Hyper-Palatable, Ultra-Processed Foods are Porn for the Mouth
QUOTE:
“Hyper-palatable foods…I liken it to mouth porn.” - Max Lugavere
TOPIC:
Highly Processed, hyper-palatable foods hijack the brain’s reward learning process creating food cravings, food addiction, and overeating.
Have you ever experienced this?
Have you ever taken a bite of your favorite ice cream, and immediately experienced what feels like fireworks going off on your taste buds and in your mind?
As soon as that sweet, creamy treat hits your tongue, it’s like a party erupts in your head?
Potato chips, homemade cookies, or cream cheese frosting on a bakery-made carrot cake, to name a few, set off fireworks in my brain as soon as the salt and fat (chips), or sugar and fat (cookies and icing) hit my tongue, creating an instant urge to overeat.
Hyper-palatable foods, such as these, made with a combination of salt, sugar, and/or fat takeover the pleasure centers of our brain.
When this happens, it makes it very difficult to moderate the consumption of these foods.
When I add salt to a cucumber, the cucumber tastes fresh and delicious, but I do not get the same blissful response from my taste buds to my brain creating an urgency to overindulge.
Author Max Lugavere has identified similarities in how the brain is affected with people addicted to pornography, and people addicted to ultra-processed, hyper-palatable foods.
Lugavere, explains, “It’s not that sugar is addicting, or fat is addicting, it’s the combination…it’s when food becomes hyper-palatable. When I looked up articles about porn addiction, and I read how people who are addicted to porn described how it felt to be addicted to porn, and it read almost identical to people who can’t stop eating ultra-processed foods. When people get addicted to porn–it’s basically the same thing, a numbed pleasure response and overriding of satiety mechanisms …like when you’re watching too much porn, and you’re hooked on it–you can’t get enough. You’re watching one video, and you’re already thinking about the next video or the search term that you want to go to. Ultra-processed food is the ‘pornographization’ of food.”
It’s that desire that can’t be met—no matter how much porn you watch, or ultra-processed food you eat, your mind is already desiring the next video, or next pint of ice cream.
The food industry has placed a lot of time, money, and resources into creating hyper-palatable foods.
Food has been tested by food manufacturers on adults and children to be engineered to have a “bliss point,” a term created by American market researcher and psychophysicist Howard Moskowitz, to describe the right amount of sugar, salt, and fat in foods to create a sense of pleasure.
These foods have been found to lead to compulsive overeating, and in order to reach the same level of satisfaction, they require you eat more.
Today sweetness has been added to many foods that didn’t used to be sweet like breads, pasta sauce, and certain yogurts, creating an expectation for sweetness in all foods.
And there are now over 61 names for sugar that you can find on food labels, most of which the average person is unaware of, so you can be consuming sugar and not even know it.
Another correlation Lugavere has found between addiction to pornography and hyper-palatable foods is, “…a lot of people are actually becoming addicted to pornography today due to the fact that it’s just ever-present on the internet and super-accessible. The same thing could be said for ultra-processed convenience foods. They’re always at arm’s length today, and this is one of the reasons why your average person is eating for 16 hours over the course of the day.”
These foods are everywhere—gas stations and convenience stores, grocery stores, drug stores, in vending machines at schools, gyms, and shopping centers, they’re advertised on trucks on the road, and on TV, radio, and the Internet.
It’s difficult to go anywhere without seeing processed foods or seeing them advertised, sending a constant cue to your brain.
When you step back and recognize all of the food messages being sent to your brain every day from inside of your home to the outside world, you can gain compassion for yourself and what your brain is up against every day.
These hyper-palatable foods have been purposely designed to create cravings and urges in your brain—your brain is responding as designed.
Nature did not intend for, or foresee that its brilliantly designed reward learning process that has ensured our survival as a species would be exploited by modern foods made up of ingredients manipulated by man.
How do we manage our desire and cravings for these addictive hyper-palatable foods when they are everywhere, and they are so easily accessible?
We need to use curiosity to gain control of our brain’s habit-forming process.
From this awareness, we can create new habits on purpose that aren’t driven by cravings and urges.
Seeing the foods is a trigger, and triggers (also known as cues) set off the evolutionarily conserved reward-based learning process.
The process looks like: TRIGGER → ACTION → REWARD…REPEAT.
In the context of food, the process looks like:
TRIGGER - See ice cream advertised on the side of a truck, or see someone in the family eating ice cream in your kitchen…and have a thought like, “That will taste amazing.”
Your thought causes you to feel an urge to eat the ice cream, so you give in to the urge, and take the action of eating the ice cream.
ACTION – Eat the ice cream.
The brain receives a flood of dopamine, the “feel good” neurotransmitter, so the action is rewarded.
REWARD – Intense pleasure from the flood of dopamine from the ice cream’s sweetness and satiating fat content.
It is here that brain remembers what you are eating and where you found it so this can be repeated in the future.
REPEAT – Pattern is reinforced each time it plays out until it becomes a habit where it is delegated to our lower brain where it becomes an automatic, unconscious process.
Once the process becomes unconscious and automatic, it can lead you to feel like it is happening against your will, and that you are out of control.
Being curious allows us to step outside of this ‘TRIGGER → ACTION → REWARD…REPEAT’ loop that we get sucked into, and become present in the moment.
Curiosity is naturally rewarding and feels good so it makes turning towards your experience instead of pushing it away much easier.
The steps for mindfulness are:
FIRST, gain awareness.
It is important to identify and become aware of where you are being faced with triggers for hyper-palatable foods inside and outside of your home.
SECOND, without judgement, get curious about your experience in the moment consuming the ice cream with these observational questions:
1. Describe the food in detail—the look, color, smell, texture, etc.
2. What are you feeling before you eat the food?
3. Stop after each bite, and describe each bite in detail.
4. Do all of the bites taste the same?
5. Does each bite begin to taste less pleasurable, or more pleasurable?
6. What is your feeling after eating this food?
7. Is this feeling the same as before you ate the food, or different?
8. How much did you eat before you were satisfied?
9. When did you stop eating?
10. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being not hungry and 10 being very hungry, where are you after eating the food?
THIRD, review.
In my experience getting curious with eating a homemade chocolate chip cookie revealed to me that the taste was so pleasurable that I immediately wanted to take another bite before I had finished chewing my first bite.
I felt this incredible sense of urgency to eat more because I wanted to continue to feel the blissful rush of pleasure the cookie had provided.
I felt like I couldn’t eat enough to hit that high.
In this moment, I realized this simple cookie had hijacked my brain, and made me feel completely out of control.
The urge created an internal battle because intellectually I knew it was best for my wellbeing to limit myself to 1 to 2 cookies, but the desire to continue the “porn in my mouth” made me feel helpless and out of control.
I eat a lot of salads with fresh vegetables, black beans, sun-dried tomatoes, cheese, slivered almonds, salt, and olive oil, and I never experience feeling out of control and pushed to overeat.
The salad is totally satiating, and I do not experience an urgency to overindulge.
Recognizing this was a game-changer for me.
It changed how I look at sweet treats and desserts.
This observation, after gaining awareness from having dessert on multiple previous evenings, led me to decide that I did not want food, a basic need for my body to function, to make me feel out of control and helpless.
I moved from knowledge that these processed foods are addicting and wreck my health to wisdom of exactly how the cookies affected my brain and body.
This caused me to stop eating sugar and desserts.
My habit to eat dessert after dinner was broken after recognizing how my brain got hijacked by these unnatural foods.
Getting curious made me clearly see, and with this deeper-level of awareness, I didn’t have to force myself, or experience deprivation and restriction to let my sugar and dessert habit go.
Taking back control was most important to me.
It hasn’t been easy—seeing my family continue to eat sugary desserts after dinner triggers my reward path, however, because of my awareness, I am able to interrupt that loop by reminding myself I don’t want food to control me, but instead nourish me.
Each time I do not give into eating sugar and desserts, I desire it less, and it becomes easier to be around it and not eat it.
It’s like being someone who doesn’t smoke—seeing cigarettes, someone smoking, or smelling them doesn’t trigger me at all, and my desire for sugar and desserts is becoming the same.
I experience no resistance to say no to it, and I don’t feel deprived for not having it.
I encourage you to get curious while eating processed, hyper-palatable foods versus natural foods, and become familiar with how each affects your body.
With your acquired knowledge, decide deliberately if you’d like to continue allowing foods in your diet that create over-pleasure in your brain, and an urgency to overeat.
Knowledge is power, and from this awareness, you can control what you’d like to nourish your body with on purpose.
EMPOWERING QUESTION:
What one thing can I do today to make my wellbeing a priority so I have more to give to others?