Junk Food

I just listened to an excellent podcast from Stuff You Should Know on junk food.

Everyone needs to listen to it.  Like right now.

Seriously, here's a link.

Here are my takeaways from the podcast.

Junk food has never been as cheap and plentiful as it is right now.
At no other time in human history, has it been as easy to get calorie-dense food as it is right now.  We've been making cookies and chocolate for a long time, but now it's easily packaged, stored, and sold to us for dirt cheap.

We get addicted to junk food.
In the same way our bodies react to drugs, we become addicted to the dopamine rush we get when we eat junk food.  At first it's a great rush.  After that though, our bodies tell us we need it more and more and we get less of a benefit from it.

Junk food companies are using science to hijack our bodies.
There's a ton of science that goes into making a junk food.  What that science focuses on is how to get us to cram more of their product into our gullets.  They do this by mixing flavors because the body tells you to stop eating after a while of just one flavor.  They do this by tricking our bodies not to feel full.  They're jerks.

So junk food is so pervasive that I can't just avoid it.  I can, however, understand what junk food does to my body.  In the podcast they talked about how Type II Diabetes is preventable, but not necessarily reversible.  I recently talked about having a window of time before my choices irrevocably mess up my health.  Cutting out as much junk as possible will go a long way toward going through that window.