Michael Pollan

And get people to buy it.

And get people to buy it, yeah.

But, I mean, if you step back far enough, you've got an excess of calories coming off the farm, and then you've got to persuade people to consume those calories.

And you do that by sweetening things.

If you add sugar or high-fructose corn syrup to anything, people will buy more of it.

See, cheap corn is very insidious because...

There are products now in the market that never used to have sugar added to them.

I'm thinking of tomato sauce or ketchup.

And it's very hard to find products that they haven't added some sugar to it.

And there are like 25 different kinds of sugar you can add.

And that's a good way of hiding its predominance on an ingredient label.

So the net result is we eat more because we're hardwired to like sweetness.

And sweetness has become so cheap.

I mean, sugar was precious for most of history.

And now it's so common that it's added to just about everything we eat.

Yeah.

And they get on this roller coaster of glucose response.

And I was always a little reluctant to use the word addiction.

I thought it was more metaphoric when it came to food compared to drug addiction or cigarette addiction.

But in fact, from the researchers I've talked to, it's a fair description and that you have the kind of dopamine release that's often associated with an addictive drug.