Now first of all, most people agree that caffeine is addictive. If you don't believe that you are addicted to caffeine-try going without it for 24 hours and tell me how you feel. The ubiquitous migraine headache comes on, along with irritability, fatigue, and a real craving for it. For the taste, the smell, the feel of coffee (or soda pop) -whatever your caffeine delivery system is, there is a definitive craving for that item to get the caffeine 'fix.'
If you continue to go without it, your body will be achy, you will become depressed, your thinking foggy, your mind slower, your reflex's off, and your metabolism screeching to a halt. For a hard-core caffeine addict, it can take a month to feel normal. Until one day you wake up feeling refreshed and not needing anything to 'get you going'. You have natural energy and you no longer have the 'slump' in the afternoon where you reach for another cup of coffee or a pop and artificially boost your energy levels because you are playing with your flight or fight system now (Read: stress your body the fuck out)
I know all this, because I quit a horrible coffee addiction. I went 2 years without caffeine and I was so much better for it. It did literally take about a month to feel normal however. But once I was clean off it -everything improved. My energy levels were stable-I had no dips, I'd wake up fine, do my thing and then when I did sleep, I sleep soundly and deeply. My skin cleared up, I didn't need as many cigarettes (at the time I was still smoking) and I was no longer craving. (Caffeine incidentally, causes nicotine in your body to be excreted faster, and vice-versa. This is why people who smoke and drink coffee, do a lot of both. When you quit smoking, you need less caffeine, and when you quit coffee, you need less smoking. It's a synergy-an evil synergy but as an FYI, it helps when you quit one to do the other if you already do both. I drank a ton of coffee the first two weeks I quit smoking. Hell, I already had wicked insomnia from the nic withdrawal so who cared? It did help me pass the nic thru my body faster which meant withdrawal was shorter.
Despite what we thought, caffeine is no longer considered an antagonist of the heart, unless it is in crazy amounts or in combination with other crap, like energy drinks. Those ARE truly evil and should be avoided on many levels, but in any event studies are showing that MODERATE caffeine use in coffees and teas can be beneficial for the heart. I guess that's why up in ICU they kept letting me have it and didn't care, which I questioned (and subsequently discovered all this. So drink some for heart health, unless you have an arrhythmia or sensitivity in which it would be contradicted. You know, check with your doctor and pharmacist for any drug interactions with caffeine.)
Since my heart attack I've more or less quit again-I have only 1/2 of cup of caffeinated in the morning. I really don't crave or want much more than that. I also love my coffee with cream so I'm not really feeling the cream substitutes. I'd rather just not drink it. But there is no question that our coffees, with their milks and creams and sugars and flavors are very addicting and for many, the one 'treat' they allow themselves to have.
The other caffeine culprits of seeming addiction are of course soda pops. I'm from Chicago so it's hereby referred to as 'pop'. Frankly, I've seen more of my friends addicted to this crap than anything coffee, and I don't just think it's for the caffeine. Certain brands of pop in particular seem to turn people into fiends. Sorry, but I've never seen anyone drink just one can of Diet Coke a day. Or Mountain Dew-regular or diet but the people I know that drink Mountain Dew typically don't touch diet drinks. Even so, unless they are drinking a Mexican or a 'throw back' pop-they are drinking high fructose corn syrup.
Now without getting too in depth, I can only say that Aspartame, the main 'sugar free' additive in diet drinks of all sorts, and High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) which has substituted cane sugar in just about everything-these have been highly implicated in not only creating health issues-a myriad of them, but also in being addictive.
Books have been written for years about the evils of cane sugar- or fructose table sugar as it's known- for years. The book Sugar Blues comes to mind. It is true however, that we do not need sugar to survive. Our bodies convert sugar but it would convert other sugars such as in fruits to create energy and did long before sugar became a 'thing.'
I don't want to get into the biology here of the insulin cycle as it is bad enough we eat as much table sugar as we do. When we complicate it by then throwing our bodies a fake sugar that does not break down into glucose and the pancreas does not release insulin as a result but our taste buds keep craving looking for that energy hit-all kinds of trouble ensues and diabetes is it. So these foods become 'addictive' for a few reasons.
Remember, there was a time when sugar was treated like it was a drug, a precious metal or commodity and only the very wealthy could afford it, and it was used as barter and trade.
One, the physiological effects of many food additives on the brain- like caffeine is a drug, sugar acts like a drug, the effects on the energy blood sugar cycle, and 2, the psychological associations with food which cannot be underestimated. The smell of bread cooking can remind one of childhood and if Grandma made you mac and cheese when you were upset, you will associate love and comfort and being cared for with that particular dish. But nowhere have I seen more circumstantial evidence of food being addicting than the heart attack support group I'm on.
I was on an online support group for heart attack survivors 55 and under. Many of us are unclear as to why we even had one, because we were healthy. No diabetes, high blood pressure, cholesterol, maybe a few were overweight but not morbidly so-essentially, stress, maybe smoking and genetics is the axis of evil that have been implicated in our heart woes. No one says 'diet.'
However my cardiologist did, and urged me to watch "Forks Over Knives" which is a movie about why a plant-based diet is good for the heart. Not only good for it, but with the ability to reverse heart disease that already exist. Many are skeptical-except leading cardiologist from the Cleveland Clinic to Harvard. In fact, there is a 100 yr old heart surgeon who credits his longevity to a plant-based diet.
My cardiologist urged me to go vegetarian-vegan being optimal, even he says that he's a vegetarian. Yes, because it can be damn hard to forgo animal based foods like cheese and eggs. But before I start posting the brigade of experts who extol the virtues of the diet, I still want to post a video for you on foods being addictive.
Going back to the support group, I saw one of the members type a post that stated she was going to INCREASE her intake of meat, cheese and butter. I was all 'whaaaaaa......? Increase?
Well yeah, because evidently there are also a few doctors out there who are advocating that. (WTF??)
In actuality, what is being said is that studies have shown that the saturated fats in bacon, cheese, butter-all the things we love-may not be a direct cause of heart disease. Rather it is now believed that the carbs and sugars are the real culprits. (is anyone confused yet? ) It is the substitutions of 'fat free' and 'sugar free' that are also lending a hand in hurting our hearts. So what the doctors are suggesting is that it is preferable to eat things such as bacon and butter- IN MODERATION- than it is to eat hydrogenated oils in margarine and trans-fats in fast food. It's not a green light to indulge in animal fat by any means.
But what is 'moderation', particularly when food is addictive? Can't nobody moderate addiction, that's the very antisis of addiction.
Not to mention that animal fats have still been shown to have a direct link to certain types of cancers and other illnesses beside heart disease. But try telling that to this group. These people would not hear it. They were angry, in denial, they were defensive as to why it's okay ("I've been eating meat 3x a week since my heart attack and my cholesterol is only 130!") (Are you on a statin?) ("Well yeah of course")
Right. So it wasn't the statin that lowered the cholesterol-which is what its supposed to fucking do-it was that extra pat of butter on your dinner roll, right?
"No, its carbs that will give me a fat ass, not meat and dairy."
Right. I mean sure, white rice COULD, if you throw bbq pork on it, and potatoes COULD, if you throw sour cream on them, and sure, forget the spaghetti but pour Alfredo Sauce on your chicken-that won't gain ya no weight, yah okay sure fine. Incidentally, in most cultures that eat rice and grains-they are NOT fat asses. Because above.
But they still wouldn't hear of it. I was lambasted and maligned to such a degree that I ended up just deleting them. It was essentially, addressing a roomful of addicts who were not willing to admit that maybe, JUST maybe, their CONSTANT intake of meats and crap pre-heart attack had something to do with it. And now that they've added some salad and maybe LESS meat and are watching the fat intake they think 'ok'-they simply refused to accept that all of the evidence both scientific and anecdotal for a plant-based diet could be remotely true. I even had one or two people post links to counter-opinions on why the plant-based diet and Forks and Knives in particular is a bunch of trendy bullshit. That it really was the paleo way that led to good health. It was the most asinine and counter-intuitive post I think I had ever read, and I only had 2 people inbox me who were also just as incredulous (but thankful for me speaking out) at what we were reading.
As I've stated here a bunch of times, I am a moderate. I don't fault or scold anyone for indulging in a cheese, or eating some chicken, or using that butter. I allow myself that stuff rarely also. What good is life if you can never eat what you love again, or at least take a few bites??
Yes, your farming grandparents ate cow and pig and churned butter and drank buttermilk and lived to be 98. Their shit was organic. They didn't have 100 cows crowded together in slaughter houses passing their bovine disease, being fed antibiotics and GMO corn feed and their chickens weren't being given growth hormones, and by the way we are genetically closest to the pig-not the monkey-so its almost cannable to eat pig but fine. Point being-our grandparents also didn't have microwaves with fast food, no boxed mashed potatoes, no 100 calorie cookie bags, none of that shit. They cooked, they ate it straight from the ground or tree. As I've stated in previous posts-they shopped at butchers and bakers and yeah. The argument that meat and cheese and butter must be okay since they ate that way and lived so long is now invalid, and it sure wasn't everybodies grandparents living that long.
It's not about deprivation, the plant-based diet and there are many misconceptions about it that I'll cover in a new post soon. A diet of just 10% 'bad' stuff is better than a diet of 30% 'bad' stuff. And of course for ethical reasons as well as health its just nice to always stay vegetarian.
Many people do go 100% in the pool, never to eat animal or dairy again, even sugar and caffeine, and they are happy with it and claim no cravings at all. However, they did AT FIRST have cravings and that is something to be expected when switching from your addictions to foods.
I mean, not to don the tin foil hat for too long, but there is a bit of a conspiracy in that yes, certain foods seem completely designed to addict people. Is that really so far-fetched? Tobacco companies introduced ammonia into cigarettes, which acts as a 'freebase' for nicotine. This means that nicotine hits the brain and bloodstream stronger, faster and harder than it would on the legally allowed amount. So they essentially addict people that much faster than they normally would-and makes them smoke twice as much. Add to that faster-burning papers than 'back in the day'-I mean they are doing everything they can to keep people smoking since so many people are trying to quit, and we actually have nicotine replacements now (many own by big tobacco, btw) and so fewer people are smoking that they got desperate enough to do something radical and of course unethical to stay relevant (and keep billions of profits coming in.) Considering the state tax on this, I'm really not convinced that the gov't, even with it's big blitz to get everyone to stop smoking-well moving on, doing the same thing to certain sects of the food supply would work in the same vein, yes? (BTW....the gov't which once exposed the use of ammonia in cigs has now retracted stating it is not shown to increase. I'll let you be the judge, its pretty interesting stuff.
For further reading if interested : Big Tobacco Exposed adding 'crack' to smokes by gov
Gov't saying "Nah, no freebase" 3 years later
So yes, you could say I trust the FDA about as much as these guys above. And just why is it that so many foods we have on our shelves here are illegal and banned in Europe? But I digress.....
Addict people to fast foods, addict them to convenience foods, addict them to 'snacky' foods and certainly to beverages-you're money. So despite the billion-dollar diet industry, despite our addiction to body image and shaming, regardless of the research and science of health and vegans in the blogspear teaching you how to do it-if they make it almost impossible for people to want to give up certain food crack-including people who have already had heart attacks and strokes-well it's food for thought for me and should be for you as well.
The sad thing is just how much this has infiltrated to our children-the backlash the First Lady has gotten trying to implement healthy lunches in schools, and the news stories of kids smuggling salt into school-yes. Addicted. I'm pretty convinced and maybe after watching some of these, you will be also.
Food for thought. I'll get into the Monsanto stuff later because that also reminds me of addiction, I think they are the biggest pushers there are.
a bit longer but more informative
And a 100 yr old heart surgeon on food:
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