Hooked

Picture this: a seven-year-old girl sneaks out of her house every evening, using her allowance to buy McDonald's Happy Meals instead of eating her mother's home-cooked dinner. By middle school, she's skipping breakfast and lunch only to devour double orders of burgers, fries, and shakes after school. By sixteen, she weighs 250 pounds. This isn't a story of simple lack of willpower—it's the reality of Jazlyn Bradley, whose case against McDonald's would expose a disturbing truth about how food companies engineer products to hijack our biology.

What Bradley experienced mirrors what millions face daily: an inexplicable pull toward certain foods that seems to override our conscious decisions. The processed food industry has spent decades studying our evolutionary wiring, learning how to exploit the same brain pathways that once helped our ancestors survive. This book reveals how companies use our biology against us, turning natural survival mechanisms into profit engines. You'll discover why some foods trigger irresistible cravings while others don't, understand the science behind food addiction and how it compares to drug addiction, and learn practical strategies to reclaim control over your eating habits by working with, rather than against, your evolutionary programming.

Jazlyn Bradley's relationship with McDonald's began innocently enough when her family moved within walking distance of a restaurant. What started as occasional Happy Meals soon became a daily ritual that would define her childhood and teenage years. She'd tell her mother she wasn't hungry at dinner, then sneak out to spend her allowance on McDonald's. By middle school, she was skipping breakfast and lunch entirely, only to consume massive quantities after school—often two complete meals, telling herself she'd share the second with a friend but frequently eating both herself.

Bradley's behavior puzzled even her. She despised regular potatoes but craved McDonald's fries. She couldn't finish meals at her mother's table but never found a McDonald's order large enough to satisfy her. When cravings struck—which could happen at any time, even right after eating—she felt powerless to resist. The certainty that she would cave to these impulses left her hiding empty wrappers under her bed, ashamed yet unable to stop. What had begun as pure childhood joy had transformed into something darker, a pattern she used to cope with family stress and depression.

The turning point came when Bradley watched a talk show about overweight children. Seeing another child "stuffing his face" with burgers, she recognized herself and realized she wasn't alone in this struggle. This moment of painful clarity led her to join attorney Samuel Hirsch in a groundbreaking lawsuit against McDonald's, alleging that the company's products were "physically or psychologically addictive." Though the case ultimately failed in court, it opened a crucial conversation about whether our food choices are truly free when companies engineer products to exploit our deepest biological drives.

Bradley's story reveals a fundamental truth about modern eating: what looks like personal failure is often biological hijacking. Her brain had been trained to crave specific combinations of salt, sugar, and fat that McDonald's had perfected over decades. The speed of fast food delivery, the convenience of drive-throughs, and the emotional associations built through childhood memories all worked together to override her conscious desire to eat healthier. Understanding this isn't about removing personal responsibility—it's about recognizing that we're fighting an uphill battle against billion-dollar companies that study our weaknesses with scientific precision.

Roy Wise thought his colleague was talking nonsense when the young MIT researcher claimed he could turn hunger on and off in rats with the flip of a switch. But curiosity drove Wise to test it himself, inserting a thin wire into a rat's brain and sending tiny electrical pulses to a sesame-seed-sized area called the hypothalamus. What happened next revolutionized our understanding of appetite: the rat would ravenously devour food for exactly twenty seconds while the current flowed, then immediately lose all interest when Wise turned off the switch. This cycle repeated hundreds of times with clockwork precision.

This simple experiment revealed that appetite doesn't live in our stomach, as long believed, but in our brain. The hypothalamus serves as our control room, managing the four essential behaviors for survival: fighting, fleeing, fornicating, and feeding. But Wise's discovery went deeper—he identified the brain's chemical messenger system that drives our desires. When we see, smell, or even think about appealing food, our brain releases dopamine, which doesn't create pleasure but generates want. This distinction is crucial: dopamine makes us seek rewards, while other brain chemicals called endorphins actually make us feel good when we get them.

The processed food industry doesn't need harsh chemicals like nicotine to hijack this system—salt, sugar, and fat work perfectly well. These ingredients trigger the same dopamine pathways as cocaine, creating what researchers call the "go" brain response. Meanwhile, our "stop" brain—the part responsible for weighing consequences and applying brakes—can be easily overwhelmed or distracted. When we eat mindlessly while watching TV or working, our stop brain goes offline, leaving us at the mercy of our go brain's demands for more.

Speed amplifies everything. While cocaine takes five to ten minutes to reach the brain through snorting, sugar hits our reward system in just six hundred milliseconds—nearly twenty times faster than cigarettes. This speed advantage allows processed foods to trigger intense cravings before our rational mind can intervene. Companies exploit this by engineering products for maximum speed and convenience, knowing that the faster something excites our brain, the more likely we are to lose control. Understanding these mechanisms isn't about blame—it's about recognizing that our brains are wired to respond powerfully to these engineered foods, and that awareness itself is the first step toward regaining control.

When Ardi stood upright 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia, she unknowingly set in motion changes that would make her descendants—us—exquisitely vulnerable to modern processed food. Her decision to walk upright moved her head away from ground-level germs, allowing her species to trade large, hardy snouts for smaller noses. This evolutionary shift gave humans two distinct ways to smell food: through our nostrils and through the back of our mouths. As we chew, smell molecules rise into our nasal cavity, creating the complex experience we call flavor. This enhanced smelling ability helped our ancestors appreciate variety in their diet, crucial for surviving climate changes that constantly altered available food sources.

Ardi and her descendants also evolved to crave calories above all else. Their world offered mostly tough, fibrous foods requiring twelve pounds of daily consumption just to survive. Through millions of years of scarcity, humans developed an exquisite ability to detect and desire calorie-dense foods. Our stomachs learned to send "accelerator" signals to the brain when encountering high-energy foods, urging us to eat quickly before the food source disappeared. Only after we'd consumed enough would the stomach send "brake" signals telling us to stop. This system worked perfectly when food was hard to find and low in calories.

Our ancestors also became exceptional at storing energy as body fat—a survival advantage that kept them alive during famines. Human babies are born with 15 percent body fat compared to just a few percent for most mammals. This fat tissue isn't passive storage; it's an active organ that communicates with the brain, defending itself when threatened. When we try to lose weight, our fat cells fight back by lowering our metabolism and increasing our appetite, making weight loss extraordinarily difficult to maintain.

These evolutionary gifts become curses in our current food environment. The same brain that helped Ardi appreciate variety now goes wild for the fifty thousand products in modern supermarkets. Our calorie-detecting systems, designed for fibrous roots and occasional meat, can't properly process the concentrated sugar and fat combinations that don't exist in nature. The speed with which we can now obtain food—from impulse to consumption in seconds—bypasses all the natural delays that once allowed our stop brain to engage. We're essentially running four-million-year-old software on modern food hardware, and the mismatch is making us sick. Recognizing this isn't about accepting defeat but understanding that we need strategies adapted to both our biology and our current environment.

When Jazlyn Bradley's lawsuit against McDonald's made headlines in 2002, the processed food industry moved swiftly to protect itself. Within weeks, restaurant associations began lobbying for state laws that would forever ban obesity-related lawsuits. The strategy was borrowed directly from tobacco's playbook: prevent any case from reaching the discovery phase where internal company documents might be revealed. Lynn Hefley, a Colorado state legislator, sponsored the first "Commonsense Consumption Act" after hearing restaurateurs' concerns about frivolous lawsuits. The bill passed easily, with supporters arguing that personal responsibility, not corporate accountability, should govern our food choices.

Twenty-six states eventually passed similar laws, often using identical language written by industry lobbyists. These legislators weren't necessarily corrupt—they genuinely believed they were protecting small business owners from unreasonable litigation. But the effect was to shield the entire food industry from any legal accountability for engineering products that exploit our biology. The industry had learned from tobacco's mistakes: better to prevent lawsuits entirely than to risk having internal documents about addictive properties exposed in court.

Meanwhile, companies moved to control the science that might threaten them. PepsiCo funded cutting-edge brain research by neuroscientist Dana Small, hoping to develop healthier products through her "Big Bet" initiative. Small's work revealed disturbing findings: drinks with less sugar actually generated stronger brain responses than full-sugar versions, and the body's metabolism couldn't properly handle these artificial mixtures. When Small's research suggested that diet sodas might be more problematic than regular ones, PepsiCo abruptly terminated her funding. A company executive reportedly called her "dangerous" for discoveries that threatened high-calorie beverage sales.

The industry's most audacious move was taking ownership of the diet industry itself. Major processed food companies bought Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, SlimFast, and Atkins, effectively controlling both the problem and the supposed solution. Heinz discovered that owning Weight Watchers created three revenue streams: foods that made people gain weight, diet programs for those trying to lose weight, and low-calorie products for the cycling between the two. This vertical integration meant that whether customers succeeded or failed at dieting, the same companies profited.

These tactics reveal how threatened the industry felt by any suggestion that their products might be addictive. They understood that addiction implies diminished free will, which would fundamentally change how we view personal responsibility for eating choices. By controlling the legal, scientific, and commercial responses to food addiction, they maintained the narrative that obesity and disordered eating are purely individual failures, not systemic problems created by engineered products designed to override our natural appetite control systems.

The processed food industry's latest strategy reveals both their desperation and their cunning: they're now trying to win back our trust by admitting their products might be problematic while positioning themselves as the solution. Campbell's CEO Denise Morrison shocked Wall Street analysts in 2015 by acknowledging a "mounting distrust of Big Food," as consumers increasingly questioned everything from ingredient lists to marketing tactics. But rather than truly reformulating their products, companies launched what amounts to a sophisticated shell game designed to make us feel better about eating the same engineered foods.

The protein revolution exemplifies this deception perfectly. Following research suggesting protein helps people feel fuller, companies began adding protein to everything from ice cream to Popsicles. But the research was cherry-picked and misinterpreted—many of the twenty-six types of fiber being added to products don't actually make people feel full, and protein benefits vary dramatically based on individual genetics. Meanwhile, products like Lean Pockets contain only thirty fewer calories than their regular counterparts, a meaningless difference that won't impact anyone's health or eating habits.

Even more audacious is the industry's venture into personalized nutrition and genetic testing. Nestlé now offers DNA analysis to create customized diet plans, while companies race to develop "taste enhancers" that trick our tongues into perceiving more sweetness from less sugar. These technological solutions promise to let us have our cake and eat it too—literally maintaining our cravings while supposedly reducing harm. But fruit fly studies reveal disturbing effects from artificial sweeteners: the insects became hyperactive, couldn't sleep, and ate more despite not gaining weight, suggesting these products may cause metabolic chaos we don't yet understand.

The path to freedom lies not in the industry's false solutions but in understanding and working with our biology. We can slow down our eating to give our stop brain time to engage by choosing foods that require more effort, like nuts in shells or whole vegetables that need chopping. We can build new food memories that override childhood associations with processed products by repeatedly choosing healthier options until they become automatic. We can reduce the visual appeal of packaged foods by transferring them to plain containers, removing the bright colors designed to trigger our go brain.

Most importantly, we can change how we think about food choices. Instead of asking "Which looks better today?" when faced with tempting options—a question that activates our reward circuitry—we can ask how those foods will affect our health, energy, or appearance. This simple shift activates our stop brain instead of our go brain. The goal isn't to eliminate all processed foods or achieve perfect eating, but to restore balance between our ancient biology and modern food environment. Victory doesn't require perfect willpower; it requires better understanding of how our minds work and strategic choices that make healthier options easier and more appealing than engineered alternatives.

The fundamental truth about food addiction is that we're not broken—we're responding exactly as evolution designed us to when faced with artificially concentrated combinations of salt, sugar, fat, and convenience that never existed in nature. Food companies have invested billions in understanding our biological vulnerabilities, from our lightning-fast brain responses to sweet tastes to our evolutionary drive for caloric density and variety, then engineered products specifically to exploit these ancient survival mechanisms.

Start by eliminating liquid calories, as our bodies haven't evolved to properly process beverages high in sugar or artificial sweeteners. Practice mindful eating by removing distractions like phones or television during meals, allowing your brain's natural satiety signals to function. When facing food temptations, deliberately shift your mental framework from "What looks good?" to "How will this affect my energy and health?"—a simple change that activates your rational decision-making instead of your reward-seeking impulses. Remember that breaking food addiction doesn't require perfect willpower but strategic understanding of how both your brain and the food industry operate, allowing you to make choices that align with your health goals rather than their profit margins.