On every high street there are legalised drug pushers peddling stuff every bit as addictive as any hard drugs. They are in your supermarket and even your small local shops. I'm not talking about cigarettes or alcohol. I'm talking about all the processed and convenience foods that practically everybody uses. I'm talking about such apparently harmless substances as sugar and artificial sweeteners. The processed food manufacturers want to make us junkies on their junk food.



Did you know that the sweet taste of sugar and artificial sweeteners is more addictive than cocaine? I will not be surprised to learn that other tastes are just as addictive - it's part of our make-up. Our ancestors learned to seek out sweet foods for high energy, high flavor foods for nutrition and salty foods because salt was scarce. All these tastes give us pleasurable feelings, so guess what the processed food manufacturers do? They load their 'foods' with those flavours and take out the nutritional value, so we are left seeking the nutrition and eating more of their junk in an attempt to find it.

There are now global industries, established in the last few decades and based on the marketing hype of low sugar, low fat, anti-cholesterol and so on. Inadequately tested chemicals are added to our food to make nutritionally valueless junk taste palatable. A bean that used to be regarded as too poisonous to eat is now the number one 'health' food - even though it is carcinogenic and it is impossible to remove all the poison. An emulsion of cheap vegetable oils with water is stabilised, preserved, colored and sold as a healthy alternative to butter.

There's an unholy alliance between the the multi-national food producers and the drugs companies. The loose regulation of drugs is a scandal, where profit reigns and public safety is way down the list. If we get an adverse reaction to a foreign chemical in our food, there's always a convenient cure for the symptoms provided by a drug company. The fact that the 'cure' may give us worse symptoms is not accidental - it's no good for business if we're all healthy.

Because we are seeking the nutritional value in our food and not finding it, we unconsciously feel the need to carry on eating. The result is that we take in far more calories than we actually need for our energy requirements and we now have an obesity epidemic. There is an obvious link between this and the fact that for the average family in America 90% of budget for food is taken up with processed, rather than natural food.

There is absolutely no point in dieting to lose weight, then going back to your old habits - that's what the food and drugs industries rely on to push their products. We are all addicts - victims of our ancestry. Addressing the problem is the Cave Man Diet. It's not just about calorie control, it's about getting rid of addictions and eating only healthy food. If you truly want to lose weight and keep it off, it means committing to a different lifestyle.