Processed Food Addiction: Dr. Joan Ifland (83-Min)

Flowers, F-L-O-U-R-S. And within four days, I started having these really weird things happen. Like my cravings stopped. I didn't know I had cravings because I had them.

My first memory as a child is manipulating an ice cream truck driver into giving me a free treat. Very first memory. I know I had cravings from the beginning. My brain fog cleared up.

I didn't know I had brain fog, but I knew when it was gone on that day four. And the energy slumps, mid-morning, mid-afternoon, pretty much all the time, that just lifted. So I thought, wow, this is really weird, but it must be related to the food. That week, I lost two pounds.

I was not hungry. I said, you can't be hungry and not hungry and lose weight. But there it was. Why I got into this field happened in the third week.

I can tell you exactly where I was standing in my kitchen, and I had this thought, which was, wow, nobody has needed to be yelled at in three weeks. They've all been so good, I haven't had to yell at anybody. And then it just hit me like a ton of bricks that this was something about the food. So I was in that 12-step group by then, and I went that Saturday, and I said, do people become less irritable on this food plan?

And 20 heads said, yeah, less irritable, less anxious, less depressed. I just thought, dang, all those years of therapy, and it was the food. So I was hooked. I had a brand new addiction.

I immediately started, because I was a raging codependent. I immediately started with a handout. So these are the foods to eat. And I gave them clean food.

I call this now clean food. Their grades went up, their athletic performance went up, their popularity went up, their self-confidence went up. I was like, wow. So I thought, this is not fair.

I'm going to tell all the other mothers that this is what's going on. Well, nobody could do it. And I thought to myself, well, maybe they just need a book. So I'll start this revolution in American eating by writing a book.

I wrote a book called Sugars and Flowers, How They Make Us Crazy, Sick, and Fat. It came out in 2001. And it stayed in the Amazon top 3% of books for 10 years. It did not start the revolution that I was really looking for.

So I got with a PBS producer in Houston, and she did a series of shows about it. And that didn't help. And I did a book tour, and that didn't help. So I said, well, I'm going to go back to school.

Because if I can teach the teachers, maybe that will start this revolution. Maybe people will get this incredible information that it's the food. It's processed foods, particularly processed carbohydrates. So I went to Union Institute in Cincinnati, which is the only school for new fields.

I earned my PhD in three years. I thought, all right, now I'm going to write papers. I'm going to write chapters for books. And I'm going to write about food addiction.

And then everybody will know about this addiction to processed foods, and they'll quit using them. That did not happen. The obesity epidemic, the epidemic of food-related diseases has just marched on. So then CRC Press approached me, and they said, why don't you write a textbook about it?

I said, yeah, textbook. That'll change everything. So for three years, I sat and I read research. This is a 240,000 word book.

It's got 2,000 citations in it. Because when you look at the obesity research, through the framework of food addiction, you find an incredible amount of support for this concept. Well, I mean, the textbook didn't exactly start the revolution either. All these years, what I have been looking for, what I really needed was a reliable way to get people off of processed foods.

What the textbook showed me is that this is a very severe addiction. This is not garden variety smoking, which was hard enough to give up. But what you're going to see in the slides is that this is a very severe addiction. What does that mean?

That means it's incredibly hard to give up the substances to start with, and it's really, really hard to stay off of them for the long term. But when you can accomplish that, it's pretty amazing how many health problems just go away, just go away. So we're gonna talk about all of that tonight. I just wanted you to have that background.

Once I had written the textbook and I saw the severity of the addiction, I did devise a method finally after 23 years, trying a lot of different things, to find a way to get people off of processed foods and keep them off. So that will be at the end of the presentation. I'm very, very glad to be here. So I don't have disclosures.

I did form a corporation to provide these services that I now provide, food addiction reset. It's an online service, so that I do disclose that. I have a company that provides those services, and I am the editor and lead author of that textbook. So what are we gonna be talking about?

We're going to be talking about a shift that started in the 1980s. And this happened when the tobacco industry came in and we stopped eating and we started using. We made a shift from food to addictive, processed, food-like substances. Very, very big difference.

And now 30 years later, we have to ask ourselves, are we addressing an eating problem? Is this really a diet problem? Or is this an addiction? Very, very big difference.

So for example, you would never say, you know, that's smoking. You know that smoker, he's got a breathing problem, cuz you see, he breathes, oddly. You would say, no, it's very clear. He's got a smoking problem.

It's nicotine addiction. So we have, I think, we have been led down this path of thinking, we have eating disorders, we have compulsive overeating. No. What I'm gonna show you tonight is the evidence that this is actually an addiction.

So we're gonna be talking about the addiction epidemic business model. We're gonna be asking, who has spread food addiction? What's the impact on the brain? What are we gonna do about it?

And we're going to get a big understanding of a burning question, which is why can people not maintain weight loss? Why can they not maintain a diet change? So I recently gave a presentation in Seattle last weekend, and a doctor came up to me afterwards and he said, well, I have a practice with 558 people in it. It was a membership practice.

I would say 60% of them need to make a diet change, and they cannot make it. And he said, now I know why. So this is a great mystery. We tend to blame the person who cannot make a diet change.

But you're gonna see another picture tonight. And then how do you be a winner in this environment, in this shift? How do you be a winner? So what is the industrial addiction business model?

What is that? It started in the food industry when the tobacco industry came into processed foods in the mid 1980s. R.J. Reynolds bought Nabisco, Phillips bought General Foods, Kraft Foods.

Within a very few years, the tobacco industry controlled 10% of American food purchases. That is the key to everything, in my opinion. It is the, you just read these reports of the tobacco executives calling the food industry executives to New York to be tutored in how to create this addiction model. There it is.

And soon after this, it took very, very little time. And you see these presentations of how the obesity epidemic just burst into the country in a very short time. People were no longer eating food. They were using addictive substances.

So what are these? What's the model? What are the components of the addiction model? The first thing you have to do is you have to teach the brain to crave.

And you have to teach the brain to crave uncontrollably. So you're going to see that there's a war between the craving pathway and the frontal lobe, higher level thinking, and that the frontal lobe is losing most of the time because the food industry now, remember, it's like the tobacco slash food industry. They are, that's what they do. That's what they're really, really good at, which is teaching a brain to crave so strongly that the person is doing things that are not in their own interests.

This is why addictions are diagnosed as a mental illness, because people are doing things to themselves which are harming them. It's self-harm. So why does that happen? Because the tobacco slash food industry is so good at teaching the brain to crave.

So how do they do that? First of all, they make the products very addictive. And we're going to talk specifically. What happened to processed foods when the tobacco industry came in?

The food formulation changed dramatically. They need a lot of advertising. So you might remember if you're my age, the years of tobacco advertising in magazines and billboards. Just everywhere you look, there were tobacco advertisements.

And now there are food advertisements. You have this situation of focusing on the youngest possible user. With tobacco, we had the Joe Camel campaign. Cartoons for ten-year-old boys.

That campaign was aimed at that demographic. Processed foods are aimed at toddlers, newborns. The youngest possible person where the neurons are still developing. The other thing that you have to do is you have to remove barriers to use.

Because you have to get the people to use it often enough to create this, what's basically, Pavlovian conditioning. And you remove the availability barrier. You've got to get it to where people can get it easily. And you saw cigarettes being distributed in vending machines, so people could get them easily.

And now you see processed foods, particularly sodas, available everywhere. Even elementary schools. And then you have to make it very cheap. So you can't have an expensive addictive item creating a whole epidemic of addiction because it has to be cheap.

So people can use it often enough that you create the addiction. The addiction is created by repeat use. So that's the key thing there. So how does this come down?

Who uses this model? Well, tobacco used the model to sell smoking to teenagers. Alcohol markets to teenagers. So you see things like wine coolers.

Low alcohol drinks that girls will drink. So now we have, for example, an epidemic of alcoholism among teenage girls in Canada, because Canada has a low drinking age, age 18. So they will target very specific demographics. This model was used by the pharmaceutical industry to market opiates to doctors.

Very deceptive advertising, highly addictive substance, easy availability, and now we have an epidemic of opiate addiction. We see tobacco and alcohol moving into marijuana. It's got to be an addictive substance. So we see them buying the marijuana companies, again, in Canada.

And vaping, we see tobacco moving into vaping. Now we see them moving into selling processed foods to children. So this is the model. It depends on addictive substances.

That is what these executives know how to do very, very well. So in alcohol, you have ethanol. Opiates, you have opium. Tobacco, you have nicotine.

Cannabis, you have tetrahydrocannabinol. Vaping is nicotine. And processed foods are sugar, gluten, fat, salt, dairy, caffeine, and additives. So I'm going to make a case tonight that processed food addiction is the worst addiction of all.

And one of the reasons is because the combinations of addictive substances in the food are extensive. So how does this work? This all falls under the umbrella of neuromarketing. Because you're not actually educating the person about a product.

You're not actually persuading them that this product will have some beautiful use in their life. No, you are literally teaching the addictive pathway to react violently to reminders of these addictive substances. It's not like, oh, this car has all these features, and it's a great price, and it goes fast, and it's beautiful, and the design is this, and it's so comfortable. No, it's just this is really fun.

There aren't any properties really to sell it on, because you're not selling to the frontal lobe, you're selling to the craving pathways. This is a very cool thing to understand. So let's look at some examples. You have this infant formula, 52% corn syrup and sugar.

You have cereal for toddlers. I use the number 40% here, but I have seen a report of 70% sugar formulation of toddlers, a cereal. You have the co-opting of children's heroes in the marketing of these. If Spider-Man eats this, then I want to eat it.

It's just vicious marketing. Happy meals, we all know that in San Francisco, the fast food industry has been banned from putting toys into meals. This is tragically effective, tragically effective. But the big one is television, and this is really where you see the tobacco industry at their strongest.

So you saw the numbers for when they started buying processed food companies, and within very few years, 1987, there were 160 ads per Saturday morning, cartoon programs for sugary, fatty, salty foods, 1987. By 1992, a mere five years later, it was 264, and within a few years after that, it was 564 ads for sugary, fatty, salty, highly addictive foods to children watching cartoon programs on a Saturday morning. Now, this is research that was done right here at Stanford. It only takes five commercials to persuade a toddler to prefer a product.

So the research was this. They took two groups of toddlers. One group watched an hour program with no commercials. The other group watched an hour program with five commercials for a particular product.

They put all the toddlers in a room with a lot of different products. The toddlers who had seen the five commercials went for the product they had seen. The toddlers who didn't see the commercials picked out a lot of different toys. It only takes five commercials, and here are these children being exposed to 500 commercials in a Saturday morning.

And did this reach across the country? Oh, yeah. Nickelodeon carried these commercials into 65 million households. So you might remember that in smoking, we had two-thirds of American adults smoked.

This is unbelievably effective. It's just a great way to get a cheap product out to hundreds of millions of people and then just foster this very compulsive use. So I have to tell you that at this conference last weekend, somebody asked a question afterwards about the influence of the food pyramid. So the bottom row of the food pyramid is a lot of processed foods.

But the food pyramid advertising cannot touch this volume of advertising. When if you went up to somebody in line for a fast food meal and said, well, are you here because of the food pyramid? They would not say yes. They would say, no, I'm here because Junior in the backseat has nagged me into being here and I'm tired of it.

So this was just, again, tragically effective. You see the rise in obesity in the children's demographic almost immediately. Between the years of 1988 and 1994, it was 10%. 10% of American children were obese.

Within 10 years, it's 15%. You see a 50% increase in a mere 10 years. Just amazingly effective. Tragically effective.

So what about availability and advertising as a way to spread an addiction? Look at this grocery store. Now, all the real food is in the back of the grocery store, right? Because if you pass enough choices, you will stop.

So if you've ever seen somebody going through the grocery store, you know they're just going through, I'm just going to get eggs. I'm just going to get eggs. I'm just going to get eggs. But then they say, oh, new, extra crunchy.

Wow. I'm going to try this. Put it in their cart. And it's like, jalapeno, caramel, salted chocolate.

I got to try this one too. And then they turn around and they walk out of the store because they've completely forgotten about the eggs. Right? Right?

We're going to see how that happens. So this is a statistic actually out of a Coca-Cola report that Michael Moss worked into his book, Sugar, Fat, Salt. 60% of store purchases are unplanned. So that means that they are provoked by the grocery store by seeing all of these products, hundreds of thousands of products, that are actually triggering dopamine.

You hear these urgent announcements over the intercom. It's noisy. There are tastes. It's a very, very deliberately intense craving environment.

Nothing left to chance. And it works. 60% of store purchases are unplanned. Half of what Americans are eating they did not plan to eat.

We have vending machines everywhere. We have fast food on the road. This is a particularly insidious thing, these fast food or these processed food outlets at grocery stores. Because who is driving the most?

Teenagers. They get their license. They want to go to the, just hit the road. And so the teenagers are the kids, are the people who are buying gas.

And then they're just pulled into the grocery store. So again, trying to get to the youngest possible. Why the youngest possible? Because their neurons are still developing.

They're very easy to teach those young neurons. Very easy to create a very deep impression. And then workplaces. I remember when I started out in the corporate world in 1978, nobody would ever eat in a meeting.

Oh, you were just. That was just so wussy. You could have coffee. It could be black.

It could have cream and sugar in it. You could not have tea. And you could not have water. And you would never, anybody who brought food into a meeting, maybe they wouldn't be fired, but that would be the end of their career.

And now, now you can't have a meeting unless you promise goodies. You go downstairs and get the fancy coffees, take everybody's order, and then you have to have all these sweets, etc., in the meeting. It's very ironic. I remember talking to a business owner.

She was so proud of the fact that she supplied snacks to her employees. And I'm just like, but can you connect that to the health problems that they have? It was a hard one. It was a hard sell.

And of course, the availability in schools, because that's where actually that food pyramid really has an impact. Because the schools are, behold, if you're getting any kind of federal assistance, then you have to follow the federal guidelines. And that's where they really run into trouble. Very sad.

Now, this is a very interesting slide. Here we are, we're on Hong Kong University campus. So this is increasingly an international problem. And you see these people lined up for coffee.

It is raining, and they are not going anywhere. Because this slide illustrates an aspect of fluid addiction that I don't think most people think about. The food addiction, having food addiction is like having a sociopathic narcissist living inside your head. And it works like this.

So let's look at this person right here in the middle. This woman, she's gazing out at us. You can imagine what she's thinking. Oh, I need to be studying.

Oh, I wish I could look at my notes before the test. Oh, I really need to go to the library. But she is stuck in that line. She's got this voice going on in her head.

So she's saying, oh, I really want to go study. And the narcissistic caffeine addict says, no, we're not going to go study. We are going to stand here in the rain and get a coffee. Then she says, oh, I really need to be looking at my notes.

She says, no, I'm the coffee addiction, and I run this brain. So we're not going anywhere. So they're just stuck there in that line. Coffee addiction is very, very strong.

So in my doctoral research, I actually validated the diagnostic criteria for alcoholism for overeating. It fit perfectly. It was a small sample. We got statistical validity right out of the box.

It was an amazing study. So I said, if you're engaged in this particular addictive behavior, what foods are you using? The food that came up most often was cookies. But right underneath that was coffee with sugar and cream.

Black coffee was way down at the bottom of the list. But a combination addiction is much more powerful. And almost all processed food is sold in combinations. So this illustrates that this problem is now international.

There's another very, very interesting similarity to cigarettes, which is that the items are sold in packs. So cigarettes had 12 cigarettes in a pack. So does have 12 cigarettes had 20 sodas have 12. And the pricing is very, very cheap.

So you have you can get sodas for like 20 cents a can in this kind of a paradigm. But you see the pricing structure, the packaging structure is all about making sure that you have enough available to develop a very deep addiction. So your cigarettes were right here in your pocket. The cokes are right there in the fridge and there are a lot of them.

So you just get into the habit of using them frequently. Now, this whole affordability thing is also very insidious because you know that if you're driving home and you don't have anything made at home, the allure of a dollar meal is just very powerful. But what is what's really going on there is the industry is starting off a whole evening of cravings. So this is a technique called kindling, where you just get the addictive parts of the brain fired up so that they will overrun the frontal lobe and the person will just go home and binge in front of the TV for the evening.

Now, here we get into the substances. This is very, very important to know. The more different substances a person is using, the harder it is to put the addiction into remission. If you have an alcoholic who's only drinking alcohol, which is very rare, that person has a chance.

But if the alcoholic is also using cocaine and smoking cigarettes and smoking marijuana, throwing in a little heroin now and then, that person is going to be very prone to relapse. Very hard to treat. So you see the food industry taking advantage of this. A typical fast food meal will have sugar in it, which activates the dopamine pathway.

Same pathway as dope. Flour activates the serotonin pathway. Gluten activates the opiate pathway. So gluten has a substance in it called gluteomorphine.

Not a big problem. Shouldn't be a big problem. Shouldn't be a big problem. But when you grind the flour, you concentrate that morphine.

And in the United States, there was a hybridization program in the 1940s that resulted in a gluten level of 70 percent versus Europe, where it's maybe 30 percent. So our wheat is highly addictive. Excessive salt also activates the opiate pathways. Really great study was done by Mark Gold, who's the past president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine.

So these are the addiction doctors. He noticed in his morphine addiction clinic that the addicts would come in, they would get their tray of food, they would open the salt shaker and pour the salt onto the food. And he said, ah, there must be something about excessive salt that it can replace morphine addiction. And indeed, it activates the opiate pathways, just like morphine does.

Dairy has four different kinds of opiates in it. It is designed to put a baby calf to sleep. It's designed for that baby calf to feed and then go to sleep to absorb nutrients. You notice all babies, all breast milk of every mammal puts that baby to sleep.

It's designed to do that. It has natural morphine in it to put the baby to sleep so the baby will absorb the nutrients. It puts us to sleep. It's a it's a it's an opiate process.

Fats actually activate the same pathway as marijuana. And the pathway is called the endocannabinoid pathway after marijuana. Great study, a study in a researcher in Philadelphia took a group of women, gave them a high fat diet and then took it took it off. She wanted to evoke to see what to see if there would be a withdrawal syndrome.

And there was the women became irritable. Same withdrawal syndrome as from marijuana. Caffeine activates the dopamine pathway. And then we have we don't even know what the food additives are.

But we know that the tobacco companies concentrated nicotine and put it back into cigarettes. I suspect that the food industry is putting additives, addictive additives in the food. So how could it be an epidemic? A food addiction?

Well, when the tobacco industry came in to the food industry, all the food executives said, you know, the snack industry is not really a big deal because people get filled up at their meals and they're not hungry. And the tobacco industry says, oh, we will take care of that. If hunger doesn't sell snacks, we can create desire. So there you see the shift from eating to addiction.

They were not selling food. They were selling desire. And that is the shift from eating to food addiction. How did they do this?

What did they do exactly? Well, they really jacked up the sugar. There was a consultant named Howie Moskowitz. Harvard trained PhD in the psychology of marketing.

And how he was a big data guy. So he would get thousands of people. He would give them hundreds of products. They would taste them and tell him, oh, no, this one is too sugary.

So he would load up the sugar right to that point. Maximize sugar. Sugar is a highly addictive substance. And once one of the processed food companies had done this to their products, maxed out the sugar, they all had to do it.

So he just he had this great career going from one product to the next, to the next reformulating to maximize sugar. At the same time, two good people, Adam Drunowski at University of Washington, he figured out that you could put as much fat in a product as you wanted. And nobody would ever object. And then the Monell Institute in Philadelphia figured out that you could teach children to be salt addicted.

So babies are born with a preference for sugar, but they're not born with a preference for salt. But if you put enough salt in their food frequently enough, like think Lunchables, you can teach them to have salt addiction. And the food industry did it. So the thing that you have to know about processed foods is that when they have been processed, they're horrible.

They've lost their color. They've lost their taste. They've lost their texture. Nobody would ever touch a tomato, a processed tomato.

But when you put sugar, fat, salt in them, they have lots of flavor and texture. So for these executives, you put these highly addictive substances in. Everybody likes it. That's a no brainer.

You kind of get this image of processed foods being like a boat holding sugar, flour, fat, salt, dairy, just just a container for these addictive substances. So did this work? Oh, my goodness. It works so well.

These are the most addictive foods. These are the foods that change in consumption during the years of the rise of obesity. So I deliberately chose 1970 to 1997. And I had to go digging into the USDA statistics to pull these numbers together.

These are not routinely published. You don't see these numbers. It's really hard to read. Yeah.

Yeah, I can. So the blue is 1970 and the orange is 1997. The first pair of bars are corn and wheat flour, annual per capita consumption. The next one is caloric sweeteners.

The next one is frozen potatoes. And the last one is high fat dairy. So I have one more slide that will really illustrate this. The next slide will really illustrate what happened.

So how addictive are these substances? There's research showing that it only takes seven days of a 30 percent sugar solution to begin to alter neuron firing in a rat's brain. And very interestingly, it starts in the locomotion center. So the addiction spreads through the brain.

It gets into the centers that it needs. So clearly think back to that slide of the people standing in the rain to get their coffee. The addiction has control of the locomotion center. So the addiction is saying, no, you're just going to stand here.

You're just going to stand here. Yeah, now the line has moved. You can move. But that is the the addiction driving that locomotion.

It only takes seven days for sugar to start altering neuron firing. So this is now the locomotion center has more activity. It's like getting ready to go get the sugar. Rats will chew sugar over cocaine.

They will chew sugar over heroin. And we do see in a really great study. So this researcher injected sugar and then cocaine into rats noses. It doesn't sound very nice.

The sugar gets to the dopamine pathways faster and activates a bigger response than cocaine. OK. Fried potatoes are like cigarettes. They have this highly altered by high heat starch in the middle.

They've been dipped in salt, sugar and fat. And they are just they're just like packs of cigarettes, except you can eat them a lot faster than you can smoke. And then Gary, as I said, dairy contains four natural opiates. So how does this come out?

By 1997, Americans are eating a pound per person per day of sugars, flowers, french fries and high fat dairy. A pound per person per day of these highly addictive substances in the space of like just 10 years after the tobacco company moves in. So that's a 37 percent increase. Neuro marketing works tragically well.

And then like tobacco, we have this whole constellation of consequences. Because these are highly destructive substances, as well as being highly addictive. So this is the this is the number to to remember. A pound per person per day.

So just if you can only remember one thing from this entire presentation, that's it. A pound. On average. Men, women and children.

Per day. And Americans eat about twice the number of calories they need. This is the other half. This is that the half that they don't need.

So how does this impact the brain? As I said, that uses Pavlovian conditioning to teach neurons to fire. You can teach a cell to fire. And this has taught the limbic system to crave.

There's a pathway called the corticotropin releasing factor pathway, which controls stress. It's taught the frontal lobe to crash. Just. Move out of the way, and it has taught mirror neurons to copy addictive use.

So let's see how this all comes together. The limbic system is supposed to make you feel good. It is dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, opiates, endocannabinoids. It's the part of the brain that gives you a feeling of pleasure and satisfaction.

It is also reward and it is also cravings. And when the cravings get ramped up high enough, that is also the source of obsession and eventually the addiction. I am doing something I don't want to be doing. I'm doing something that hurts me.

That's what an addiction is. Now, the corticotropin releasing factor pathway, it starts out being worry, chronic anxiety, stress, fear, and it ramps up into panic. So we have an epidemic of panic disorders in this country and stress eating that's called stress eating. I think it's we're going to we're going to get another look at that.

The frontal lobe. Now, this is where you just really have to take a deep breath. Because what you're going to see is epidemics of problems in the frontal lobe. And we're going to see why.

So just think attention deficit. Why? So just think attention deficit. Learning difficulties.

Trouble with decision making. Memory loss. Poor impulse control. Lack of satiation and lack of emotional processing.

And you go to any elementary school teacher and she's got a classroom full of people, kids with these problems. A lack of willpower. That's the big explanation for why people can't stop eating. Lack of willpower.

Mirror neurons do one thing and one thing only. It's a survival mechanism. It is the strongest mechanism in the brain. And it just, it's a survival mechanism, which what, what does it do?

It says when your tribe is running, you run. You see mirror neurons are not connected to frontal lobe. It doesn't say your tribe is running. Stop and think about it.

No, it says your tribe is running. Run. There's, it goes directly to the locomotion center and you're running. You don't know why you're running, but everybody else is running.

You're running. Hide when the tribe hides, look for food when the tribe is looking, eat what the tribe eats. So the food industry just hijacks this whole part of the brain and says, eat the processed foods that everybody else is eating. So when you see ads for television on television for processed foods, what do they typically show?

They show people sitting on a sofa watching TV. They want the mirror neurons in those people's brains to like, oh yes, that's what we're doing. We're doing what everybody else is doing. So we're okay.

The tribe is running. We're running. Everybody else is eating this. We're eating this.

Okay. We're good. We're safe. Very, very powerful mechanism.

So let's just review. So food neuro stimulation is, it's about availability everywhere, advertising, there's queuing, there's triggering associated. You remove the price and availability barriers and you focus on children everywhere around us. This food stimulation is going on.

Now a normal brain has a breaking system. So if you get food stimulation that activates the limbic system, the limbic system says, oh, that looks really good. It goes over and it checks it out with a frontal lobe and the frontal lobe says, oh, we just ate. We're not hungry.

Besides your doctor said not to eat that. So no thanks. There's a great big no thanks. And the person just doesn't eat it.

But over time, when you get enough food stimulation, the limbic system starts to heat up and it pulls the blood supply in the brain to itself. So when I gave that analogy of the kind of the narcissist in the brain, I'm not kidding that limbic system is pulling the blood supply from the rest of the brain. Now the frontal lobe, you'll recall it's the neo cortex. It's the new part of the brain.

It doesn't have dibs on the blood supply. The blood supply is hardwired to go to the survival parts of the brain. And the limbic system, the food seeking limbic system is particularly hardwired. So now with this really hyped up limbic system, you get food stimulation into the limbic system and says, wow, that looks really good.

And then it turns around to the frontal lobe and the frontal lobe is like. Frontal lobe doesn't have a voice anymore. There's no breaking system in that brain. Now, after a while, the stress system in the brain says, wow, something is really wrong and this is where stress comes from.

Are you all you hear everybody say, oh, I'm so stressed. Well, maybe it's because you are producing stress neurotransmitters in your brain. So Cotacotropin releasing factor, those stress neurotransmitters go to the adrenal glands and they trigger the release of adrenaline and cortisol. But the irony of this is it's it's stress also activates cravings.

So now you're in this tight loop, a craving, a stress response, a craving, a stress response, and then it is aggravated. I mean, the frontal lobe doesn't have a chance now aggravated by dieting because dieting says, oh, and now there's not enough food. Okay. Well, now we really got to look for food and that aggravates the limbic system profoundly.

So how does this come up with the mirror neurons? Well, you get this food, neuro stimulation, the mirror neurons are saying, oh, everybody's eating processed foods. Well, limbic system, go get processed foods. So that limbic system is just under this bombardment, not just from the food neuro stimulation, but from other parts of the brain to crave, crave, crave, crave, crave.

That's what's going on in the brain of somebody who cannot start, stop eating. I call this the Bermuda triangle of food addiction, but it's the same triangle for any addiction and it's why the person's behavior seems so irrational. Choice is in the frontal lobe. Frontal lobe has gone offline.

People are not choosing to overeat processed foods. They're being driven to it by their limbic systems. Does that make sense? Does that explain a lot of eating behavior?

Like, why, why did I eat that? Well, because your frontal lobe went offline. That's why. So this terrible thing called thought fusion sets in.

It's a brilliant piece of research. I don't know how this guy thought to look for this, but I'm so glad he did. Thought fusion is when you cannot have a food thought without a stress thought. Now in the brain of a food addict, it sounds like this.

Like this. Well, I'd like to just eat one. I'm just going to eat one. I'm just going to eat one, but I'm not really that hungry, but oh my God, I'm really hungry.

So I'm just going to eat one. Oh my, I can't believe I just ate the whole thing. And I didn't really, I have to go to the grocery store and I have to buy, I'll get two. I'll replace this one and I'll put the other one in the laundry room.

No, I'll get three. I'll put the, and then I'll put two and then, oh gosh, I hope nobody sees me. And oh, I hate myself. That is what's going on in the brain of a food addict all day long.

So when you see people who are, they're just like, stop eating, stop eating. They cannot stop eating. Maybe they go to a, to a professional and the professional says eat clean, but that eat clean goes right into that frontal lobe that's not working. So going to a practitioner and saying, you know, what should I do?

And the practitioner says, oh, let's talk about your macros and let's talk about your ratios and they're just like, wow, I really saw that good pastry place on the way in here and I think I'm going to stop there before I leave. And, and the practitioner doesn't understand why they come back the next week and they haven't started. They, they can't get there. Their brains are so full of craving thoughts.

Their brains are so full of craving thoughts. They cannot get even to how to start. Food addicts need to learn a lot. If you've been immersed in processed foods, you need to completely revamp your food, your relationships, your activities, your thoughts.

You have to just do a lot, a lot. You have to be in a new body. But learning function has crashed. So this is exactly why the United States and increasingly other countries are in such dire straits.

People cannot stop. They cannot learn to, to change their food habits. So what are we going to do? We're going to flip the mirror neurons.

So if Robert Mueller can flip witnesses, we can flip mirror neurons. Absolutely. You've got to get the mirror neurons to stop focusing on what the neuro marketers are showing them and start focusing on clean eating people. And they are hard to find, these clean eating people.

But if you can do it, if you can get those mirror neurons to focus on clean eating people for long enough, when neurostimulation comes along, this whole brand new message comes into the brain and controls behavior. And the message is, are you kidding? My tribe doesn't eat that. And that is where the safety comes.

That is where you can change behavior. And that is what I discovered last year. And that is what I discovered last year. After 23 years of educating, educating, educating and educating, and really not getting anywhere, I introduced Zoom.

How many people know what Zoom is? Zoom is a video chat platform where you can see other people eye to eye, whether they're in Singapore or Sydney or anywhere. And that turned the corner. Now, this is tricky.

So I offer my members, I created a community, an online community, and I charge a little bit per month. And it works like incredibly. There are issues around training these members that they really do have to get to the video chats in order to stop this overeating. But they're, we're working on that.

We're working on videos for them. Because mirror neurons are very fickle. Remember, they just do one thing. They copy the people they see.

So they're going to copy the last people they see if they are, they're either creating disease or overriding disease, depending entirely on who they are around. That's just the bottom line. So if they are around people who are not eating processed foods, who are really calm, energetic, optimistic, healthy, not in needs of meds, they're learning and growing people, then mirror neurons are actively right in there creating health. But if they are around people who are raving about processed foods all the time and helplessly eating and they're sick and they're depressed and they're stuck, then mirror neurons are creating disease.

You can take exactly the same person, you can change the people around that person, and they will change. Easily. So I saw this a year ago, January, we said, oh, we'll do a whole week of Zoom. We'll have seven days of Zoom.

We'll have Zoom open. We have a person in Australia and we had East Coast, West Coast. We'll just have Zoom open 24 hours a day. So people would come in there in the morning and they would say, you know, Joan, today I don't think I'm going to be able to start today because this is really scary to me because, you know, processed foods have been my best friend since I was really little.

So I probably am not going to start the food today. And I would say, because I know stress is a big trigger, I would say that is okay. You do not have to start today. Why don't you just hang out and listen, listen to people around the world and listen to what they're doing.

And that person that night came into like the final checkout and said, well, I ate clean today. I'm like, you did what? You did what? What did you do?

What did you say? I just couldn't believe it. But now I know what happened to her. Her mirror neurons said, oh, everybody's going to make a clean lunch.

We're going to make a clean lunch too. It was that easy. People who could not start their first meal were just like, okay, I'm going to go make a clean meal now. No, it can't be that easy.

But it was that easy. And now we know that you can directly replace a craving with a meeting. So we space four meetings a day through the day. People only have to hang on for a couple of hours till they can get to a meeting.

And we know these mirror neurons are very happily saying, oh, we're in our tribe. Well, let's activate some dopamine because we feel so happy. Look, everybody's happy. All right, they're happy.

We're going to be happy too. Dopamine, turn on. It directly replaces a dopamine rush from eating processed foods. It's the most amazing thing.

And it's so cool. So, 23 years. 23 years it took me. So you flip mirror neurons with a healthy tribe.

Research shows that you need more than five people. If they are people that we know well, we are more likely to copy them. If they're doing something we've done a lot of, like I have my members come and bring their crocheting and knitting, like I just want those mirror neurons to identify, then the mirror neurons are more likely to copy. And if food is involved, they're more likely to copy, faithfully.

So these are things that we do. We have typically more than five people in a meeting and it just works incredibly well. People who have never had control, because remember it starts in toddlerhood. So we have one 61-year-old woman who has never had control over food.

She was born with deformed hips. Her parents were in the ice cream business. And to console her, they just gave her all the ice cream she wanted. So that by the time she was in sixth grade, she was already 160 pounds.

She has control over food today. It took her a long time. She lives with an abusive person. It took her a long time, but she has control of her food today.

So this really explains why people cannot start and why they cannot succeed at weight loss. They never think, oh, well, it depends on who I'm around. I'll go find some healthy people. No, they just take it upon themselves.

Okay, I'm starting a diet today. I'm so excited. And it's why you can sell millions and millions of diet books, even though we know they don't work. They could never possibly have worked.

Bariatric surgery cannot work. And the research is clear. Bariatric surgery patients just regain the weight slowly, but they do. But it explains why nothing has ever worked.

So using the nicotine comparison, just think overeating has been explained. Oh, it's an emotional eating. Oh, it's an eating disorder. Oh, there are childhood issues involved, which is true.

Children who are being traumatized will reach out for processed foods more often. Oh, those people are just lazy. Oh, let's just make the stomach smaller. That'll take care of that.

Now, if you applied those concepts to smoking, you would get, oh, they're just an emotional smoker. Has anyone ever heard that term, emotional smoker? No, but why do we think that she's an emotional eater? Oh, they just have a breathing disorder.

It's just something funny about their breathing. No, and we don't have eating disorders either. We have addiction. It's something different.

Oh, they're smoking because of trauma. No, we know they're smoking because they have an addiction. Oh, they just need to lose the weight, and then the smoking will take care of itself. So that's the one where, oh, if they just lose the weight, then the eating disorder will—no.

It's an addiction. Well, let's just make the trachea smaller, and then they won't be able to breathe in that smoke, right? It's an addiction. It's an addiction.

So use the shift to understand overeating is not lack of willpower. It's not gluttony. They haven't hit a bottom. It's not about exercise, and it's not about self-sabotage.

It is about having the wrong diagnosis. Overeating is not a diagnosis, and obesity is now a diagnosis, but it's like saying, oh, you know, you have lung cancer, but never ever addressing the smoking. They have an addiction. Dieting is not a treatment for an addiction.

And here's the key thing. If you're going to activate those mirror neurons, if you're going to get people to really identify with that tribe, they need hours and hours. They need the intensive outpatient model. The intensive outpatient model is where the person goes to the hospital all day long and then goes home at night.

That is the level of severity that we're talking about here. They do have cognitive impairments. They really can't learn, but they can copy, and they have these kidnapped mirror neurons. So once you know that that's what's causing overeating, then you know not to ever, ever, ever blame the client.

Don't blame the client. Don't blame the friend. Don't blame the family member. They have been bombarded by these Pavlovian messages for their whole lives, and it's not within their control, and they've been given the wrong treatment for all this time.

So in this culture where the neuromarketers have full sway, they can hit people with messages all day long, everybody is going to have to make a choice. It's either going to be the neuromarketers reaching into that brain, crave, buy, stress, or it's going to be wonderful people reaching into that brain, the mirror neurons, and saying, you know, have a great life, protect your brain, restore your brain. It's really either or if you're out in that culture. How to fight like a neuromarketer.

Find a band of health warriors. Get set up at Zoom. Spend hours per day with them, and be astonished at how much your behavior can change. Keep it up for a lifetime, because as soon as you quit hanging around with healthy people and go back to hanging around with unhealthy people, mirror neurons will kick right in, and you'll be doing unhealthy things.

So for practitioners, if there are any practitioners, remember, Robert said diet is only 18% or genetics. He said genetics. Diet is only 20% of recovery. Get those online support groups set up.

I know that relapse is normal, because you're still going to be out in that culture being bombarded by used messages. Give new hope to people who have failed, and get a new revenue source for your practice. That's how you get to be a winner in this shift. So thank you.

So we'll have time. Is it working? Yeah. Can you hear?

Okay. So we'll have time for questions and answers. Any questions? Raise your hand.

I'll try and get somebody first, and... Just wait for the mic. Not you, but anybody who has a question. Thank you.

Hi, Joan. That was an amazing talk. Didn't everybody enjoy it? That's great.

So really, really insightful. I was wondering what you noticed about mirror neurons. If... I totally, totally believe in that.

That is definitely when you're around a toxic environment, you can feel how it affects you. Do you know if there is any way, thing that you could practice to make your... To take control of your mirror neurons. So if you...

Not all of us can just up and go and leave our home or wherever we work. You have to be able to cope being around toxic people. Is there a method that you have that you can train yourself, brain exercises or something, to try to not let your mirror neurons take over and kind of not allow yourself to do what you want and follow the health quest crew? So...

Yeah. You're asking the most important question. How do you work this? How do you get enough healthy exposure for your mirror neurons in a culture that is eating a pound per person per day of toxic foods?

So we train our people to really think about the hours when we're live. Could they schedule some not very engaging work for that hour so that they could put their earbuds in in their workplace? When they do that, of course, they're conditioning that space. Oh, this is where our tribe meets.

And so every time they walk into their workspace, oh yeah, this is where our tribe is. And they don't need that stuff. So you're conditioning. We have people who just wait and they take their lunch break at a meeting time.

And they will leave their building. They'll go for a walk. So they're compounding. Oh, I'm walking with my tribe.

And walking is something that decreases cravings. Then we have another meeting when they get off work. So I got to get off work. I got to go because I'm going to be sitting in my car with Zoom on my cell phone driving home.

Now, I'm not going to be looking at the screen, but I'm going to be listening. Like I'm driving home with my tribe. And then we have one more meeting at the end of the day. So yeah, that's the way that we have figured out so far to do this.

Maybe they could even print off a screenshot. Oh my goodness, what a good idea. And keep it with them because that's what I do. I have photos and reminders of positive things.

Even if I have to spend time with people who I feel are a bit toxic or don't understand my vibe or want to put me down, you need kind of visual reminders of, no, this is not it. This is not forever. You're going to move out of this room soon because time flows. So forward thinking.

That's a really good idea, Fiona. Thank you. Cool. Great.

Yeah. I kind of remember a reading about the transition of the tobacco industry into the food. And I think a lot of it had to do with the legal issues that the tobacco industry ran into and regulations and lawsuits. And when they realized that they're losing the war, they began searching for some other big markets.

Do you think that phenomenon can happen in the food industry where there is enough pushback with all these chronic issues that somehow because of lawsuits or because of regulation or because of epidemic, they'll start cutting back on... It's a really good question. Here's what I think really happened. So these people, obviously, they have no sense of morals.

There's a great quote in one of the tobacco books by a tobacco executive. And he says, I would rather have a shorter life with the pleasure of a cigarette than a longer life without the pleasure of a cigarette. That is an addict. That is a person who cannot see beyond the addiction to the pleasure that life might otherwise bring.

So when you think about that mentality, here's what I think really happened. They just said, oh, well, people are going to stop smoking. But there was already evidence at that time for the addictive properties of particularly salt and sugar. So they already knew they had an addictive substance.

And they said, what do people do when they get off cigarettes? They overeat. So let's go into that market. I think it was just a business decision.

And I've had the same thought. Oh, they got into trouble with the courts. Finally, false advertising on the health benefits of low tar cigarettes is what finally got them into trouble and started bringing in these huge settlements. Huge settlements.

I mean, they have already made so much money. So would they have continued on with tobacco? They did continue on with tobacco. So as the market dried up in the United States, they turned to the rest of the world.

And the State Department helped them, like threatening Thailand. So Thailand stood firm. No, you're not going to advertise to our teenagers. No, you're not coming in this country.

And the State Department said, OK, well, if you don't let them in, we'll invade you or something like that. So the State Department was right in there with the tobacco industry, spreading cigarettes around the rest of the world. So we think, oh, yeah, the US market dried up. The rest of the world opened up.

They've followed the same pattern with processed foods. So I just think these guys are like, OK, we're addiction mongers. This is our business model. What are what other what other industries could what other markets could we all?

Processed foods, toddlers, we can market to toddlers finally. And they just went for it. It happened so fast. Yeah.

It was so enlightening to see Michelle Obama plant gardens for her kids. And then you compare that to the current administration serving fast food in their beautiful dining room in the White House. Yeah. Well, Michelle Obama was she was reigned in, you know, her whole let's move deal.

She really wanted to go after processed foods. And the Democratic Party said, no, no, because processed foods is 13 times bigger than tobacco. And tobacco, you've got to remember, tobacco started its downward slide in 1964 when the surgeon general said tobacco causes cancer. There was enough evidence.

1964, 45 years later, we got the federal legislation. So the reason for that is because there were four tobacco states with eight senators. And they said, if you vote against tobacco subsidies, we will not vote for tobacco. We will not vote for anything.

And so they would just it took years to eliminate the tobacco subsidies. Think of how many states grow corn, wheat and dairy and sugar. So we're not going to ever get any help from the federal government on this. No.

But I do think this will be grassroots meetings just like this. The symposium in Pittsburgh some months ago where they were bringing together the school nurses and giving presentations about what was it was all hands on deck for the health of our children. It's a really interesting question. Where's the battleground going to be for processed foods?

So with tobacco, it was restaurants. It started out in restaurants and airplanes. Those were the earliest places where you had no smoking zones. And then, you know, it took 50 years to get to the rest of public spaces.

Where's the battleground going to be for processed foods? Is it going to be elementary schools or hospitals? All right. Those are my two bets.

Go ahead. One question and one comment. When you talked about the tribe, I thought of weight watchers who have the idea of having the tribe, but yet again, they're owned by, is it Heinz that owns them? So it was at one time.

I think she shares in it, but either way, it's a way for them to sell their own products and an excellent marketing way. My question or request for your comment is a lot of the processed food has been sold around pleasure and desire, but I remember in college, you know, drinking Mountain Dew in the morning for productivity. So when I saw that picture of the students standing outside Starbucks, they at least reconnected certain processed food with productivity. We didn't think we are one of those people addicted because we are hooked on dopamine.

We thought this is what makes us productive in what it is that we do. But you know, Mountain Dew has the highest level of caffeine of any of the sodas. I mean, did you know that? And to go back to your observation about weight watchers, so I know somebody who knows somebody who knows the head of Heinz when Heinz bought weight watchers.

So this comment came back to me in that very short chain, which is the president of the CEO of Heinz when he bought weight watchers. His comment was, this is the best marketing decision I have ever made. And if you go to a Weight Watchers meeting, they're talking about the next, you know, candy bar that they're bringing out. Yeah, it was.

It's massive. And the deception is it takes a long time to get your brain first around the deception around the processed foods and then the deception that somehow weight loss would be the answer for this horrible addiction. It'd be like, you know, a beer addict coming into a drug counselor and the drug counselor says, you just take that weight off, you'll be okay. No, stop the alcoholism.

The weight will take care of itself. So there's the deception around the processed foods itself. There's the deception around the dieting. The whole dieting industry is just, you know, one big horrible mess.

Yeah. Hi, thank you. This is a topic. Is this on?

Oh, it's a topic dear to my heart. But I'm going to, I don't know if you have any information. I'm going to go away from the processed food idea. Can you link cravings and food addiction to female hormone cycle and the drop in progesterone?

Yeah, yeah. So I did talk mostly about brain chemistry. But every system in the body is made dysfunctional by these foods. They have inflammatory properties.

And remember that they're always kicking up the adrenal glands. So every time that, where'd he go? Wolfram's going to talk about the hypoglycemic cycle. So processed foods create a great surge in blood glucose and then it drops off.

And the adrenal glands pick it up. But adrenal glands are also in charge of regulating hormones. But because low blood glucose is life threatening, the adrenal glands prioritize getting the glucose back up. And so they're basically neglecting hormone regulation.

So every system, you know, the gut biome is now just full of bacteria. They're there to break down processed foods. It's a mess, you know, and then the heart is clogging up because of inflammatory. The brain, you know, all of those frontal lobe functions that are not getting enough blood supply, they all just go offline and people, oh, I mean, just the behavior issues and the mental issues, it's all throughout the body.

Then the immune function is also suppressed. So you get a whole range of chronic infections, including cancer. Sugar feeds cancer. There are cancers that have insulin receptors, which means that, so you think of it this way, sugar for a muscle cell, sugar fuels that cell.

It stores, it gets stored in a fat cell. But in a cancer cell with an insulin receptor, it causes that cell to multiply. So it's a factor in all these epidemics that we have today that we didn't have in the 1950s. These are all processed food driven.

And they're all driven by the processed food is driven by the cravings and obsession. Hold on. Hold on. Here we go.

I was just saying, with all your knowledge, you're probably very optimistic about the health care rising costs in America. It's so bad out there, but, you know, organizations like this really give me a lot of hope. They do. I do think that, you know, Malcolm Gladwell's book, The Tipping Point, there will be a tipping point.

And I don't, as I said, I don't know where it's going to start. I don't know whether it's going to start in the hospitals because like you see San Francisco, they have a no beverage policy, no juice, no sodas in the whole hospital. That's really encouraging. And we do like in Texas, the secretary of agriculture for some reason had control over the vending machines in the elementary schools.

And she she went to the mat for that and got the vending machines out of the elementary schools. I don't know where it's going to happen, but I know it's going to happen. We have people like Rob Lustig and Wolfram who are really out there spreading the word about processed foods and it'll happen. Now in tobacco, interestingly enough, it happened with local officials.

So the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation just dedicated like $500 million sometime in the 1980s to educating local officials. They didn't try to unblock the federal or the state. They went with the local, the county commissioners and the town. And the town mayors, they went to those conferences and educated those people.

And those people went back and pushed for no smoking zones. Yeah, I think that's how it's going to come down here too. Okay, one last round of applause.