Big Food: What You Shouldn’t Gobble Up

Sep 09, 2014 Bhattarai Chiranjeevi Lifestyle & Health 0

The powerful food and beverage industry is a global multi-billion enterprise collectively known as Big Food. Specifically, this is composed of multinational corporations in the business of processed and packaged food and beverage. Possessing concentrated and huge market power, this highly influential industry has been affecting the health and wellness of people worldwide as they influence what people eat practically everywhere on the planet. Big Food is accused of causing a global obesity epidemic. Scientific researchers and medical authorities have been studying the issues behind this allegation and the industry’s role on the global health stage.

In his book entitled “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us”, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Michael Moss asserts that the combinations and proportions of fat, sugar, and salt are driving consumers to get addicted to commercially-packaged food. And what’s harmful to people’s health is wealth to the packaged and processed food industry that has been manipulating consumer taste buds with salt, sugar, and fat and causing the obesity epidemic. Indeed, consumers always have a choice in their purchases. But when they are manipulated into such an addiction, they become victims and not just participants in the system. Systemic addiction to a systematic manipulation of popular tastes puts consumers in a situation that is beyond their control.

Image Credit: Christian Cable

The irony is as stark as it’s sickening. In the world today, one billion people suffer from hunger, while two billion are considered overweight, even obese. In either situation, the health of people is grossly affected and solutions are direly needed both immediately and over the long haul. Big Food, being a largely concentrated industry, is controlled by a few players that handle a huge chunk of the global food supply chain. Consumers would do well to be aware of what these giant players do to their lives. During the 8th Global Conference on Health Promotion held in Helsinki, Finland in June 2013, the World Health Organization admitted that the efforts of the public health community slam with great difficulty against the profit-driven interests of the powerful multinational food industry. So, individual consumers must be made aware of the facts that there are aspects of this colossal and global processed food phenomenon that must be totally shunned. It starts with educating the consuming public on the enormity of the harm.

Consumers Get Hooked

The reason that the powerful processed and packaged food industry has been able to control the eating habits on the planet is that their harmful ingredients and combinations of the tastes from these ingredients are addictive. People simply keep coming back for more because they now think and feel that they need these in their system. For instance, studies have revealed that consuming large amounts of sugar leads to the release of natural opioids that are neurotransmitters found in the pleasure center of the human brain. Caffeine, salt, fat, refined carbohydrates, and lots and lots of sugar get people addicted. Throw in marketing strategies that promise and deliver on value for money, plus advertising that shows how mouth-watering these foods are, and you’ve got a global populace that’s wired to come back for more. This is manipulation to the smartest degree.

Consumers Feed on Toxins

Processed food needs considerable amounts of phosphates to lengthen their shelf life. There are potential health risks when people continually consume packaged food and fast food that can normally contain sodium phosphate, calcium phosphate, or all other phosphorous-based additives to make them last longer. Processed food is also known to contain residues from crop pesticides and warehouse fumigation. For example, breakfast cereals that are marketed as natural are anything but. They are full of pesticides, the controversial GMOs, and even industrial waste. Almost all processed food contains corn or soy that has been genetically modified. What’s more, the herbicide RoundUp is most likely part of this genetic engineering process that has been known to carry health and environmental risks. These are enough reasons to justify that, since people have been consuming toxins, processed food should carry warning labels of harmful ingredients.

Consumers Eat Their Way to Illnesses

Convenience food such as packaged, processed, and fast food have been proven to cause harm to people’s health. These are the types of products that Big Food has been cashing in on for a long time now. Diabetes is just one of the many diseases that results from consuming these types of food. So-called convenience food is chockfull of large concentrations of salt, sugar, and fat. While people have become busier in their lives and more dependent on these convenience foods, they are also heading toward more and more illnesses. While the health of the people on the planet continue to deteriorate because of the continual, consistent, and concentrated proliferation of such convenience food, their multinational manufacturers get richer by the billions of dollars every year.

Big Food lacks the necessary vitamins and the requisite fiber, and these are just two of its many disadvantages. Taking the place of the necessary nutrients that consumers must be getting, processed, packaged, and fast food instead offer other ingredients that harm the health. The most important thing that consumers must not be gobbling up with Big Food is the blatant lie that it effectively feeds people to survive a hungry and harried planet.