MAY 17, FRIDAY

ADDICTION

Today I met my old man‘s group. I usually forget what we talk about because what we talk about about is not important, what is important is five old men sitting around a McDonalds table and talking, it is the act of talking that that matters, of listening to each other and responding to each other, not what we say. We drive home feeling good.

But today I remember what we talked about. We talked about diet. We talked about an article that one of us had read about an experiment with rats. A bunch of rats were fed their normal diet of food scraps and stuff they foraged. They would eat some and when full they would turn away. They were satiated. They stayed lean.

But then for a few weeks they were fed a diet of processed human foods straight out of the grocery store. They loved the new food and smeared themselves in it and ate and ate. They all gained weight.

But here is the kicker. They were put back on their original diet that they had always eaten moderately until they seemed to be full. But now they turned up their noses, they refused to eat healthy food, some of them almost starved. They were waiting for real food, waiting for the processed foods they had become addicted to.

And then I remembered that when I have eaten home cooked meals at the house of friends I‘ve found the food lacking in taste. It had none of the intense flavor that the Trader Joe meals I like so much have. And I thought of the rats. I am addicted to processed food, I will keep on eating processed food until I am stuffed, I gain weight and here I am turning up my nose at home cooked healthy food.

I had read another article by a guy whose parents were Swiss and ate only homecooked meals before coming to the United States. But on an American processed food diet this young man gained a great deal of weight. He lately started taking weekly shots of Ozempic and he lost 60 pounds. He felt ashamed of himself for being fat, then he felt ashamed of himself for taking a medicine to make him slim again. Fat was a morally failing, fat people were gluttons who couldn‘t control themselves. Taking shots to reduce weight was cheating, it was for sluggards who didn‘t exercise and couldn‘t restrain themselves.

But no, he says, none of that is true. He was fat because the American processed food diet was intended to lure people into addiction to some of the chemicals of processed food. All Ozempic was doing was countering his addiction and allowing him to eat normally again. He wasn‘t the immoral one. The immoral ones were the large processed food companies that were deliberately addicting people to their processed foods.

So that is what we talked about in our old men‘s group. But what we wondered, as I was eating my McDonalds processed biscuit and gravy, was how we would get out of this trap when the temptations were all around us.