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could ever get from nature. This processing removes any nutrition once found in the food but still leaves all the calories. The final concoction (we can’t really call it “food” at this point) offers a staggering variety of over-the-top flavor sensations in every single bite—but your body knows there is no nutrition there, so you continue to want more food, even past the point of fullness.
    If we stopped right here, we’d have made our point. Clearly, these foods violate our first Good Food standard by provoking an unhealthy psychological response—heck, they were designed to do just that!
    Unfortunately, there’s more.
    Chronic consumption of these foods doesn’t just affect our taste buds, our perceptions, and our waistlines.
Over time, they literally rewire our brains.
PLEASURE, REWARD, EMOTION, AND HABIT
    Pleasure, reward, and emotion are all interconnected in our brains. Reward circuitry is integrated with parts of the brain that enrich a pleasurable experience with emotion, making it more powerful, and easier to remember. The combination of pleasure, reward, and emotion pushes you toward rewarding stimuli—including food.
    The foods in question—supernormally stimulating without adequate nutrition to invoke satiation or satiety—tell the brain to release dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with the pleasure center. Dopamine motivates your behavior, reinforces food-seeking (“wanting”) and energizes your feeding. It gives you that rush of anticipation before you’ve even taken your first bite. (You’re daydreaming at work and start thinking about your favorite cookie from the downtown bakery. You’re visualizing the taste, the smell, the texture. You start to get excited and happy at the thought of picking up cookies on the way home. You want those cookies. That’s dopamine talking.)
    On the way home, you stop at the bakery, pick up a dozen cookies, and take your first bite before you’ve even pulled out of the parking lot. (Of course, because that cookie is supernormally stimulating, but lacking in nutrients that satiate, you don’t stop at just one.) Immediately, the brain releases opioids (endorphins—the body’s own “feel good” compounds), which also have a rewarding effect. The release of opioids brings pleasure and emotional relief, releases stress, and generally makes you feel good.
    Over time and with continued reinforcement, those dopamine pathways begin to light up at the mere suggestion of the food, like when you’re driving past that bakery, see someone else eating a similar-looking cookie, or watch a commercial for cookies on television. This preemptive dopamine response (and the memory of the reward you’ll experience when you indulge) makes it all but impossible to resist the urge to satisfy that craving. Your want has turned into a need .
    The kicker?
    You don’t even have to be hungry—because it’s not about satisfying your hunger . It’s about satisfying the craving .
    After just a few trips to the bakery, your memory circuits tell your reward circuits that the cookie will bring you joy. Dopamine promises satisfaction, if you only give in to your urge. You can’t resist, so you eat the cookie(s) and your endorphins help you feel good (for a while). And so the vicious cycle serves only to reinforce itself until you have developed a habitual response—the automatic craving for a specific food in response to certain triggers.
    Automatic cravings do not sound psychologically healthy to us.
THE STRESS EFFECT
    Stress is another factor that promotes the reinforcement of these unhealthy patterns. We don’t need a scientific study to tell us that many people eat when they’re stressed to distract themselves from the situation and help themselves relax. The trouble is, chronic stress (whether it stems from anxiety or worry, lack of sleep, over-exercise, or poor nutritional habits) is driving us—via our biology—to overeat.
    Stress affects the activation of reward