BRAIN POISON: How 'Addiction Engineers' Went From Big Tobacco to Big Food
Talk about leaving a bad taste in your mouth...
Remember when cigarettes were safe and effective?
Well, if these large companies went to such great lengths to convince the public of their products, just imagine how hard they worked to hook the public on those products.
For the longest time, smoking cigs was fun, cool, and harmless. If anything, it improved your health! And even as new research indicated problems, that didn’t stop the big execs and tinkering scientists from making the most addictive product possible.
Just consider the numerous ways Big Tobacco continues to hijack the brains of millions of people across the globe…
Nicotine Manipulation - High-nicotine tobacco strains (like Latakia) are blended, with additional nicotine often added. Not to mention, the delivery mechanism adjustments that allow for maximum absorption via the burn rate and smoke composition.
Added Ammonia - These compounds increase the pH level but also increase nicotine exposure and absorption.
Modified Filters - Filtered cigs are considered less harmful, but they actually show no real difference from unfiltered in triggering addiction, and actually taste better, which increases consumption.
Menthol - Menthol helps to cool the smoke, decreasing irritation for a smoother more desirable (and addictive) experience.
Cigarette Wrappings - The porous paper makes it easier to inhale, while tobacco additives like potassium nitrate may increase the efficiency of nicotine delivery through an ‘even burn.’
Chemical Additives - Speaking of additives, many chemicals like citric acid, sugar, and artificial flavorings can control the burn rate which may optimize nicotine exposure and absorption. The resulting rise of acetaldehyde in tobacco smoke may be particularly addicting.
Throw in flavors like vanilla and cocoa, and it’s definitely hard for some people to quit!
Nicotine ‘Boosters’ - Nicotine salts are a nice little tech that can really addict the unwitting smoker. They’re more concentrated, faster absorbed, faster metabolized, smoother, and more pleasurable. What can go wrong?
Aerosol Modifications - Mad chemists are hard at work tweaking the size and composition of smoke particles. In doing this, they can increase absorption through the lungs via smaller particles.
Carbon and Carbon Monoxide - The combustion process is manipulated regularly by addiction engineers. They can boost carbon monoxide in smoke which can greatly boost the addictive potential.
So clearly, Big Tobacco knows exactly what it’s doing, and if they’re telling you they’re doing something simply to improve the ‘smoking experience’ that’s code for you’re gonna become more addicted and enjoy it, bitch.
The problem is, many of these brain-hacking addiction engineers have also put their unique skill sets to work for another life-harming industry, Big Food.
It doesn’t take one long to look around and realize we’ve got a problem, especially in the United States. Go out to a Walmart and you’ll see all kinds of interesting sights. People are unhealthy, they’re eating literal poison, and they’re taking all kinds of pharmaceutical products to ‘treat’ the consequences of that poison.
Sure, some people are lucky and some people have unexpected health events and some people struggle immensely to maintain a healthy baseline even with good practices. Hell, we all get older and things happen - that’s life.
But none of that explains the epidemic we see in our modern societies. While some countries are starving just for drinking water and food, we have a plethora of it, and the options are killing us.
Again, look back at the evolution of cigarettes.
Whether it’s traditional cigs long-touted as harmless or the new, trendy nicotine-loaded E-cigarettes that target teens in particular, Big Tobacco shows no honest signs of slowing the gravy train.
Even today, when most people acknowledge that cigs are bad but continue to smoke, Big Tobacco is raking in revenue…
But what about food?
While people generally know to control sugar and salt intake, what about those other too-many-syllable compounds that are leading to everything from cancer to ADHD?
Can you say Azodicarbonamide?
How about butylated hydroxyanisole?
Does the general public realize just how dangerous some ingredients are, and just how carefully these ‘foods’ are engineered to ensure drug-like addiction?
While substances like nicotine, alcohol, or marijuana are said to be the main ‘gateway drugs,’ what about sugar? What about salt? What about caffeine?
How often do you hear people say (half-joking), ‘Don’t talk to me till I’ve had my coffee’?
By and large, many people don’t seem to recognize or understand just how powerful the engineered foods we ingest truly are. In many cases, they act on the reward pathways in our brain just as successfully as many of the ‘hardcore’ drugs we’re told to avoid.
While it may come as somewhat of a surprise to some, and a shock to the uninformed, is it really all that groundbreaking when you simply consider the ingredients in many foods?
Even foods that aren’t typical ‘junk foods’ have fallen victim to profit-driven addiction engineering.
Whether it’s high-fructose corn syrup in seemingly everything, emulsifiers and stabilizers for that perfect texture, the interplay of salt, sugar, and fat to release dopamine and opioids, refined carbs for blood-sugar cravings, jacked-up portions for extra temptation, inflammatory seed oils for dressing and snacks, or any other of the countless brain-body manipulations, it’s all being done, and it’s all being done, our health be damned.
No wonder ~20% of teens in the U.S. have fatty liver disease and nearly one in three have prediabetes. The mind-body effects cannot be denied, with ~20% of those aged 3-17 in the United States having a mental, emotional, developmental, or behavioral disorder.
And it looks like the powers-that-be have no intention of letting that stop…
The scary thing is, we know where this came from.
Again, Big Tobacco addiction engineers didn’t just disappear, they simply changed clothes. While many continue to successfully fill our meat suits with toxins through smokables, many are now slinging that poison through our edibles.
And who better to know than a former consultant to food and pharmaceutical companies, Calley Means, who has dedicated his life to understanding metabolic disease since the abrupt loss of his mother due to cancer?
The power duo, Calley and his younger sister Casey, have been carving their righteous path to food freedom ever since.
And part of that awakening requires a long, hard look at how we got to the chemically compromised populace of today.
Is it any surprise then that around this exact period is when many developed countries - suffused with Frankenfoods - began to see anomalous increases in all kinds of health problems?
The NIH spells it out in plain sight:
“The prevalence of obesity changed relatively little during the 1960s and 1970s, but it increased sharply over the ensuing decades—from 13.4% in 1980 to 34.3% in 2008 among adults and from 5% to 17% among children during the same period. The prevalence of extreme obesity also increased during 1976–1980 and 2007–2008, and approximately 6% of U.S. adults now have a BMI of 40 kg/m2 or higher.
The United States is not alone in experiencing an obesity epidemic. Similar increases in the prevalence of obesity have been reported in developed countries such as England and in countries where obesity was formerly rare. For example, the prevalence in China among preschool-aged children living in urban areas has increased eightfold—from 1.5% in 1989 to 12.6% in 1997.”
So clearly this isn’t just happenstance or the unfortunate outcome of workforce shifts and corporate restructurings. This is an intentional, calculated, profit-driven movement.
We can play patty-cake with these massive conglomerates and their business model of deleterious addiction all we want. The fact is, they know what they’re doing, they don’t care, and when they’re occasionally exposed, they issue some lawyer-mill-generated statement, take ‘steps’ to address the issue, and continue on with more advanced, less detectable means of owning our bodies and brains.
But here’s the good news.
Relatively speaking, this isn’t all that terrible. Because if you think all of this is bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Just wait till we break down the interrelated, and even more disturbing, incest of Big Food and Big Pharma ;)
coming soon to an article near you…
Excellent article on how companies are making smoking and food addictive with chemicals.
Thank you. It is interesting the reference to ammonia and potassium nitrate. The nitrogen ions cause neurotoxic effects. My facial palsy I put down principally to sodium nitrite.
https://baldmichael.substack.com/p/sodium-nitrite-e250-the-poison-in?utm_source=publication-search
Tobacco would not be so much of an issue if it wasn't so poisoned by added chemicals including those on the crop, let alone in processing.
Tobacco's replacement vaping is bound to be a problem.