On his book The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business
Cover Interview of December 04, 2019
A close-up
Not everyone is happy with all the talk of expanding
addiction. It bothers clinicians who fear stigmatization, libertarians who
smell an excuse for indiscipline, social scientists who fear neuroscientific reductionism and imperialism, and philosophers who detect concept creep and equivocation, the misleading practice
of using the same word to describe different things.
I shared many of these concerns and wanted to give the critics
a hearing. Using the brain-disease model of food addiction as a case study, I
wrote a dialogue that boiled down the arguments on both sides. Here’s a taste
of the pros (P) and cons (C):
C: You can’t compare drugs and food. We don’t have to take
drugs. We do have to eat.
P: Eat food, yes. Eat engineered food, no. People don’t
overconsume corn. They overconsume corn processed into Cheetos, Doritos, and
other mass-marketed, synthetically flavored products designed to maximized
brain reward.
C: So take junk food off the grocery list.
P: Not so easy if you’re hooked.
C: Get unhooked. This is a bad habit, not a real brain
disease like schizophrenia or multiple sclerosis. People quit bad habits all
the time.
P: People don’t quit cravings or forget cues. They don’t
restore lost receptors with a snap of the fingers.
C: But they can overcome bad habits by adopting other,
healthier habits. They can change their routines. Start going to Weight Watchers,
stop going to McDonald’s. What you call addiction has an element of choice and
a developmental trajectory. People wise up as they get older. They outgrow
addictions, often quitting on their own. Ex-tobacco smokers outnumber current
smokers in several developed nations.
P: Yet people have to eat, as you say. And shop for
groceries. Talk about cues. But, yes, there are workarounds like learning to
prepare meals with fresh, carefully measured, low-fat ingredients. And avoiding
fructose, which is nothing but a brain-pleasing additive.
C: The vast majority of people eat and drink fructose at
least occasionally. Ditto other feel-good additives. Yet they don’t all become
addicts.
P: You could say the same thing of drugs. Fewer than 20
percent of the people who ever try crack or heroin wind up as addicts. More
people than that have trouble controlling their food intake, ruining their
health in the process …
You can guess what follows. Is food addiction about dumb policies
that make brain-altering and potentially addictive processed foods available at
low cost to susceptible populations with few healthy alternatives? Or is it
about dumb people who lack the discipline and future orientation to establish
healthy regimes to maintain proper weight and nutrition?
Tell me what you think about food addiction—any
addiction—and I’ll tell you what your politics are.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
A close-up
Not everyone is happy with all the talk of expanding addiction. It bothers clinicians who fear stigmatization, libertarians who smell an excuse for indiscipline, social scientists who fear neuroscientific reductionism and imperialism, and philosophers who detect concept creep and equivocation, the misleading practice of using the same word to describe different things.
I shared many of these concerns and wanted to give the critics a hearing. Using the brain-disease model of food addiction as a case study, I wrote a dialogue that boiled down the arguments on both sides. Here’s a taste of the pros (P) and cons (C):
C: You can’t compare drugs and food. We don’t have to take drugs. We do have to eat.
P: Eat food, yes. Eat engineered food, no. People don’t overconsume corn. They overconsume corn processed into Cheetos, Doritos, and other mass-marketed, synthetically flavored products designed to maximized brain reward.
C: So take junk food off the grocery list.
P: Not so easy if you’re hooked.
C: Get unhooked. This is a bad habit, not a real brain disease like schizophrenia or multiple sclerosis. People quit bad habits all the time.
P: People don’t quit cravings or forget cues. They don’t restore lost receptors with a snap of the fingers.
C: But they can overcome bad habits by adopting other, healthier habits. They can change their routines. Start going to Weight Watchers, stop going to McDonald’s. What you call addiction has an element of choice and a developmental trajectory. People wise up as they get older. They outgrow addictions, often quitting on their own. Ex-tobacco smokers outnumber current smokers in several developed nations.
P: Yet people have to eat, as you say. And shop for groceries. Talk about cues. But, yes, there are workarounds like learning to prepare meals with fresh, carefully measured, low-fat ingredients. And avoiding fructose, which is nothing but a brain-pleasing additive.
C: The vast majority of people eat and drink fructose at least occasionally. Ditto other feel-good additives. Yet they don’t all become addicts.
P: You could say the same thing of drugs. Fewer than 20 percent of the people who ever try crack or heroin wind up as addicts. More people than that have trouble controlling their food intake, ruining their health in the process …
You can guess what follows. Is food addiction about dumb policies that make brain-altering and potentially addictive processed foods available at low cost to susceptible populations with few healthy alternatives? Or is it about dumb people who lack the discipline and future orientation to establish healthy regimes to maintain proper weight and nutrition?
Tell me what you think about food addiction—any addiction—and I’ll tell you what your politics are.