America The Snackable
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
There is only one pathway to health and sanity: stop consuming snackables of any kind.
Everything in America has become snackable: devoid of value, easily consumed, intentionally addictive, and ultimately destructive to all that is healthy for individuals, communities and society at large.
The core features of edible snackables are self-evident yet worthy of a closer look due to the severity of the consequences:
1. The snack is made of highly processed ingredients.
2. The snack has high concentrations of sugar, salt and unhealthy oils/fats.
3. The snack has low nutritional value (empty calories) and is not beneficial to health.
4. The snack is packaged in small quantities so the price appears cheap but is revealed as expensive when converted to price per pound.
5. The snack's "serving size" may be deceptively presented: a 4-ounce package may have a calorie count based on a "serving size" of 2 ounces, as if the package contains two servings when everyone knows a single individual will consume the entire snack.
6. The snack is a legal addictive product as the snack has been designed to hijack humans' innate receptors for sugar, salt and fat and satisfying mouthfeel. (Bet ya can't have just one.)
Highly processed, highly addictive, low nutritional value foods are a key driver of America's declining health. All these foods share the same characteristics of the manufactured snackables: they are heavily marketed, highly profitable and contribute to obesity and metabolic disorders.
When only one-quarter of the adult populace is normal weight, this leads to a host of chronic health disorders including higher risks of heart disease and many cancers, as well as the spectrum of metabolic disorders such as diabetes and prediabetes. Here are the facts: over 73% of adult Americans are overweight or obese.
Given that almost 3/4 of adult Americans are overweight or obese, it shouldn't surprise us that 52% of adult Americans are diabetic or prediabetic. This is a sobering trend, one that won't be reversed by $1,000 a month weight-loss medications which cease to be effective once they're no longer consumed. These medications don't change the patients' diets from highly processed foods to only unprocessed real food, and so the benefits are inherently narrower than advertised.
The snack and beverage aisles take up an astounding amount of space in America's specialty-groceries and supermarkets. These are the profit-generators, and so the processed-food manufacturers and grocery retailers are constantly seeking to entice more addicts with new novelties. For example: Trader Joe's Has Been Releasing A Ton Of New Products Lately.
Consuming this kind of high-fat, empty-calorie snack isn't going to generate a healthy lifestyle.
The marketing of novelty is as refined and devoid of value as the snacks being manufactured and sold:
As those with any knowledge and experience of fitness know, the notion that it's possible to burn off the empty calories of snacks with a bit more exercise is a fantasy--hence America's bulging waistlines and declining health.
The enormous profitability of edible snacks is mirrored in all the other manifestations of America the Snackable: our daily lives are now composed of one bite-sized addictive snack of social media, novelty memes, political opinion, financial data-snacks and pundits' opinions and snackable videos after another.
Attention spans and the ability to grasp complex issues have withered to snack-size, and whatever is being marketed as "ideas" are as devoid of value as an empty-calorie snack.
All share the same characteristics: they are addictive, bite-sized, packaged deceptively, marketed as novelty, devoid of value, destructive to human health and most importantly, astoundingly profitable. So the edible snacks generate chronic illnesses which then provide fodder for highly profitable medications, while the inherently deranging snackables of social media, videos, entertainment, political opinions and memes-du-jour fuel mental disorders which provide fodder for a vast spectrum of highly profitable medications.
There is only one pathway to health and sanity: stop consuming snackables of any kind. Yes, the only solution is cold turkey, baby, and like all addictions, it's painful at first, and then it becomes a great relief to be freed of the addictions.
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