Can't stop scrolling or snacking? You're not weak-willed, you're being manipulated by big business... and this is the startling evidence, says top scientist

So why do we form bad habits – and deliberately do so, too, when we are meant to be creatures intelligent enough to know better?

As the young Danish scientist Nicklas Brendborg has it, few will opt for plain vanilla ice cream if the alternative is a bowl of ice cream covered with caramel sauce, chocolate chips, brownie pieces and marshmallows.

Unerringly, we are drawn to the big, the brash, the shiny – all-you-can-eat buffets, mounds of popcorn. We are less physically active, so burn fewer calories. One consequence is that we are approximately 18kg heavier than we were in the mid-1800s and two-thirds of all adults are overweight.

Though our bodies evolved in times of scarcity, and are ‘attuned for conserving energy,’ we now live in times of abundance and the blubber simply piles on – big bellies, extra chins, wobbly bottoms – resulting in diabetes, cardiovascular diseases ‘and general metabolic dysfunction’.

Brendborg places the blame squarely on food manufacturers and supermarkets, who ‘want to make as much money as possible’, and accomplish this by manipulating our ‘appetite regulation’.

Customers’ willpower and a sense of feeling stuffed and replete ‘are some of the manufacturers’ greatest enemies’, so billions – much more than is spent on life-saving medicines – are invested in ‘designing super stimuli’ in the laboratory. That is to say, emulsifiers, flavour enhancers, artificial sweeteners and colourings, and additives by the bucket.

The objective is to get us addicted to ultra-processed food – greasy chips, biscuits, microwave meals, frozen pizza, soda pop, energy drinks, sausages, cereals, packaged snacks, from which natural fibre has been extracted, so we never feel full.

Big business is intent on ‘the careful optimisation’ of the precise shade of yellow for crisps.

Though 60 strawberries contain the same number of calories as a single Mars bar, we are steered by advertising away from fresh fruit, organic meat, vegetables and rice, and made to crave anything containing sugar, ‘the cheapest source of calories in existence’, and which doesn’t require much digestion. A sugar rush is instant, ‘and the brain screams for more’.

Manufacturers disguise the levels of sugar they feed us by giving it a variety of pseudonyms: dextrose, glucose, sucrose, fructose, or evaporated cane juice.

As a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, this doesn’t alter the fact that ‘sugary drinks are one of the most efficient ways to fatten up a human’. The science is cynical: ‘identify the pleasurable compound, isolate it and add tons of it in concentrated form’.

The same principle goes for cocaine and heroin. Sugar is added to pizza dough, tomato sauce and burger buns. The tobacco industry adds sugar to cigarettes. Sandwiches at Subway contain so much sugar, legally they don’t qualify as bread in Ireland.

The other component to which we have become addicted is salt. Westerners now ‘eat enough salt to make a mermaid feel at home’.

Salt increases shelf-life and enhances the appearance and texture of food.

Saline solutions are routinely pumped into frozen meat, for example. Yet though our taste buds do enjoy salty tastes – try to confine yourself to a single salted peanut – the upshot is high blood pressure, kidney stones, and ‘a host of autoimmune diseases’.

Having discussed how one way or another we ‘knock out our natural control mechanisms, causing overconsumption,’ Super Stimulated turns to other areas where overindulgence causes problems, e.g. modern dating, sex addiction and pornography. ‘An abundance of dating options breeds indecisiveness and more unstable relationships.’

To try to make themselves more attractive (though in my opinion it looks grotesque), everyone wants plastic surgery – trout pouts, puffy facial fillers, Botox jabs. Brendborg says there were six times more breast-enhancement procedures and 20 times more facelifts in 2022 than there were in 2005.

But the villain here is social media, Instagram, TikTok and the rest, with people no longer knowing where the real world begins and ends, what’s fantasy, what isn’t.

‘Once social media has got you hooked, it’s dead set on keeping your attention,’ the algorithms, having already decided your likes and dislikes, tailoring content.

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As Brendborg says in his highly readable book, by scrolling on their phones for hours on end, allowing themselves to become completely engrossed, youngsters, in particular, are in the midst of a mental health crisis, everyone dissatisfied, suffused with feelings of inferiority, grief and depression, and with tiny attention spans.

Smartphones are another form of endless snacking, and there are more people on the planet with a smartphone than there are with access to a functional toilet.

Maybe the frantic search for stimulation has something to do with an avoidance of boredom. We want ‘shortcuts to euphoria’. Except they are shortcuts to oblivion.

There is too much of everything: too many streaming channels, too many action movies, too many angry people, too much ill health and dementia, too many bombs.

Brendborg points out that nuclear warheads today are 1,600 times more powerful than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

It’s not going to end well. Looking for tranquillity – somewhere, anywhere – Brendborg is impressed only by innocent jungle tribes and Amazonian hunter-gatherers, who are slim and healthy, with tip-top cholesterol and blood pressure figures. Unfortunately, they die of infections from monkey bites at the age of 34.

Nevertheless, their ways can’t be emulated, though Brendborg admits, ‘your neighbours might look at you strangely if you start hunting for local squirrels for food’. In Denmark, maybe, but in my beloved South Wales, no one will bat an eyelid.