I'm going to talk about this even at the risk of sounding condescending, which I am told I am when I talk about food. I try not to be, but I guess I just am. Sorry. I suppose you can skip it if you want. Most people skip all of the posts, so you'll be in the majority.
Have you ever heard of the Bliss Point?
It's something in food science where they have worked out the optimal ratio of fat and salt and sugar. They have scientifically studied it for the last 100 years until they've engineered all the processed foods we find at the grocery store or particularly the convenience store to be irresistible. You can't eat just one. Once you pop you can't stop.
They've basically engineered our food into evolutionary traps. An evolutionary trap is something that takes advantage of a cue from evolution to entice something into partaking of it, but it is actually detrimental or even deadly. For example, there was a particular electrical wire nut that someone designed, but when they used it, they found that it fooled hummingbirds into thinking it was a flower. The hummingbirds would stick their beaks inside the wire nut to get nectar, but instead they'd get zapped by the live wire and die. They had to redesign the wire nut so that it didn't bring birds to their death.
Fat and salt are necessities for humans. Sugar, not so much. Combine them just right, however, and you have something that will bring people running from all around to consume. We have no resistance to it. Our evolution has prepared us to eat as much of it as possible, but it is actually really bad for us, and will kill us off. Not as quickly as a live electrical wire, at least, so there's that. But if it was that fast acting, then we wouldn't be falling for it so badly. Instead, it poisons us throughout our lifetime, slowly robbing us of our energy and vitality until it triggers something like cancer or heart disease or diabetes or alzheimer's and so forth.
So, I thought it was kind of funny to see this box of granola bars at work.
It's Nature Valley's Sweet and Salty nut granola bars. It almost feels like either they don't care anymore or that they just don't have any creativity left. They're letting the mask down with this branding. They're bragging about combining two of the three factors of the bliss point for you (and you know they have the third point maximized in there as well, they just don't talk about fat out in the open, because it's been demonized since the 1970s).
I've seen this brand before, but yesterday, the name just jumped out at me. I thought, why don't you just take the mask down all the way and name them Bliss Point Bars? Everybody is so captured by your products already that they wouldn't even say anything about it. They'd just keep eating and expanding and getting sicker. It doesn't matter.
I'm told that I am crazy and weird for not eating like everybody else. I'm the weird one. Is one of us supposed to be a dog in this scenario? Who is the dog? I am? I am the dog?
The funny thing is that before about 1910, no human had ever eaten anything like what we eat today. Then we got busy inventing and came up with things like Cheerios and Coca-cola and Mars bars and Sour Patch Kids and Nerds Gummies. In the last 100 years, this way of eating has been normalized. These things used to be a treat, now they're the norm.
What happened in the time of that normalization? Chronic illnesses have skyrocketed from nearly non-existent to the main causes of death in our societies. Worse, we Americans have spread our culture and our products across the world, so the whole world has joined us in our misery. We were the first to see our life expectancy diminish, but now, people are living shorter less fulfilled lives everywhere.
There is a way out of it. Eat real food. Eat human food. Every species has a species-specific diet, and they flourish most when they eat it, and suffer when they stray. Pandas eat bamboo. If you try to feed it something else, it will suffer and die. Humans are animals too, no matter how much we want to insist we are above that. We have to eat what we are evolved to eat.
What is that? Well, as you might guess, since I call myself a carnivore, I believe that we are supposed to eat meat, fatty meat. Even if you can't go there, however. I'll guarantee you this, we're not evolved to eat Doritos and Mountain Dew. Processed food is all poison. It's slow poison, but it will rob at least twenty years of quality life from you if you indulge in it. Eat real food. Eat whole foods. If it comes from a bag or a box or a can, then it doesn't belong in your body.
If you change that, you will be amazed at the difference in your life. Your energy will grow. Your focus will sharpen. Your resolve will augment. When I'm not on carnivore, I revert back to my lazy uninspired self every time. Once I'm one carnivore for a while, I get ambitious and am writing 1,000 words a day again. I say that processed foods will rob you of twenty years of life, but worse, it robs you of the quality in the years that you do live. I don't care if I live to 100 or 120. What I want is to actually live the years that I'm alive, and the only way that's possible is if I quit poisoning myself daily with processed foods.
To finish it off, I figured I'd attach this video from Dr. Anthony Chaffee talking about evolutionary traps and what to do about sugar, particularly that in honey and fruit. Spoiler alert, it's not any different. It's still sugar.
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