(The Assault on the Body & the Mind) Food that is Engineered for Addiction

Let me tell you what's in food, not the marketing or the packaging or the label that says natural flavors or farm fresh or made with real ingredients, what's actually in it. Here are some of them, artificial colors that have been linked to behavioural changes in children, colors that are banned in the European Union but permitted and widely used in other markets. Preservatives designed to extend shelf life that the body was never designed to metabolize. Emulsifies that disrupt the gut lining, the barrier between what you consume and your bloodstream.

High fructose corn syrup, a sweetness so cheap and so effective at driving over consumption that appears in the products you would never expect to contain sugar, bread, sauce, yogurt, salad dressing, products marked as healthy that contain the same metabolic disruptors as the products marked as treats and beyond the additives the raw materials themselves have been compromised. The chicken on your plate was raised in a facility where thousands of birds occupy a space designed to maximize output and minimize cost. These birds were fed growth hormones to accelerate their development, bringing them to market weight in a fraction of the time a naturally raised bird would require. They fed antibiotics not because they're ill but to prevent the infections that inevitably arise when living creatures are packed into conditions their biology cannot sustain.

These hormones and antibiotics are in the meat, you consume them, your body processes them, your endocrine system, the system that regulates your hormones, your mood, your reproductive function, your cognitive clarity absorbs compounds that were designed to manipulate the biology of a totally different species. And then you wonder why hormonal disruption, early puberty, fertility issues and endocrine disorders are rising and rates that were never seen even a generation ago. The crops on your plate were grown in soil treated with pesticides, chemicals designed to kill living organisms. Glyphosate, the most widely used herbicide in the world has been classified as a probable carcinogen by the World Health Organization.

It's sprayed on crops that end up in bread, cereal, pasta and beer. Residues remain on and in the food. You consume them daily in small amounts over decades and the cumulative effect of decades of low level exposure to a probable carcinogen is not studied with the rigor that it deserves because the companies that produce the chemicals fund the studies that assess their safety. Genetically modified organisms, crops whose DNA has been altered in ways that don't occur in nature dominate the food supply in many countries.

The long term effects of consuming genetically modified food across a lifetime are not fully understood. The studies that exist are largely industry funded, independent research is actively discouraged and in documented cases, researchers who publish findings unfavorable to the GMO industry have had their careers destroyed. And then the water, which contains its own chemical load, chlorine, fluoride, pharmaceutical residues that pass through waste water treatment, microplastics, fragments of synthetic material so small that they pass through filtration and then accumulate in organs. Published research has found microplastics in human blood in lung tissue in placenters.

And not just consuming chemicals in your food, you're consuming the residue of an industrial civilization in every glass of water you drink if you drink tap water. And here's the structural inversion that ties this episode together. The food that contains all of these compounds, the processed, the treated, the modified, the chemically saturated requires no special certification. It is the default.

It's cheap. It's available on every shelf in every shop. And it's what most people eat because it's what most people can afford. The food that doesn't contain these compounds, organic, biodynamic, naturally raised, requires extensive and expensive certification, rigorous testing and regulatory approval to prove that it is what all food used to be.

The natural version must prove itself. The industrial version is assumed safe until proven otherwise. And the proof is made difficult by the fact that the industries producing the chemicals fund the research that would prove a harm. Raw milk, unpasteurized, containing the beneficial bacteria that pasteurization destroys, is illegal to sell in many jurisdictions.

Milk that has not been processed, milk in its natural state, the milk that every human consumed before industrial processing existed, illegal. But a soft drink containing high fructose corn syrup, phosphoric acid and artificial colours requires no special permission at all. Then there's biodynamic and organic meat, which is simply meat raised the way all meat was raised for thousands of years. On grass, without hormones, without antibiotics, costs three to four times what industrial meat costs.

That's not because it's more expensive to produce naturally. It's because the regulatory and certification burden makes it expensive to prove that your product is natural. The natural must justify itself. The industrial and the chemical doesn't need to.

The system is inverted. Poison is the default. Health is the premium. And the population with the least economic sovereignty, the people who most need the real food, are priced into fake food.

They don't choose it. They just can't afford not to choose it. This is not regulation. This is again architecture designed to ensure that the most compromised food reaches the most people and that the pharmaceutical industry has a steady supply of patients.

You cannot assume that the two exist in isolation because they are intimately and intrinsically connected. If this transmission shifted something in you, there's a short book that shows you why. It's called Before Approaching the Threshold. There's a link in the show notes to access it and it's free.

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