The Addicting of America

Once upon a time I drank a fifth and a half of vodka every night, smoked through three packs of menthol light cigarettes every day, and wrestled with addiction to crack and powder cocaine, bingeing, cravings, fearsome mood swings, a trigger temper and waxing and waning waist sizes.

Mainstream experts peg people like me as having an addictive personality. They recommend a nice anti-depressant to perk me up and perhaps some Ritalin to rein in my jumpy mind with a mood moderator to back the spike of the Ritalin. They prescribe Atenolol to calm my transient oddball heartbeat, a little Trazadone to get me to sleep and oh, years of therapy wouldn’t hurt either.

Not once did anyone ever consider how the foods I ate as a youngster and adult may have affected me on the deepest level of my body, mind, heart and soul.

How did we ever make it to this place in time if we, as humans, need all those drugs and counseling to make it through our lives? Did the vital peoples over the march of time have some secret to their longevity, spirituality, contentment, and beauty that we’re missing today?

You bet they did.

These “primitive” people understood the rhythm of nature and wisdom of the traditional foods they needed to not only survive, but thrive. Food is energy and life gives life. They knew it and their way of living and their countenance proved it out over millennia.

Often we begin to set our society up for addiction and illness later in life by the foods we eat—the worst offender being white sugar. It often leads to “the bigger kick” of cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol without the user necessarily knowing why. Aspartame and the 15,000 chemicals in the foods we consume on any given day begin to wreak havoc on our endocrine systems. These chemicals are added to foods with the explicit intent of making the consumer unable to stop wanting, drinking or eating them. Foods without proper nutrients or with certain additives shut off the appestat and create bingeing.

There is money to be made off of a chronically sick society. In 2000, Americans spent around 21 billion dollars on OTC meds and 145 billion dollars on prescription meds. We’re certainly not getting healthier as we come up on 2010, so these numbers are likely significantly higher. The pharmaceutical companies are laughing all the way to the bank and many of them are under the same parent company as fast food makers.

Americans spent roughly six billion dollars on fast food in the ’70s; today, we’re spending close to 150 billion dollars.