I have done something gross. I needed to do it. I did it for you. I did it for science, in the name of human exploration. I did it because I was a bit curious. Last week, late one evening, after my partner Michaela had gone to bed… I tasted a drop of her breast milk.
It was sweet, oddly creamy, and very rich. It was… nice. I enjoyed it. OK. There you go. I said it. I tasted and enjoyed some breast milk.
My daughter Molly goes wild for it, and I can see why. Nature has designed breast milk to be sweet and incredibly moreish. It’s packed with high levels of fatty acids and sugars that supercharge our growth. It’s also dynamic – the mother’s body changes the make-up of the milk based on the signals it gets from the baby, delivering antibodies specifically tailored to the baby’s needs, to help prepare and protect their immune system.
Breast milk is an intelligent super food. It is manufactured by the mother’s body to give the baby exactly what they crave, and to keep them coming back for more. That is a joyous miracle… but it’s also one of our best insights into how our complex biological desires are being weaponised against us.
In his brilliant new book, Super Stimulated, Nicklas Brendborg stops short of claiming that food manufacturers are designing their products to replicate the exact calorific make-up of the highly addictive breast milk. But it’s undeniable that, by accident or design, they got there anyway.
Nicklas explains that in breast milk, 55% of the calories come from fat, 40% from sugary carbohydrates, and 5% from protein. He then compares that to some of the most highly processed foods:
Chocolate – 50%, 45%, 5%
Ice cream – 50%, 45%, 5%
Danish pastries – 50%, 45%, 5%
Donuts – 50%, 45%, 5%
Cheese puffs – 55%, 40%, 5%
Crisps – 55%, 40%, 5%
What an extraordinary coincidence. There are no other natural foods that have this sort of ratio. It is most likely, says Nicklas, that food manufacturers have been so successful in optimising their food to reach ‘bliss-point’ – the point at which the food is as satisfying and as additive as it can get for humans – that their products have accidentally matched, almost exactly, the calorific make-up of our earliest and most primal experience of food.
Whatever the truth of that, it reveals something incredibly important: manufacturers are designing foods that prey on our primal instincts to make us addicted and, in turn, fat.
When you are sat on the couch in the evening and your mind wanders to that bar of chocolate in the cupboard, and you pull on all the will power you can muster to resist, that is not a fair fight between you and the chocolate bar. That’s a fight between you… and the finest scientific minds, backed by millions of pounds of research, whose sole objective is to make you eat the chocolate.
If we are to understand, and solve, the obesity crisis… we must understand this.
This is just food manufacturers, but the principle exists in almost every element of our lived experience: large companies spending millions on designing their products to be as additive and effective as possible, largely in the pursuit of profit.
The most obvious and egregious examples come from the tech industry, whose thirst for our attention is so unquenchable that they will stop at nothing in manipulating our dopamine receptors and primal instincts, trapping us into their products and platforms.
A few years ago, I made a documentary about Dark Patterns, the manipulative tricks and techniques that websites use to make us click, buy and subscribe to things. Have you ever tried to cancel an Amazon subscription? It can be a complex maze of clicks through various bits of the website that don’t even seem relevant, before it bombards you with reasons to stay, manipulative and emotive language, all before requiring you to… call the company. If you want to buy something from Amazon, you can famously do it in… one click. This dark pattern is called a ‘Roach Motel’, designed to make it as hard as possible for you to do something that loses the company money. There are plenty of these design tricks that websites use. They’ll use trick questions to make you think you’re agreeing to something you’re not, or the ‘scarcity’ technique, to make you think a product is running low and create an urgency to buy it, or ‘confirmshaming’, where they will use highly emotive and manipulative language to make you do something they want you to do. Some have been outlawed, like ‘sneak into basket’, where you’d come to the end of an online purchase and realise the company had sneaked something else into your basket. You can listen to that documentary by clicking here.
These are just a few of the ways that our biology, our primal needs and wants, are being hacked. It calls into question the very idea of individual responsibility, of consent, of autonomy. Are the decisions we are making really ours? In a battle between our primal brains, and highly optimised machines and meticulously designed food… what chance do we stand?
As every element of our life is upended by the technology we use, as we grapple with an era of addiction and loneliness, and look for solutions for an epidemic of obesity… this might be one of the most important things we understand.
Let me know what you think? You can always send me a message from the contact page, and we can have a chat about it. I love hearing from you. I get a ping to my emails and a lovely little dopamine hit, so feel free to pull on my biological instincts.
