But it starts from—the vast majority of it starts in these factory farms. And what happened is—you have to go back to the Great Depression, where the government policy essentially started to encourage consolidation of farming as part of national food security. And after World War II, the government had—the US government had all this surplus food, because it was trying to shore up the agricultural sector. So it used this food in a policy that became known as “aid and trade.” We would first give food to countries as aid. Once they’d get hooked on it, we would trade with them. But what this did was it encouraged consolidation of the farming sector, because we would then subsidize those farmers who were most technologically efficient, who were doing monoculture—in other words, doing one crop—because it was economy of scale, because you could direct the inputs better. And so, the farming sector shrank drastically from 1940 to 1970. In 1940, 18 percent of the populace was still farmers; by 1970, it was 4.6 percent. And so, all this subsidies, essentially, what it did is it created the condition for the concentrated animal-feeding operations to arise.

People are very familiar with these. Eric Schlosser talks a lot about it in Fast Food Nation. Michael Pollan is another writer who talks about it a lot. But what they often don’t talk about is how government policy played this big factor, because there was cheap water, cheap grain, cheap fuel, cheap land, anti-union laws that allowed these factory farms to come into being.

But the thing is, these factory farms couldn’t exist if there wasn’t a market for these products, hence the rise of the fast food industry. And you start to see this in the ’60s and ’70s. For instance, where in the early ’60s McDonald’s was using 175 suppliers for potatoes, when it switched to the J.R. Simplot Company, which was able to provide them with this standardized frozen fry, McDonald’s exploded over the next decade. Fries are incredibly profitable. Its growth was something like 400 or 500 percent in terms of the number of restaurants opened.

And then, around 1980, Tyson, the poultry king, did the same with chicken. They worked with McDonald’s to introduce the Chicken McNugget. The irony of it was chicken, at that time, was seen as a healthy alternative to red meat. But through the industrial manufacturing, what you came out with was this highly addictive product, pumped full of all sorts of flavorings and chemicals that you would then dip in this fat- and sugar-, salt-laden sauce. And on average, a Chicken McNugget has twice as much fat as a McDonald’s hamburger.

And so, what the fast food and the processed food industry has done is they’ve taken these very cheap commodities from the factory farming system; it’s processed them, added a lot of value to itself in terms of profit; and then, essentially, made many of us addicted to them. And so, this all fits together, and bacon plays this key role. And so, what I was doing was trying to explain exactly how bacon ultimately becomes this weapon of mass destruction.

DR. DAVID KESSLER: Let me give you—you know, we just published an article. Not the typical scientific title, it’s called “Deconstructing the Vanilla Milkshake.” What do you think it is about the vanilla milkshake? Do you think it’s the sugar, the fat or the flavor that stimulates you to come back for more? Which one do you think it is—the sugar, fat or flavor?

AMY GOODMAN: Which is it?

DR. DAVID KESSLER: It’s the sugar. The sugar is the main driver. But when you add fat to the sugar, it’s synergistic. With my colleague Gaetano Di Chiara, we—Gaetano studies the effect of amphetamine and cocaine on brains’ dopamine circuits. Dopamine is responsible for focusing your attention on a specific stimulus. And we always knew that amphetamine and cocaine raise the brain’s dopamines level. But what we did is we studied the effects of not just one nutrient, not just sugar, but sugar and fat, and we found, when you put them together, you get elevations of the brain’s dopamine circuitry. And not only that, it doesn’t habituate. It doesn’t go down time after time. So we see that multi-potent, multi-sensory foods can stimulate the brain’s neural circuitry.

A journey of health. A journey to discover health. A journey to contemplate health.

Not really sure which choice it is. I started off this past year’s journey not even really all that sure what “health” was, much less if it is or was a possible reality. The question I still have no answer to: is it possible to “heal” while your sitting in the middle of a war?

But even as I struggle, I do know several realities now.

* “health” has been defined by our society in the U.S.. But our individual selves rarely want the definition of “health” as defined by our society. But at the same time–we continually beat ourselves up with that society created definition–which prevents us from focusing on the needs we have to achieve our OWN PERSONAL definitions of ‘health.’

* The idea that there could be one “thing” that could bring “health” to our bodies is riddle throughout U.S. culture. Magic cure diets. Magic cure exercise regimes. Magic cure “holistic” “lifestyle” changes that focus on exercise and diet…If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past year, I’ve needed to do *multiple* things to help relieve or end symptoms/problems.

* For example, extreme chronic achy tired brought on by depression and hypothyroidism has only improved considerably after I got on medication, began acupuncture, started daily walks, began meditation, got OFF medication, increased acupuncture, increased walking to at least an hour a day, went back ON one medication, and then finally figured out that one particular way of needling during acupuncture makes me feel like a million bucks.

* It is only after a year of doing the previous “stuff,” that I finally even have the strength to sit and read a fairly radicalized book about how food in the U.S. has been manipulated to encourage addiction.

* In other words, it took a YEAR to really get me to the point I could even think about “diet.” How many doctors tell you to go straight to the “fix your diet and you’ll feel better” route?

* The book I am reading about diet (and, btw, just because I am reading this book doesn’t mean I have *fixed* by diet, it only means that I am arming myself with as much information as I can find before I fall into the full fledged “eating healthier” regime) is “the end of overeating: taking control of the insatiable american appetite” by David Kessler. I’m on part one section 4 right now, and so far, it’s a fairly disturbing interesting read. The basic argument of the book is that food in the U.S. is made up of three basic food groups, sugar, fat, and salt–all three of which are stimulants individually–and act as “hyperstimulants” when served together. As such, those of us who have a rocky relationship with food (even slender/thin folks) are often not actually lazy or lacking self esteem or unable to say no etc etc…instead, we are addicted to the high of the stimulation that high fat/sugar/salt foods provide us.

As somebody who has diagnosed diseases that erode at a person’s energy level on a daily and hourly basis…um, can we stand up and cheer at how our lifetime eating patterns now make sense?

I’ve always had depression, but it got really horrible right after I gave birth to my first child. And guess what started at that time? Extreme cravings for pints of ice cream. Is it any wonder, given what Kessler is arguing about sugar/fat/salt, that the *time* I craved the shit out of ice cream was on those two and three in the morning baby shifts that lasted for hours at a time because both of my children had illnesses? That some times I would eat ice cream first thing in the morning?

That now that I have been on serious treatment for hypothyroidism and depression, the extreme sugar cravings have really slowed down considerably (I can’t remember the last time I ate an entire pint of ice cream at one sitting).

The good thing so far about this book is that the guy who wrote it, David Kessler, is somebody who has also struggled with weight. So, thus far, I have not really encountered any fat phobic logic (outside of the fat that the whole book is written to confront the “fat epidemic.” sigh).

In fact, he started off the book with anecdotes about several people and their relationship with food–and one of the anecdotes centers on a woman who is considered “thin.” Her obsessive thinking when it comes to food is starkly similar to the way the overweight people in the anecdotes described their obsessing.

An interesting fact that Kessler incorporated in his “ohmygawdwereallsofat!” section was that researchers noticed in the 1980′s that there was a startling increase in weight throughout the entire U.S. population. That what had remained relatively stable throughout the *centuries* suddenly went through the roof in a earth shattering way in the 1980′s. According to Kessler,

“In fewer than a dozen years, 8 percent more Americans–about 20 million people, roughly the population of New York State–had joined the ranks of the overweight.”

The thing that keeps this statistic from becoming fat panic is that (unlike pretty much every type of media that I have ever encountered) Kessler uses the *statistic* of overweight numbers AND THE DATE as a point of investigation. In other words, what was going on in the 80′s that encouraged uncontrollable food eating habits? What was going on with *food* that suddenly a static inanimate object (like M&M’s or a hamburger) suddenly had so much control over ALL of us, regardless of our weight (cuz remember, it was slender people that were obsessing over food too, they just had different outcomes to the effect the obsession had on them than others did).

It isn’t, what made U.S. citizens suddenly get so fat and lacking of self control? Rather instead, it is, what happened to food, what happened to our culture?

Which has had the effect of *immediately* releasing years of guilt and obsession from my brain. It’s NOT. MY. FAULT. that I sat and gorged on a thing of ice cream at two in the morning when my son was in hour two of screaming.

As Kessler says in his introduction: YOU ARE THE TARGET. Companies *survive* on you and I and the world eating unhealthy addictive hyperstimulating food. They target your brain, your weakness, your life.

And for me–this may not be true of others–and I don’t expect it to be and I hope that anybody reading this realizes that every person’s body is different and that this analysis should not be used to judge anybody, not even your own self–eating high fat/sugar/salt diet helped me to survive undiagnosed conditions while living in high pressure situations (like early motherhood, graduate school, etc). Without medication, and without some sort of stimulation, I doubt I would have made it through those years.

But it ALSO led to a worsening of the diseases I live with. Not necessarily because those foods “made me fat,” but rather instead because once the “high” was gone, what else was there to do but to crash, to a deeper more intensely low level than what I started off at? Anybody who has been addicted knows what i’m talking about. When you crash, the aches are worse, the sadness is worse, the fogginess is worse, it’s harder to get up and do anything at all.

Anyway. Like I said, I am not reading this information with the intention of going on crash diets or anything like that. Instead, I’m thinking deeply about how to make this information a weapon in my “health” arsenal.

How can I use it to keep me at a point where I can get out of bed every day, play with my kids, go to work on a monthly/yearly basis without feeling like I must die, AND stay alive until I’m 120 in a quality and magnificent way?