HOOKED: Michael Moss Catches the Food Industry Cooking Up Deadly Drugs

We owe Mr. Moss. He has devoted over 10 years, his formidable journalistic skill, and all his heart to breaking the greatest story ever told: How a powerful group of men and women set out to destroy all of humanity by poisoning the food supply. It’s not a fairy tale, but the true story of how our world has been devastated by a diet carefully designed to set off plagues of gluttony, obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s (called Diabetes III), and many other scourges.
The diet that does it is largely made up of the substances that compose the title of Moss’ first book, the Pulitzer prize winning Salt, Sugar, and Fat. This seemingly innocent culinary weaponry was first developed by the tobacco industry to make tobacco more addictive, a process that was famously halted by the leak of a prominent insider. Since then, the tobacco industry has bought out much of the refined food industry where it has been busy producing addictive substances that look like food, quite unhindered.
Where is a hero to save us from our death-dealing diet?
• An unlikely whistle-blower is David Kessler, former FDA chief, who has written two exposés: The End of Overeating and Fast Carbs, Slow Carbs.
• Then there is the great warrior, Robert Lustig, M.D., who has valiantly and effectively exposed sugar’s toxic properties through a YouTube lecture series that has gone viral and three books. (The third, Metabolical, will be released in May.)
As a direct result, soda taxation has made real headway and millions know what modern sugar does to them.
But have the Food Industry’s walls come thundering down? No. Even those who now know better are too addicted to abstain. Though the rates of obesity and diabetes are 50% in the U.S. and higher in many other countries (e.g. 80% in India), silence prevails. The poisoners have yet to be outlawed.

What Else Can We Do?
• Moss’ end notes are three pages long and provide no hope of relief.
• Kessler’s most recent book ends with a whimper about his continuing personal struggle with sugar and weight.
• Lustig is more optimistic: He points to the true fact that eating healthful foods could rescue us. But there’s a big hole in his hope: No addiction has ever yet been cured by conventional efforts. The alcohol and drug treatment industry has certainly failed; relapse is now actually accepted and considered by the industry to be an incurable feature of ‘addictive disease.’ NIDA chief Nora Volkow admits that, though her heavily funded agency has been working on a drug cure for overeating and other addictions day and night for decades, no effective medications have yet been developed.
See Part 2 of this blog, UNhooked, next week.