Podcast: Craving Freedom: Escaping the Grip of Processed Food Addiction with Dr Joan Ifland

Transcript of Podcast

Hello, hello, hello, welcome to Fit and Fabulous with me, Dr. Orlena Kerek. I'm super excited. We have a guest today. I'm super excited to welcome Dr. Joan Ifland Joan. Welcome, welcome, all the way from the other side of the world. Yes, yes. Thank you so much. I'm joining you from the Pacific Northwest in the United States and I'm really honored to be here.

Thank you so much for inviting me. Well, thank you so much for coming and I'm excited that you're, you're West Coast because I think of all those, I love swimming in the sea and in a, in a past life I used to dive. I think of all those amazing sea creatures you have there and think, oh, I'd love to go and explore one day.

It's a very, very beautiful part of the world. The Pacific Northwest is rainforest. But it's cold rainforest, so there are a lot of plants here that are not in the rest of the world. It's really, really cool. It is definitely on my bucket list. So today, what we're going to talk about is processed food and addiction to processed food.

But before we dive in, would you just like to introduce people and tell people a little bit about why you are somebody that people should listen to? Okay. Well, I wrote the textbook for processed food recovery, and I'm one of two people in the world who has a Ph. D. in addictive nutrition. Me and Kathleen D.

May Salmon, who wrote Potatoes Not Prozac. So, the textbook was a three year labor of love. Full-time, three years to piece together what has happened to us. I also have to mention a way in my past, I just went to my 45th reunion. I have an MBA from Stanford, which for there are many years, I wondered what, why the heck did I go to that trouble?

And now I know it's because pra business practices, business models. have made millions of people, really 2 billion people around the world are now overweight or obese. And I think, and I've looked at the evidence, and I've published on this, that it's because there is an addiction business model used by businesses selling addictive products.

So it was, it was really honed by the tobacco industry and then even now it's used by alcohol and by cannabis and by vaping all those industries uses so addictive products don't have any value. People buy them because they're because they're addictive. So in the mid 1980s, the tobacco industry rocked.

They're highly owned and a tragically effective addiction business model to process foods. And it all just starts from them. So, I was raised in a violent household. My parents were ragers.

And fast forward 44 years when I was 44 and I had two children 12 and 11 I was desperately doing everything I could to stop my outranging. And nothing was working. I did therapy. And I did a women's healing group. And I was on my first 12 step group. When a woman in that group said to me I hear sugar driving your rage.

I went and got the book. And I joined my second 12 step group, Food Addicts in Recovery. And I eliminated sugar and flour from my diet on January 1st, 1996, so almost 28 years ago. And within three weeks, the raging had stopped. Wow, that's amazing. And you were very ahead of the ball in terms of sugar and flour.

There was, there were a couple of pioneers before me, Julia Ross and Kay Shepard, but they didn't get the rest of the picture. So it's also dairy. Dairy has case of morphine and then excessive salt and excessive fat. And caffeine, of course, and then gluten, gluco morphine, which does attach to the opioid receptors in the brain, and then food additives.

So, this is the, this is the tobacco model where they, you know, isolated and added nicotine to the cigarettes and they took the tobacco leaves and sugar. And they added pyrazine to all, all in the effort to make it more addictive. So when they got ahold of processed foods in the mid 1980s, now all you have to do to understand what has happened to us as a world is think, Hmm, why would Philip Morris and R.

J. Reynolds buy Nabisco and General Foods? In three short years, 1985 to 1988, you have to say, why would an addiction, you know, addiction means you have a worthless destructive product, but you add addictive substances to it and you hide addictive substances in it and you sell it on the base of basis of the addiction, the addictive properties.

wiThdrawal avoidance, particularly. So all you have to do is ask yourself, why would that have happened? And then you can see what happened. Then you, you're just, the scales fall from your eyes, and you think, oh, my God, this is, this is tobacco all over again. With a couple of significant differences.

So I got busy. You know, the allergies went away and the lifelong sinus infection went away and the bloating went away and the cravings went away and the brain fog went away. And then the fatigue went away. And I just like, okay, I had this prestigious business degree, but I was too sick with allergies to go back to work after my two kids were born.

So I'm not busy. I said, this is my new career. My husband was doing a great job of supporting the family. And I'm going to adopt this as a career. The whole world needs to know. That particularly these refined carbohydrates are so destabilizing that when you crash become violent, there is violent behavior attached to it.

So I wrote a popular book, which I don't recommend. It's not science fiction. And there are big mistakes in it. And I, in the course of promoting it, I got invited. I got interviewed to go on one of the big U. S. national morning talk shows. And then I got to the very last producer, and he said, No, you don't have a degree in your field.

So I said, Well, dang, I'll go get one. I grew up in a city called Cincinnati, and that is the headquarters of a big school for new fields. So I went there three years straight, and earned this PhD in addictive nutrition. I finally figured out what an addiction is. It's simple. It's hyperactive reward centers.

And they're putting out, those hyperactive centers are putting out so much neurotransmitter, that neurotransmitters traveling right over to the behavior centers in the brain and latching on there and controlling behavior. That's it. It's a mechanical issue. It's not a moral issue. It's not a willpower issue.

It's nothing. It's just that. Somebody's been exposed to substances or behaviors because behavior is going to do it that release the training, those reward centers. To release enough neurotransmitter to dominate behavior. The other thing that's happening is that it's pulling the blood supply and the energy away from the frontal lobe, which is your breaking system.

No, I don't want to hurt. I don't want to eat that. That will hurt me. That will make me sick. That those cells are in the frontal lobe. But when you, when you have these hyperactive reward centers craving centers. Then the Fremelonk doesn't get enough energy to put out enough neurotransmitters to control behavior.

It's a competition. It's a fight. It's a battle between two centers in the brain. And the when you are in a culture which is being dominated by this addiction business model, the real, the cleaning centers will win over and over again enough to kill you. The 1. 6 million Americans. Every year, four times worse than COVID will die from this and call it diet dying from diet related diseases, but it's.

It's the inability to stop eating processed foods. Yes. And so just a quick question about processed foods. They put all kinds of horrible things into processed foods. So it's not just refined carbohydrates. It's like other things that you look at the label and think, I don't even know what that is. That kind of stuff.

Yeah, yeah. So, it's the five A's of the addiction resistance model, and the very first one is addictive product formulation, where you hide addictive substances in the product. So, if people knew that those substances were in there, they wouldn't buy it. So, like with tobacco, they had nicotine and pyrosine and sugar in the product.

And when they came in and process foods, they hired a consultant with a Harvard PhD in experimental psychology and marketing, it's now worth 45 million and he went around to all and he have developed a method where he could maximize the amount of sugar, fat, salt. In process foods and he could, he figured out a method where he could maximize that before the consumer would detect it.

And he went around and, you know, had green beans and pasta sauce, tomato sauce, all these products had the maximum amount of sugar, had salt added to them. So that's the first a, the addictive product formulation. And then the second a. It's youngest age that you can attack, that you can target. And with cigarettes, they tried the Joe Cool Camel cartoon, cartoons for cigarettes, aimed at 10 year old boys.

Well, with processed foods, you could go right into the uterus, in utero, and start to predict a fetus based on what the mother was eating. And then it's advertising availability and affordability. You've got to be able to get your hands on the substance at the moment that the cravings are dominating your brain, and you've got to be able to afford to buy it.

So, when they were taking out the cigarette vending machines, they were putting in snack and soda vending machines and then and then you have to create delusion around it. So the cigarettes, you know, cigarettes are so repulsive, but they were able to make them sexy with Lauren McCall. They were able to make them rebellious.

So the separate checks would buy them and they were able to make them masculine. So that man returning from World War II would buy Marlboros. It's just, you have to create that delusion. So they've created all this delusion about how yummy and cheap, inexpensive and convenient processed boots are, but they're killing us just like, it's.

It's worse than cigarettes. Cigarettes my friend Robert Lustig has said we were healthier when we were smoking. Yeah. Because that's attack cell function. You know, oxygen deprivation, obviously, tar in the lungs of the same heart disease. lung cancer, but processed foods attack cell function in eight different ways.

So every cell in the body is being systematically crippled. But the fun part of that, the flip side of that is so many. I mean, almost all I had a recovery community online for the last 6 years. I've seen mental disorders, all the physical disorders, behavioral disorders get on to remission because because these processed foods attacked all cells.

And so all cells get better and dysfunctional cells, crippled cells are the basis of disease. Yeah. So we just, we have a lot of fun with this. It's just so fun to have people, you know, they've been told, Oh, it will be on this medication for the rest of your life, or you'll have to manage this pain and then it just goes away.

That's amazing. And, and so it, like on one level, it sounds very easy. What's the solution? Just stop eating them. But I know that for some people, it's just not as simple as that. So for those people who find it difficult, how do you help them? Okay, this is I'm just so glad you're asking about this. iT was in the writing of the textbook.

I had two huge epiphanies from writing the textbook during the research for it. One is that at this point, 35 years later most people have this severely. They so how do you know that you have a severe addiction? Well, the American Psychiatric Association has, has developed over 50 years 11 signs.

And if you're experiencing six or more of those signs, you are considered to have a severe addiction. And that requires a very different kind of treatment, recovery approach, than a milder or moderate addiction. And if you want, I'll go over this. Yes, please. Yeah, yeah. On our website, processedfoodaddiction.

com, you can go and you can take a quick self quiz. It's not a diagnosis, but it's a self clarification. And so I know which ones from, we've been collecting that data for years, which ones are most common. And it's unintended use, number one, where you have a plan, I'm going to just eat one, you eat the package, or I'm going to eat clean today and by 10 o'clock you're eating a something processed.

Number two is failure to cut back. And we see in the United States, around the world That obesity is getting worse and worse and worse people cut back and then they regain but more and they or they can't they get to the point where they can't cut back anymore and you see the obesity numbers just going up and up in the United States 44 percent of the country is now overweight or obese and in other countries it's worse.

So that's number two failure to cut back. Number three is cravings, which do correlate with BMI. So we know that as these, these weight numbers increase, that the cravings are increasing too. The, the sixth one that I, that, that, sorry, the fourth one that I talk about a lot is is in spite of knowledge of consequences.

Now doctors are warning people to lose the weight or, you know, your, your high blood pressure, your diabetes. Your heart disease, these, these things are getting worse and people are still eating. Another one is, the fifth one is tolerance, progressive use. And you see that over the entire population. So these are numbers that, that track back decades.

And it used to be that people were eating 60 percent or 50%. Other foods and processed foods, and now in the United States, it's 73%. Wow. So that's progression, that's tolerance over time. And then the last one is the withdrawal syndrome. So people report that when they get off of processed foods, they have headaches.

They have irritability, they have lethargy, and the way to flip that is if you're eating, but you're not hungry, if you're eating because you're so angry and you have to numb out, or you're so depressed and you have to numb out, or you're so tired that is drug use, that's not food use. So, we think that, we don't think, I don't think, I don't offer opinions, I offer research.

But when you look at the research for how prevalent those behaviours are it's over in the United States it's over 80 percent. Wow, that's amazing. Of those six signs. And so how do people stop? How do people Okay, thank you. bring it back? So I can tell you, and I'm sitting writing this textbook between 2014 and 20 between 2014 and 2017.

And I write a full chapter on each one of those 11 signs. What is the evidence that this sign, which was developed for alcoholism, what is the evidence that that behavior or that syndrome exists in overeating? So I read the first chapter and said, Oh yeah, everybody's got that second chapter, everybody's got that third, fourth, fifth, sixth.

I'm writing this, I finished the sixth chapter and I'm like, Oh yeah, everybody's got that one too. And it just is like a ton of bricks. Oh my goodness! Oh, my goodness, we're way past. Oh, this is just addictive. We have this enormous population of people who are now severely addicted, and that's why nothing is working.

So I ran to the literature and I said, well, what do you do for severe addiction? Oh. Oh, two years of residential treatment. Well, we're not sending a couple hundred million people to two years of residential treatment, so what's the next level? And the next level is called intensive outpatient, where you go to the hospital for like six hours a day.

For 6 months or so, and I thought, I wonder if we could offer that online. I turned in the manuscript in 2017, and at the end of 2017, I met zoom and I immediately thought, oh, we could offer the equivalent. Intensive outpatient treatment over Zoom. Okay. So January 1st 2018, I had had a daily phone call.

As soon as I saw it, it was a severe addiction. I thought, Oh, 90 meetings in 90 days. It wasn't nearly enough. Was not nearly enough. I had really loyal people registered for that phone call, and it just wasn't helping. So I said, would you guys come and volunteer for on Zoom starting January, I think probably January 1st of 2018, 6 years ago.

And they all came, there were 10 of them, and we stayed on Zoom all day. These are people who for 20, 30 years have never been able to eat a clean day of food without processed foods. And at the end of that first day, I went around the Zoom room and I said, so how'd you do with your food today? I ate clean today.

I ate clean today. Yeah, I had a clean day. My first clean day in 20 years, I had a clean day. All the way around the room. At that point, I had been trying for 22 years. 14 major approaches to getting people off of processed foods and they have all failed like everything else out there was failing and there they were, there they were.

So we went through the whole week, they stayed sober, I call it sober, for the whole week. And then we had paid people we've advertised for the next week, same results. So I ran back to the researchers, what the heck happened? And I've discovered mirror neurons. So there is a system in the brain which is higher than the addiction, higher than the cravings.

So if you think of it like a hierarchy, it's like, who's got control? Well, if you have a severe addiction, the, the craving centers, dopamine, serotonin. opioid, caromanoid. Those centers have control of behavior. Frontal lobe has lost control of behavior. It's a mechanical problem. It's not a moral problem. But there is a system that is higher than the craving centers, and that is the drive to belong, to fit in.

So if you look through the evolution of humans, and this is evolutionary science, I acknowledge it's not creationist. The creationists have a very similar thought framework, which is you gotta be in a tribe. If you look at the creationist literature, the first thing they say when they start talking about somebody is which tribe they belong to.

It's very close parallel between those two other otherwise diversion fields of thought. So, there's 7 million years of evolution, human evolution. We don't have horns, we don't have fangs, we don't have claws, we don't have big muscles to run. But predatory animals see in silhouette. So, if one human is standing with six other humans, An anthropologist said we evolved in, in groups of seven to 12 people so that you will look like some enormous animal, especially if you're throwing rocks and they add, and then the segment to the tiger will run away.

So our very survival, if you were the kind of person who really liked to wander off by yourself, you did not survive, did not survive long enough to procreate. So in the human brain. is dominated, dominated by the urge to belong. The human brain loves their humans, and so the human brain will lead a person to, to fit in by copying the behavior around of the people around that person.

It's a whole field. It's the field of mimetics, imitation. That's what happened on January 1st, 2018. Those 10 people. This is carried over screens. So those 10 people were in a group, which was eating clean. And they all just, their loving brains said, Oh, look, we're seeing these people all day long, we should do what they're doing.

And they just, it was, what was impossible for decades for them, became easy, automatic. It's usual within hours of being on a screen with these people. Fabulous. We now, six years later, we have an online community. It's it's the addiction reset community. It's the ARC. And oh my gosh, what was impossible is now a gazing.

Perfect, perfect. And where can people find out more about you and the services that you provide? Our umbrella website is processedfoodaddiction. com. We also offer training, food addiction recovery advocate training. If you are, you know, in a position where you're telling people what to do and they can't do it, it's because there's a barrier to those cravings.

Processed food addiction.com, the Daily Living Community. The ARC is at food addiction or reset.com. The training is at food addiction recovery advocate.com. And then we now, because we've seen so many quote unquote incurable diseases, go into remission, we have a whole separate community or a disease remission called remission optimistic.com.

Perfect. Fabulous. Thank you so much for spending some time with us. It's been absolutely fascinating. Another person who is obviously following my, my desire to teach people that healthy eating is easy and fun. Absolutely. Absolutely.