Lent is finally over. Someone in the family or circle of friends is always not eating chocolate, meat (anymore) or drinking alcohol. And then the social pressure that comes with it. Shouldn’t I also be healthier, sportier, slimmer? After Easter and the mostly unavoidable gluttony over the holidays, there are a few weeks in which one can renounce Protestant renunciation. Thank God? Yes, somehow.
But let’s be honest: With us, the balance between gluttony and renunciation, addiction and self-determination is still quite intact. The USA shows how things can be done differently. A short walk through Las Vegas offers possible variants of true excess. Diagonally opposite the “Bellagio” hotel casino, a huge store offers a variety of sweets, ergo: sugar products, that I had never imagined before. Above the entrance is written in large letters: “Sugar: you know you want me!”
This overstimulation is not only showing its lush side in the US food industry. Everything is available there in excess. Car washes offer a special rate for the “limitless car wash”, hair salons a special price for the “limitless haircut”. I wonder whether the obligation to wash can also be transferred to the car, so that you have to have it washed indefinitely. And how long can you have your hair cut before you simply don’t have any more on your head? None of this makes sense in individual cases, but it does as a systemic expression of an economic model in which the well-known “more is more” is overdriven: addictive capitalism.
The US food industry is a prime example of this. It essentially produces industrially highly processed foods. This is good for corporate profits, but not for people’s health.
If you’re looking for unprocessed (in Germany: freshly baked) bread in a US supermarket, you’ve been looking for a long time. Bread in the USA is almost always industrially processed, i.e. enriched with preservatives, colorings and emulsifiers. It’s wrapped in plastic on the shelf and then at home and you can leave it like that for weeks without noticing the slightest change. While you have to chew a slice of freshly baked wholemeal bread properly and then feel full, emulsifiers ensure that the bread simply dissolves in your mouth. This leads to the desire for more – supported by additives in industrial bread. You eat five slices instead of one.
Miriam Meckel is a German journalist and entrepreneur. She is co-founder and CEO of ada Learning GmbH. She also teaches as a professor for communication management at the University of St. Gallen.
(Photo: Klawe Rzeczy)
One billion people worldwide currently suffer from obesity. According to predictions by the World Obesity Foundation, by 2030 half of the world’s population could be considered severely overweight. Essentially, this development affects poorer and socially disadvantaged groups in society. This is a sad prognosis that has multiple individual consequences, but also economic consequences: higher mortality rates, growing social divisions, rising costs for the health system. Addiction capitalism is not interested in that, it is subject to other, short-term mechanisms and relies on technology. It should mitigate the consequences, but please according to the laws of addictive capitalism.
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One approach is newly developed drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy. To get this straight: Such drugs can be a blessing for sick people. For healthy people, they become a problem. Diabetes drugs proper are currently enjoying a social media triumph in the US, most notably on Tiktok.
Market worth billions: New drugs to lose weight
There, the agents to be injected under the skin are advertised as weight loss miracles. Because they regulate the hunger hormones and fool the brain into being full. But not just for overweight people. Hollywood stars and other “influencers” boast that they can get rid of the last few grams of invisible fat on their ribs by injection for about $1400 a month.
So addiction to addictive foods is replaced by addiction to a drug. And the excesses of addictive capitalism apply to both increasing and decreasing: more is more.
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In his book The Hungry Brain, biochemist and neuroscientist Stephan J. Guyenet describes what’s going wrong. Many people now live in a permanent imbalance between the neurochemistry of their brains, their genetic dispositions and their environment. Our brains once evolved in a world where food was scarce and finding food was difficult and exhausting. In constant abundance, the once meaningful signals are turned into their opposite. We become addicts who have been disturbed by civilization. “Sugar: You know you want me” – always and everywhere.
What a disturbed world in which people who are actually healthy get sick from eating too much and the wrong food, and then fight the consequences with medication. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said earlier this year that the new weight loss miracle drugs could tap into a $90 billion market. This is the market where addictive capitalism can continue to thrive.
We only saw a shadow of him in our Easter baskets.
In this column, Miriam Meckel writes fortnightly about ideas, innovations and interpretations that make progress and a better life possible. Because what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the rest of the world calls a butterfly. ada-magazin.com
More: Epidemic with serious consequences: Germany urgently needs to do something about obesity