Now For Burgers And Coke

Hmm, let's see. What's the new tobacco today?

Well, it's fast food and fizzy drinks, as it happens. However, this time it's not just some obscure publicity-seeking crank offering up the nonsense.

A growing body of medical research at leading universities and government laboratories suggests that processed foods and sugary drinks made by the likes of PepsiCo Inc. and Kraft Foods Inc. (KFT) aren’t simply unhealthy. They can hijack the brain in ways that resemble addictions to cocaine, nicotine and other drugs.

“The data is so overwhelming the field has to accept it,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “We are finding tremendous overlap between drugs in the brain and food in the brain.”

Twenty-eight scientific studies and papers on food addiction have been published this year, according to a National Library of Medicine database. As the evidence expands, the science of addiction could become a game changer for the $1 trillion food and beverage industries.

If fatty foods and snacks and drinks sweetened with sugar and high fructose corn syrup are proven to be addictive, food companies may face the most drawn-out consumer safety battle since the anti-smoking movement took on the tobacco industry a generation ago.

This is worrying for the fact that one of the cornerstones of anti-smoking strategy - built up over decades - is that smokers are not making a free choice to enjoy cigarettes. They may think they enjoy them, but it's actually just an addiction.

This is the prime driving force behind the worldwide state and supranational quango attacks on tobacco. It's how governments square their claim of presiding over a free society with increasingly prohibitive legislation which is effectively 'banning' smoking by way of price, availability, denormalisation, and restrictions on where it can be consumed.

The weak case for cost to health services notwithstanding, the assertion that an individual is being forced, against their will, to smoke; that tobacco users all really, really want to give up - and if they don't, they just need more encouragement - is used daily against the free choice of smokers.

Now the template is being utilised to attack people who like to eat Big Macs and suck on a Diet Coke.

They don't just like such products, y'see, they are addicted to them.

“This could change the legal landscape,” said Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity and a proponent of anti-obesity regulation. “People knew for a long time cigarettes were killing people, but it was only later they learned about nicotine and the intentional manipulation of it.”

See what he did there? Calling down images of evil, omni-recognised demons within tobacco companies to help turn bovine minds against food and drink suppliers who have previously been very popular.

Because we have all been duped. That pleasure isn't real pleasure at all, it's just an illusion forced on us by greedy corporations.

Education, diets and drugs to treat obesity have proven largely ineffective and the new science of obesity may explain why, proponents say. Constant stimulation with tasty, calorie- laden foods may desensitize the brain’s circuitry, leading people to consume greater quantities of junk food to maintain a constant state of pleasure.

Education doesn't work. Again, this was a plank of anti-smoking propaganda. Smokers are unable to make decisions based on mere information or warnings, they're addicted and so bullying is the only option!

While anti-smokers have long compared (wrongly) nicotine with Heroin, anti-food campaigners have chosen the same strategy from the tobacco control template ... just using a different drug.

Binge-Eating Rats

The results produced the same brain pattern that occurs with escalating intake of cocaine, [Paul Kenny, the Scripps scientist heading the study] wrote.

“To see food do the same thing was mind-boggling,” Kenny later said in an interview.

Indeed, it's worse than that!

A 2007 French experiment stunned researchers when it showed that rats prefer water sweetened with saccharine or sugar to hits of cocaine

Is your belief in real life suspended yet? Don't worry, there'll be plenty more of this to come, if not.

Little wonder that the food industry is pushing hard on the idea that the best way to get a handle on obesity is through voluntary measures and by offering healthier choices. The same tactic worked for awhile, decades ago, for the tobacco industry, which deflected attention from the health risks and addictive nature of cigarettes with “low tar and nicotine” marketing.

Yes, it worked "for a while", until the incessant barrage of propaganda turned tobacco from a choice which comes with risk, into an almost nuclear substance which will kill people after the merest second or two of exposure.

And just to further prove that this idiocy has been unleashed thanks to the stable door being thrown open to shrill tobacco controllers, here's anti-smoking, arch-lunatic lawyer, John Banzhaf, chasing the potentially lucrative new ambulance (and he'll have plenty of clients, too).

Once free will is destroyed as a concept for perceived unhealthy foods and drink, governments feel perfectly justified in denormalising them for your own good.

Eye-watering taxes, product warnings, advertising bans, demonisation and display restrictions are all clearly on the horizon for the fast food industry. It really is only a matter of time.

Still, at least Aunt Gladys won't have to sniff a wisp of smoke when she has her monthly tea and scone at Wetherspoons, so who cares about the elimination of personal choices as a result, eh?