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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Johann Hari
There’s already been a decline in the value of the stocks of the doughnut company Krispy Kreme, which analysts directly attributed to the growing popularity of Ozempic.
Companies selling devices for hip and knee replacements have seen their values plunge, because obesity causes so much damage to those parts of the body. An analyst for Jefferies Financial said that airlines are poised to save millions of dollars a year because less jet fuel is burned when you are flying slimmer people.
according to scientists at the National Institutes of Health in the United States, this began to change in the late 1970s. Obesity had likely been rising very slowly since the turn of the twentieth century, but suddenly, it went supersonic. Between the year I was born and the year I turned twenty-one, obesity more than doubled in the United States, from 15 percent to 30.9 percent.
“There was no genetic shift that happened in the 1970s or ’80s. There was no massive change of willpower that occurred. Yet all of a sudden, people started gaining weight rapidly.”
This change happened quickly enough to be shocking, but slowly enough that we seem to have accepted it without much fightback or friction.
The manufacturers are doing this for one reason above all others. Fresh food rots quickly, and these factories are preparing food that needs to be able to sit on a supermarket shelf for weeks, months, or years. To achieve this, they have to dramatically alter it. If you pump food full of sugar and fat, it reduces bacterial growth, and if you add salt, it lasts longer on the shelf without rotting. So our food is filled with unheard-of amounts of all three.
“The hard fact of the matter is that the extreme temperatures and stress involved in industrial food manufacture do grievous bodily harm to natural ingredients, irrevocably damaging their intrinsic textures, flavors and aromas.” They appear dull and inedible. So it is necessary to add large numbers of colorings to make them look like the original form of the food.
One typical stand explained that the chemical components they were selling for inclusion in human food had many other uses: they boasted that their chemicals could be used in bakery products and meat, but also in “fly spray, air freshener, shower sealant, deodorant, computer casing, scratch-resistant car coating, paint and glue.”
The scientists working for these food manufacturers have carefully studied how to create what they call “bliss-points”—moments in the consumption of these foods when we will feel a sugar-kick, or a moment of mouth-bliss, or a wildly exciting aftertaste, all constructed by their shower of chemicals.
It was like they had forgotten what real food was, and no longer recognized it as food at all.
Dunkin’ Donuts now sells enough doughnuts every day to circle the earth twice,
More people recognize the Golden M as the symbol for McDonald’s than the number of people who recognize the cross as a symbol of Christianity.
seven ways in which this new kind of processed food could be undermining our sense of satiety.
The first way that ultra-processed food undermines our satiety is strangely simple. You chew it less.
The second way our satiety is being undermined is that these manufactured foods often contain that uniquely powerful combination of sugar, fat, and carbs—and this seems to activate something primal in us.
The third way is that processed food seems to affect your energy levels differently.
The fourth way is that processed food lacks two things we really need—protein and fiber.
The fifth way is that a lot of the drinks we now consume contain chemicals that may be actively triggering us to be more hungry.
for every extra soft drink a child consumes a day, there is a 60 percent boost to the risk of them becoming obese.
You drink something sweet, and it expects a surge of energy from sugar. Everything in our evolution primes you for it. When it doesn’t come—when your brain realizes it’s been tricked—it responds by making you more hungry, to give it that fresh surge of energy it was expecting, and so “you suddenly want cake.”
The sixth factor is one that took me a while to really understand. This new kind of food has done something unprecedented: it has separated flavor from the underlying quality of our food.
the system that used to tell you to eat fruit now tells you to eat Fruit Loops.
The seventh factor is that these foods seem to cause your gut to malfunction, in ways that undermine satiety.
the average person has “lost about 40 percent” of the diverse life in our microbiomes,
Big Agriculture does to animals precisely what the processed food industry is doing to us and our children every day.
Obesity is an artificial problem in the sense that” we now eat “highly energy-dense foods that normally [don’t exist] in nature. There was virtually none in our hunter-gatherer days. And now we’ve come up with an artificial solution, which is to fix the artificially undermined satiety through an artificially designed drug.”
Something is wrong, he believes, “any time a society has a problem that everyone acknowledges is heavily based on the environment, and turns increasingly to treating it in a medical way.”
where do you draw the line to say ‘let’s live however we want, and we’ll just depend on the pharmaceutical industry to save us from ourselves’?
Do you object to diabetics taking Ozempic to control their blood sugar? No. But doesn’t diabetes have environmental causes? Isn’t it driven, when it comes to type 2 diabetes, by the same factors that drive obesity?
if you are overweight, your chances of dying of any cause in the next ten years increase by between 20 to 40 percent. If you are obese, they increase by 200 to 300 percent.
By the summer of 1970, 8 percent of all prescriptions in the US were for amphetamines.
exercise, diet, and stigma. The recipe for weight loss, we are taught, is simple: eat less, move more, and feel bad about yourself if you don’t.
two years after starting a diet and making a real effort to stick at it, you will—on average—weigh two pounds less than you did at the start.
As you gain weight, your biological set point—the weight your brain tries to keep your body at—rises and rises.
“The body always fights back,” he said. “We have billions of years of evolution to make sure that weight gets back within five years.”
“You’re trying to change your diet in the food environment we’re already living in.” You can’t isolate yourself from
We hugely overestimate how many calories are burned by exercise, and what we can eat to treat ourselves afterward.
In the past, scientists had tried designing drugs to reduce addictive behaviors, but they kept bumping into a problem. They could find drugs that dampened addiction, but the drugs also dampened “natural rewarding behaviors, like feeding and sex and social interactions.” They worked by dialing down your entire reward system, so if you took them, you lost your interest in cocaine, but you also lost your interest in life and all of its pleasures.
The brains of people addicted to cocaine look remarkably similar to the brains of people who are obese, or engage in binge-eating.
what if the idea that these are weight-loss drugs is kind of a mischaracterization? What if they don’t work primarily on your weight, but instead work primarily on your relationship with rewards—and reduce your cravings for things that can be bad for you across the board?
I am going to quote a lot of people here, with a very broad range of views, to give you a sense of how many perspectives there are on this at the moment.
If they work by repressing my reward systems, how can they tell the difference between something that’s bad for me—eating that second box of Chicken McNuggets—and something that’s good for me, like going for a run?
How does a drug working on my reward system know to suppress eating jam sandwiches but not to suppress jamming? “Yeah. We don’t know,” Heath Schmidt said. “Honestly, I think that’s a great question…That’s why we’re doing a lot of these mechanistic studies
If I was to speculate, I’d say what these GLP-1 agonists are doing is not necessarily modifying the reward systems. They’re really turning up the aversion systems—the systems that say ‘stop doing that. You shouldn’t be doing that,’ so you get the satiety response.”
worst-case scenario—is you alter these developing circuits in the brain that are involved in reward systems.
In pregnant rats administered semaglutide…structural abnormalities and alterations to growth occurred.”
When you take them, you are not just changing your gut. You are changing your brain. You are changing your mind.
the real human pleasure is eating, because you need to make sure you eat every day. So the body had to create a system of pleasure where you would eat every day and not get tired of it.”
‘Let’s try this experiment where for half of the population, we’re going to remove the primary source of pleasure from their lives, and have them stick with that for the rest of their lives. That’s going to really turn out to be a good thing.’ I don’t see how that’s possible…Maybe
On the night Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, as the news of each state going into the red column came in, food orders on apps like Grubhub and Uber Eats in blue states massively surged, and people mostly ordered high-fat, high-carb junk.
