Have you ever entered in the supermarket committed to buying only healthy food? Then after spending 15 minutes going through the aisles you looked at the chart and noticed you had no choice but buying processed food or you would starve?
One of the most powerful sectors in the world is the Food Industry. Simply because the whole planet depends on them and is quite manipulated by them. We know we need to stay away from processed food but the majority of the food in our kitchen has gone through some process. Bread, tomato sauce, mayo, crackers... basically everything despite fresh fruits and veggies are made of things we have no idea about. We know it, still we don't do anything about it. In fact, there's nothing we can do about it.
I've tried many times to have the most natural diet possible, but the truth is that it's extremely hard. Without the flour, sugar and fat we found in the industrialized products is hard to feel satiated. Processed foods, rich in sugar, salt and fat are biologically addictive. They are smartly developed this way to make us food addicted. We are held hostage by the food industry. We are programmed to like salt, sweet, and fat tastes.
In addition, the marriage of science, economics, and technology gave all the tools the industry needed to provide us food in the most economically efficient manner. The industry is not aimed at feeding the planet for the sake of just feeding and keeping us healthy. They want the money and they will do anything to have the highest ROI possible. They will produce the nutrient-poorest products and sell as the best options to our children. They will remove 20 vitamins of the flour to enrich it back with only 3. They will buy scientists to convince us that the colorings and other chemistries in our drinks don't cause cancer.
Despite being nutrient-poor and danger our food is also becoming tasteless, probably because the industry has chosen the cheapest and low-quality primary products. I remember when I was a child when the two things I loved to eat the most were Kinder Surprise and a Brazilian cookie called Passatempo. Today when I eat these products to have the taste of my childhood I always get frustrated because today they don't taste the same. Kinder now tastes sugary and Passatempo tastes like flour. Similarly to the food industry, the traditional agriculture operates on the same virtue of efficiency. With the help of pesticides, herbicides, and the science of chemical engineering our fruits and veggies have become more beautiful and bigger, but also tasteless.
The big problem is that we have no option. We obviously don't have space or the know-how to plant and produce our own food, and organic products costs higher than the regular ones. Thankfully, science has been, even if slowly, shedding light on the truths about the products used by the industry and their effects in our bodies. Unfortunately, they don’t have the marketing budget like the retailers, but we as a community of thinking people who want real information can speak out, can spread the word and demand more transparency and better products.
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