The supermarket layout has been designed by people who understand neuroscience, social science, behavioural science and taste science. They use their knowledge with one agenda in mind - to make you buy.
Then we have the multi-national fast food giants who are getting quite clever in their marketing techniques. They target children for pester power, they sponsor sports games and slam us with their images everywhere.
According to Michael Moss, the Pulitzer prizing-winning reporter and author of the book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Have Hooked Us, food companies use a range of sophisticated techniques.
For example, they have an arsenal of scientists (unethical scientists if you ask me) working out the exact right balance of salt, sugar, fat and flavour to reach the exact "bliss point - the precise amount of sugar or fat that will send consumers over the moon". This is why the SS (sinister sugar) is used increasingly in processed foods. Sugar apparently hits the same parts of our brain as cocaine does.
I could go on and on with examples of how food manufacturers use cutting edge science to manufacture and market food, but this is only a small column and I ought to get to my point.
My point being, I wonder whether we can make healthier food choices when we have food giants using our brains and bodies against us. The more they learn, the more they use it against us.
This is why I agree with what Helen Clark suggested a few years ago.
Her party advocated for public health strategies to improve people's eating habits, such as healthy eating guidelines for schools, the Healthy Action, Healthy Eating campaign, and other strategies aimed at promoting healthy food choices.
Calls were also made to require food manufacturers to reduce the amount of salt and sugar in food, to tax high-sugar fizzy drinks, introduce traffic-light labelling, or get rid of advertisements for unhealthy food targeted at children.
Helen Clark was criticised for promoting a Nanny State and these highly important policies appear to have gone nowhere.
To those who think they should be able to make their own choices about what food to eat, then think again. Is this really your choice, or are you simply responding to the environment?
I would posit that for many of us the food manufacturers contrive our choices. We are without free will when it comes to purchasing and are merely puppets in the hands of scientists, marketers and multinational food corporations that are making bucketloads of money out of us.
This is why we need public-health strategies to have a shot at getting healthier and overcoming the diabetes and obesity epidemic.
According to the Ministry of Health, poor diet accounts for more deaths than alcohol, violence, cigarette smoking, and road deaths combined.
Isn't it time to deploy the same tactics used in the food-manufacturing industry to help people make the healthy choice when it comes to food?
I suppose the trouble is that there is too much money at stake, just as there is with tobacco. Good luck to all of us, I say.
-A registered psychologist with a masters in applied psychology, Wanganui mother-of-two Kristen Hamling is studying for a PhD in wellbeing at Auckland University of Technology.
