I am an avid TED talk watcher. Rather
than going on Netflix binges like most of my friends, I know that if I open
TED.com I will be hooked in it for hours on end. In one of these recent moments,
I stumbled upon this TED talk by Laura Schmidt, a medical sociologist at UCSF. In
this talk she addresses several topics we have learned about throughout the
semester, most notably, the epidemic of sugar addiction as result of processed
foods.
One of the things she mentions that
was the most shocking to be was that food companies use MRIs to look at
pleasure seeking centers of the brain to determine what recipe of the foodstuff
will create the most addictive product. In my opinion, this practice is an
unethical use of medical technology. It creates this dichotomy wherein this
technology is supposed to serve the purpose of ameliorating health, but instead
it is being used to harness addiction, leading to the great obesity epidemic. It
is disgusting when you think about it.
She then goes on to compare the
modern American grocery store to a neighborhood of drug dealers, where by being
forced to walk on the perimeter, we are robbed of the choice in our food. I do
think that this point is completely valid, and she advocates for several things
to change this, such as a soda tax and removing advertising/accessibility of
candy and sugary cereals to young children, however I disagree that this in
practice limits our choice of what we eat. Yes, it does mean that snacks and
ready-to-go meals might need to be changed, but I don’t think that this is a
limitation in anyway. If I have gotten one thing from this class, it is the
reinforcement that eating fresh, real food is in no way a compromise to the options
available. It might take a little more time to prepare, but in the long run it
is completely worth it for your health, the environment, and the taste. So,
while I completely support Schmidt’s efforts to change the sugar scene in the
grocery store, I disagree that we do not have a choice.
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