Healthy Food Choices vs Willful Ignorance by “Engineering of Consent”
Poor quality of life where it matters most.
Here we are at the peak of human achievements, almost at The Jetsons level of lifestyle, yet chronic diseases, like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, alcohol related diseases, arthritis, asthma, stroke, kidney disease, etc., continue to worsen; resulting in poor quality of life, disability, financial strain on the individual as well as on the system, and premature death. And the damnedest thing is that these extremes can be significantly mitigated through lifestyle changes! There are several key factors to being optimally healthy but the number one factor is what we consume.
Exhibit A: Heart Disease
Scientific study clearly shows that diet is the main culprit associated with this number one killer! Science also shows that healthy food choices are the only proven way to prevent it, treat it, and even reverse the disease in many cases; even cases of profound heart disease. The same holds true for many if not most of the chronic diseases that plague human kind today. If the above statement is true on an evidenced based level (evidence based medicine), and it is; that begs the question… Why in the hell aren’t more people eating that way?! I’ve been pondering this conundrum for years now, and the answer is complicated. As you can imagine there’s a multitude of reasons, we choose to eat foods that undermine our health. Many people exclaim that eating healthy doesn’t satisfy, it’s too labor intensive/time consuming to plan, shop, prepare, cook, and cleanup afterwards. They don’t have the utensils or know how to cook. They don’t know what is considered healthy and therefore what to buy. They can’t (won’t) give up certain foods. Some enjoy suboptimal foods so much they report they’d rather enjoy food now and give up a couple of years of life later. And let’s not forget there’s information overload, and confusion.
With all that, the general public is ripe for manipulation by marketing, advertising propaganda and misinformation, and this element is much more prevalent and insidious than realized. Humans, the most intelligent life form on the planet are fully capable of reasoning good vs bad in most instances but remain extremely vulnerable to misinformation, manipulation, and our propensity toward our primitive inclinations, pleasure seeking and pain avoidance. These inherent weaknesses are readily targeted by “the powers that be.” The powers that be are the collective corporate food industry as well as other industries associated with the production of food from start to plate. These might include, fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, fungicide, or GMO production as well.
Psychological Warfare in the food industry.
Let’s look at and consider decades of brainwashing by these industries whose interests lie with profits and shareholders, not public health, and how this is achieved. In the book (Twilight of American Sanity) psychiatrist Alan Francis, M.D., writes about “psychological weapons”, used in public relations, marketing, promotion and advertising utilized to influence our decision-making process in purchasing products. He states that advertising is applied psychology designed to bypass our reasoning processes, stimulating our unconscious amygdalar emotions basically triggering primitive wants and perceived needs. He mentions Bernays, who is considered the father of “Public Relations”, a term Bernays’s invented because it sounded more genteel than its original moniker; Propaganda. The Food Industry has perpetuated propaganda from the likes of Bernays “engineering of consent” Edward Bernays and the engineering of Consent , and John Watson’s Behaviorism in Advertising, to manipulate the public at large by means of “public-relations”, marketing and promotion.
We’re also affected by overt manipulation of scientific data that misinforms us, as well as major lobbying efforts with little to no concern or consideration about the quality of the science behind these food products. This is what some might call “insidious capitalism.” If you have the inclination to learn more and wake up to the actuality of the manipulation we are bombarded with, here’s a few more links.
Big Food Using the Tobacco Industry Playbook
Eating Today Similar How Smoking Was Acceptable in The 50’s
Don’t Let the Divide and Conquer Strategy Defeat You
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/collaboration-with-the-new-vectors-of-disease/
Brainwashing through misinformation.
Humans are hardwired to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Our main pleasures are Food-Sex, unless male, and then it’s Sex-Food. Avoiding pain would include being lazy or looking for the easier way. The food industry taps into these pain-pleasure drivers of human behavior. As previously explained above, if we can prevent, treat, and reverse cardiovascular disease as well as most if not all other forms of chronic disease, why are we not following this lifestyle diet? The answer is, it’s because we have been misinformed and manipulated for profit, and many have swallowed the propaganda hook, line and sinker. Now many are hopelessly brainwashed and through willful Ignorance, cognitive dissonance, and selective bias continue to defend sub-optimal foods that are associated with chronic disease.
Pleasure = Food Addiction
The Dopamine Made Me Do It
For the love of money and power, “the powers to be” literally run amok.