Not sure I would call that an addiction. Sugar is one: almost everybody consumes way too much sugar and would be incapable of reducing that to a healthy amount. I am including myself, pretty sure you're part of the club.
Sugar is very difficult to unplug from if you don't cook for yourself.
Here in Singapore almost every restaurant and hawker is obsessed with jacking their food up with sugar. Worse though is that if they don't the local Singaporean "foodie" hitmen will annihilate the restaurant with poor reviews on Google Maps for being "bland".
So eating out is a no go. Cooking again unless you're obsessed with reading packaging or make everything from scratch yourself you're instantly adding more sugar than you know.
I have a suspicion that now fruits are also being engineered to be sweeter because apples are way way sweeter than I remember growing up and a lot of the oranges my mother in law buys for me also are blindingly sweet. And yet I feel there's a certain fragrance missing from these sweet fruits...
> now fruits are also being engineered to be sweeter
Yes. But it's not by injecting sugar into fruits like many people think.
Farmers including the one next to my rural alt house:
- Take consultancy of agritech and selectively breed variants that are sweeter [0]
- Optimize min(fruits/tree-or-vine) to concentrate sugars in remaining fruits. [1]
- Ethylene-based post-pluck ripening to convert some starch to sugars and make it sweeter. [2]
- and more. Richer the farmer, the more sophisticated the techniques.
If you want truly fresh natural fruits, buy from a poor farmer directly and pay for logistics yourself. They have to be poor because well, they have to sell at market rate. Tragedy of the commons and all that. And logistics chains depend on fruits being fairly resilient. The logistics loss for natural fruits is 30-50% depending on the fruit. So yeah you need to pay 3x as well.
[1] this technique leads to lesser minerals, polyphenols, vit c etc in fruits. "Crowding out".
[2] this technique leads to less fiber formation since there's no time for polysacs to form. Major reason for fiber deficiency today according to agtech person I know is that people are eating fruits the same way their grandparents did, but whoops, you don't get enough anymore.
[0] They are bred to naturally do the above two things. Mostly, they are bred to autocatalyctically generate ethylene earlier.
If your country is in the business of exporting fruits, then the farmer has to compete with the whole world, and the tragedy of the commons mentioned above goes global. So every effect mentioned above multiplies 2-3x. Because it has to be even more logistics friendly, supply has to be really uniform due to expensive GTM, etc,.
No one is debating whether glucose is or isn't a building block for life, the problem is that humans have evolved from an existence that has of food scarcity but now lives in a world of food abundance.
Not only do we live in food abundance, commercial interests exploit our hardcoded desire to seek out energy rich food to make more profit from us usually by pumping sugar into everything.
This can be as innocent as competing for repeat business at your local restaurants or engineering your food to optimise for the bliss point[0] in order to subvert your natural satiety mechanisms and maximise the addictive quality of the product.
Sugar and its derivatives like HFCS are everywhere. Your sauces and condiments are swimming in it. Subway bread was so high in sugar it couldn't be legally called bread in the UK.
My own personal favourite anecdote was from someone senior in McDonalds:
"we find from our studies that children do not like a meaty beef flavour in their patties so we deliberately choose a bland patty mix while adding sugar to the buns and smothering the burger in ketchup because kids love sweet stuff, unlike our competitor Burger King. Once the habit is conditioned from young, they will be a customer for life"
Case in point, my wife loves the idea of McDonalds and admits every time that the reality is always disappointing but she is still drawn to it due to nostalgia.
Given that a lot of the developed world has obesity problems which puts a strain on public resources, it's really important to get a grip on our sugar consumption
Almost every cuisine Singapore serves will be sweeter relative to the authentic recipe. For example Korean food here is so sweet my wife thought she doesn't like Korean cuisine until she went to Seoul.
Japanese food is definitely healthier in many respects although there's still a lot of sugar hiding in sushi for example, and oyakodon, teriyaki and katsudon sauces are also often quite sweet.
Shabu shabu is better but so are most hotpots in a clear soup
Studies on rats have shown significant similarities between sugar consumption and drug-like effects, including bingeing, craving, tolerance, withdrawal, dependence, and reward. Some researchers argue that sugar alters mood and induces pleasure in a way that mimics drug effects such as cocaine. In certain experiments, rats even preferred sugar over cocaine, reinforcing the idea that sugar can strongly activate the brain’s reward system
This is somewhat intuitive when you think that sugar is almost pure energy and in a food-scarce existence that we evolved for, energy is synonymous with survival. So alongside reproducing, consuming energy is probably one of the most basic of desires we are hardwired to seek out in more ways than one
Restaurant food is optimized for everything but healthfulness.
Portion size, saturated fat, excessive salt, sugar, sometimes alcohol, low fiber— the industry has defined itself as an extension of the junk food industry. Which is ironic! Because pretty much the only food I would be willing to pay a premium for would be healthy food, demonstrably healthy food.
The reason it isn't, is because it's automatic. Your brain keeps you breathing as much as it can (if you hold your breath until you pass out, your brain will start breathing again for you). Breathing isn't reward driven. It doesn't engage the dopamine system the same way, eg cocaine does. You don't become tolerant to breathing the same way you do, eg cocaine. Lastly, for something to qualify for Substance Use Disorder (SUD), they need to keep doing it, despite social and health ramifications of continued use in the face of developing a tolerance for it. Other than some edgelord shit, no one's gonna give you shit for continuing to breath.
