<ul><li>Soda companies intentionally keep their prices down so we'll buy more. If we put a tax on this soda, that raises the price a little and nudges us away.</li><li>Food corporations bombard our children with advertisements for Captain Crunch and Cocoa Puffs. We can take those ads off the air.</li><li>If they pay grocery stores to put candy at eye level for our little children, we can put it a little higher on the shelf.</li><li>If they pay famous sports figures to promote Gatorade, we can pay them to say drink water.</li></ul>

Small changes can add up to big shifts in the environment

As long as food corporations aren't breaking narcotics laws, they can formulate their products any way they want and make them even more habit-forming.  Coco-cola was formulated in the 1880s. At one time, the coca-cola corporation was forced to change its recipe as cocaine was made illegal. That's when coca-cola took the cocaine out of the coke. But they just replaced the cocaine with a concentrated dose of sugar combined with a concentrated dose of caffeine, which doubled the chances to get hooked.

Sugar is the go-to habit-forming food

Educating the public in healthy choices doesn't work. 48% of Americans are still drinking a sugary drink or more a day.  In a sugar-saturated environment, you'll probably reach for what is within your reach, and if it's a concentrated source of pleasure that is carefully engineered to get you hooked, that puts a huge burden on you all the time to say no. Many of us don't.

Solutions that evade us

At no point in history has humans been so bombarded by stuff designed to get us hooked. Companies compete on the basis of creating evermore habit-forming products. Food is no different. Food corporations hire scientists to engineer habit-forming foods. The brain imaging technologies we use to find cures for addiction is used to fuel addiction. They put people in the MRI machine and give them Dorito chips to figure out ways to tweak the recipe to make it even more habit-forming.

Designed to be hooked

When it comes to processed food and sugar, we're all living in an obstacle course. Habit-forming foods are on every corner in your grocery store. Besides the rising obesity worldwide, what is more concerning is the appearance of adult diseases in children. <ul><li>Type-2 diabetes is linked to heavy sugar consumption, especially in sugary drinks.</li><li>There is also the appearance of whole new diseases that seem to come out of nowhere, such as the diagnosis of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease that didn't even exist until 1980.</li></ul>

Diseases caused by processed foods and sugar

We live in a world where we are surrounded by food products that are scientifically engineered to be habit-forming. Do you really think you have the freedom of choice? 

Sugar scientist and UCSF professor of health policy Laura Schmidt questions whether consumers really do have freedom of choice – and what policymakers can learn from corporations in nudging consumers toward healthier behaviors.

Understand yourself and those around you.

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