatory neurotransmitters can cause cell death. To protect itself from damage, the postsynaptic neuron employs a self-protective mechanism — it downregulates its receptors.
By having fewer receptors, the dopamine cannot do as much damage. So, each time you get a “hit” or rush of dopamine, the number of receptors decrease. As a result, you need increasingly larger doses or “hits” to get the same rush. Eventually, you end up with tolerance, a state where even a large dose produces no effect. Once the neurons start to actually die off, you’re a full-blown addict.
“The point that you need to know is that it takes three weeks for the receptors to repopulate. The cravings can go on for upwards of a year when you’re addicted. This is a long-term process that sometimes requires medical intervention and medical management by physicians who understand addiction medicine,” Lustig says.
Serotonin, on the other hand, is not an excitatory neurotransmitter. When it acts on the serotonin-1a receptor (the “contentment” receptor), no damage occurs. Hence, happiness does not lead to addictive behavior. Keep in mind that dopamine downregulates serotonin, so it’s basically impossible to achieve happiness (related to serotonin) through pleasure-seeking behavior (related to dopamine).
One of the cheapest pleasures that stimulates dopamine is sugar. Many reach for sweet junk food when they feel down, thinking it’ll help them feel better, but neurochemical science reveals this simply cannot happen. Add the stress hormone cortisol to the mix, which downregulates the serotonin-1a receptor, and you have a recipe for both addiction and depression. “That’s what we’re seeing throughout all of civilized society, not just in America, but around the world,” Lustig says.
Other Serotonin Boosters
There are three other ways, besides connecting, that boost serotonin and happiness. The remaining three of the four Cs are:
1.Contribute: Meaning the act of contributing to something greater than yourself; making a contribution to society. “You can get happiness and contentment from your job, but there are certain criteria that have to be met,” Lustig says. “Most people, unfortunately, have a boss who is not contributing to their happiness. The workplace is not usually the best place to achieve meaningful contentment.”
2.Cope: Lack of sleep, insufficient exercise and multitasking are all causes of unhappiness. Sleep is extremely important for healthy serotonin production. Here, avoiding exposure to electronic screens is important, as blue light inhibits melatonin production, thereby making sleep more elusive. Electronics will also disrupt your sleep and deteriorate your health by exposing you to unnecessary microwaves, discussed in this recent article on depression.
3.Cook: If you cook, you’re likely going to increase your tryptophan, reduce your refined sugar intake and increase your omega-3 fats (anti-inflammatory) and fiber. Overall, this will result in improved gut health, which has tremendous impact on your mood and mental health.
“Numerous investigators … have shown that your gastrointestinal flora tell your brain what they want through signals that go through the bloodstream, and potentially even neural ones as well. If you do not feed your bacteria, you cannot get happy. Eating real food you prepare yourself is super important,” Lustig says.
Eating Real Food Helps Optimize Tryptophan and Other Vital Brain Nutrients
As mentioned, a big part of the happiness equation is to increase serotonin by optimizing tryptophan. However, the dilemma is that most of the serotonin produced in the gut is used there locally. It does not enter your brain. Lustig explains:
“There are many diversions for tryptophan away from the brain. It can be metabolized in the intestine itself. It can be metabolized in the platelets. It can be turned into kynurenine, which is a secondary metabolite in the liver. It may not be transported across the blood-brain barrier because of phenylalanine and tyrosine taking up the aromatic amino acid transporter.
In addition, of course, your serotonin neurons must be functional. There are things that will kill off serotonin neurons, including party drugs. For instance, MDMA, or Ecstasy, is a famous dopamine and serotonin killer … Once you’ve lost those serotonin neurons, it’s pretty hard to get any sort of happiness signal.”
So, how do you boost systemic tryptophan? One of the keys is to eat real food, and to make sure you include high-tryptophan foods, the highest of which is egg whites. You also need omega-3 fatty acids, especially DHA, which is a component of every cell in your body. More than 90 percent of the omega-3 fat found in brain tissue is DHA.
“Omega-3s are probably the single most beneficial thing you can put in your body. They are anti-inflammatory. They are anti-Alzheimer’s. They increase membrane fluidity. Therefore, they increase neuronal distensibility, which means it’s less likely that any given neuron will die,” Lustig says.
“The problem, of course, is that when we took the fat out of the food, we took ALL the fat out of the food. It’s been a real chore to get the medical cognoscenti to turn around on this. I do want to do a shoutout to the American Heart Association, because they have now debunked their long-standing cholesterol-fat hypothesis.
They now recognize that saturated fat was not the demon they made it out to be, and that there are seven classes of fats, and that you actually have to consume omega-3s. You have to consume monounsaturated fats. In fact, you do have to consume some saturated fat because it’s a major component of membranes.”
The Corporate Takeover
So, how have food companies contributed to the problems of food and drug addiction? According to Lustig, “If you look at the Supreme Court decisions that took place between the mid-’70s and mid-’80s, they took away individual rights and loaded up corporate rights in a very distinct fashion.” In his book, he describes four specific Supreme Court decisions, one of which basically deregulated corporate speech.
Corporations can say anything they want, whenever they want, regardless of whether it’s actually true. Our current epidemics of opioid and food addiction are outgrowths of corporate dishonesty.
“We are now seeing the advent of the post-truth society because of how the Supreme Court chipped away at our own individual rights,” Lustig says. “By doing so, corporations have affected our ability to experience pleasure and happiness. They’ve actually inserted propaganda into our limbic system, our reward generating system, so that we constantly seek reward at the expense of our own happiness.
This is why we currently live in the world we live in. The late political philosopher from Princeton, Sheldon Wolin, wrote a poignant book called ‘Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism,’ [in which] he envisioned that corporations and government … would become one and the same.
If you look at what’s going on in the White House today, you can see that Wolin’s nightmare scenario has been realized. It’s fascism in the sense that we don’t seem to have a voice of our own. It’s not fascism in the sense that it’s corporations that’s told us what to do. It’s that we’ve basically abdicated our own responsibility for our own health and safety.”
The EatREAL Trust Mark
Speaking of living in a post-truth society, you might not realize there’s no regulation against restaurants blatantly lying about what they’re serving you. Larry Olmsted, in his book “Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating and What You Can Do About It,” addresses this. There are no consequences, no regulatory action, for lying to customers. The deception will only enrich them — until or unless they’re publicly outed and perhaps boycotted.
One way to protect your interests when eating out is to make sure the restaurant is affiliated with Responsible Epicurean and Agricultural Leadership, better known as EatREAL, a nonprofit Lustig helped create. It teaches restaurants what they “should be doing,” and provides a trust mark to the public — a green fork.
The High Cost of Added Sugar
Processed fructose, mostly in the form of corn syrup, has become a major contributor to the $3 trillion health care budget in the United States, and there’s clear data linking sugar consumption to de novo lipogenesis — a disease process associated with fat accumulation in the liver, causing insulin resistance, hyperinsulinemia, metabolic syndrome and associated diseases. That includes Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, lipid problems, cardiovascular disease, cancer and dementia.
“We have the mechanism by which this occurs. In fact, our paper in Gastroenterology1 demonstrates that if you take sugar out of the diet of children with metabolic syndrome and substitute starch — calorie for calorie exchange, glucose for fructose exchange with no change in calories … — in 10 days, you can reverse metabolic syndrome.
You can reverse the insulin resistance. You can reverse the liver fat. You can reverse the burden on the pancreas. Basically, all of the metabolic perturbations go away. This is the smoking gun,” Lustig says. “In addition, we have a paper in BMJ Open2 which models what could happen in terms of health care expenditures and disease rates if we reduced our sugar consumption by 20 percent, which is what taxes would do.
Or if we reduce sugar consumption by 50 percent (which is what the United States Department of Agriculture suggested we do), for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease alone … the United States, over the next 20 years, could save $103 billion, just on that disease alone. Ultimately, this is where the money goes. This is why health care will be defunct. This is why Medicare will be broke by the year 2026 …
We have to deal with health. Health is going down the tubes. There’s no amount of health care that can fix what’s wrong with our diet, unless we fix the diet first … The bottom line is we are in trouble. But you can’t fix a problem until you recognize what the problem is. This book, ‘The Hacking of the American Mind,’ demonstrates how the science, how the biology, ultimately has influenced not just our health, but in fact, our policy.”
More Information
In the past, people had a much better understanding of happiness and pleasure. Lustig’s book describes how these terms have been purposely conflated and confused by businesses and governments because it helped sales. To turn the trends of addiction around, you have to understand the difference between the two.
“So, what’s the difference between pleasure and happiness? There are seven differences: Pleasure is visceral; happiness is ethereal. Pleasure is short-term; happiness is long-term. Pleasure is usually achieved alone; happiness is usually achieved in social groupings. Pleasure is taking; happiness is giving. Pleasure can be achieved with substances; happiness cannot be achieved with substances.
The extremes of pleasure all lead to addiction, whereas there is no such thing as being addicted to happiness. Finally, pleasure is dopamine and happiness is serotonin.
Understanding the difference between the two is something, for some reason, that the American public just never got. We have to make them get it in order to turn this problem around. Academics don’t get it. Businesses don’t get it. The federal government certainly doesn’t get it. We have to make them get it. That’s why this book is so crucial.”
“The bottom line is it’s about the science,” Lustig says. “There will be detractors who will say this is garbage. But the bottom line is there are 600 references to the primary literature to demonstrate that this is not gobbledygook. The science actually predicts the phenomena that we see and the society we’ve become.”
