Today’s Brain Booster is: Quit the cult!
For nearly a century, we’ve all been part of a cult. Every single one of us.
The common ideology.
The daily brainwashing.
Blind allegiance to charismatic leaders like a Smiling Colonel and a Clown with a round red nose.
Unquestioning self-sacrifice to the Golden Arches and the Three Dot Domino.
Every day, millions of people sacrifice their heart, liver, brain, and mental health at the altar of Ultra-Processed Food (UPF) for immediate gratification and convenience.
We engage in behaviours we’d consider completely irrational if we stepped outside the cult, and sensibly assessed what we were doing. But of course, we can’t just step outside the cult. That’s the nature of being in a cult. And maybe we don’t want to step outside, because we like what the cult offers: transient pleasure as a surrogate for meaning.
To be fair, it’s extremely difficult to break out of the cult. We’re up against a power that has infiltrated every corner of our existence.
At just one of several cult headquarters, 500 psychologists, chemists, neurobiologists, and technicians, conduct research costing tens of millions of US dollars a year to devise methods to keep us captive.
One room houses a $40 000 machine that simulates a munching mouth for the purpose of testing the perfect break-point for a potato chip. When a chip snaps at exactly 281 grams of pressure per square centimetre, that’s when it hooks us and we can’t stop eating until we’ve finished the packet.
Another tactic the cult employs is what’s known as ‘vanishing calorie density’. If something dissipates in your mouth very quickly — like cheese puffs — your brain is tricked into thinking that it doesn’t contain any calories and you just keep eating and eating and eating.
A 3rd way that Ultra-Processed Foods snare us is through what’s known as the ‘bliss point’. The bliss point refers to food companies painstakingly calculating the optimal amount of sugar that needs to be added to a food to produce ‘peak sensory pleasure.’ Too little sugar and we don’t like it. Too much sugar and it’s sickly. But the perfect amount of sugar — especially when combined with the perfect amount of salt and fat — and we find the biscuit, muffin, cheesecake, donut, or whatever the product happens to be, irresistible.
It isn’t a personal weakness that you can’t stop at one. Ultra-Processed Foods are designed to be addictive and to override our fullness cues.
Listen to this week’s podcast episode discover how to break out of the cult and save your brain.
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Today’s Health Headline is: You’ve been duped into eating Ultra-Processed Food.
By the end of listening to this week’s episode, I’ll bet that you discover that something you’re eating — that you thought was healthy — is actually Ultra-Processed and harmful. And you didn’t have the slightest suspicion.
That’s because the marketing departments of global food corporations with their billion dollar annual budgets, excel at disguising industrial chemical formulations as health foods.
So how do you know if something you’re eating is Ultra-Processed?
Ultra-Processed Foods are edible products made from ingredients you can’t buy in a standard grocery store, using industrial processes you can’t replicate in a home kitchen. Basically, if your great grandmother wouldn’t recognise it as food, it probably isn’t; it’s an Ultra-Processed concoction.
To make this concept easy to understand without getting bogged down in formal classification systems, you can determine whether something is an Ultra-Processed Food if it fails one of three simple real-world tests that I outline in this podcast episode.
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What’s Missing From Modern Medicine is a conversation about UPF.
What’s missing from modern medicine is doctors explaining why UPFs are damaging to our health so that people can make informed choices about what they’re eating. Most people only associate UPFs with gaining weight. But that’s just the tiniest tip of the iceberg. The damage goes so much deeper than carrying excess body fat. This episode delves into the many harms of consuming UPF, including a significant increase in the risk of dementia.
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Today’s Whether question is from Meiti: Can you tell me whether green tea is actually good for our health?
Tune in turn find out!
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Click here to watch the episode on my YouTube channel, or listen to Healing with Dr Helena on your preferred podcast platform. I’ll publish a new episode every Monday, and you’ll receive an email notification that morning. Please subscribe to my podcast or YouTube channel so that you don’t miss an episode, and send your whether questions to: podcast@drhelenapopovic.com
If you’re happy for me to play your voice on my podcast, you can provide an audio file. Otherwise, you can type your question for me to read out.
I very much look forward to answering your questions, and exploring how we can all build a smarter brain, stronger body and deeply fulfilling life.
Please share this Health-e-Byte with everyone you know!
