The Pleasure Trap

“Our population faces a plethora of health dangers. Most people—over 75 percent!—will die prematurely of strokes, heart attacks, congestive heart failure, cancer, or the consequences of diabetes. This means many of the people we know—our friends, spouses, parents, relatives, co-workers, and even our children—will needlessly suffer and die from one of these conditions. We say “needlessly” because scientific evidence now clearly indicates that most of these tragedies are preventable, not through early or more intensive medical intervention, but through the adoption of health-promoting dietary and lifestyle choices.”

“The real culprits in most modern-day health problems are excesses, not deficiencies. It is the subtraction of these excesses that will solve most of the problems, not the addition of medications or supplements.”

“In just the past two decades, our caloric intake, mostly from increases in refined carbohydrates and sugar, has skyrocketed by 650 calories per person, per day. A few decades ago, meat was an expensive commodity and a rare treat for some. Today, virtually everyone can have all they desire, and unfortunately they do—every day.

… Modern foods are tastier than ever before, as the chemicals that cause pleasure activation have been isolated and artificially concentrated. Meats, once consumed as wild game, with perhaps 15 percent fat, are now genetically engineered and growth-hormone controlled, and routinely contain as much as 50 percent or more fat. Ice cream, an extraordinary invention for intensifying taste receptor pleasure response, is no longer an expensive delicacy. French fries and potato chips, laden with fat, are the most commonly consumed ‘vegetable’ in our society.”

Ever heard of the famous “Milgram experiment”? Amazing stuff.

Quick overview: 20 years after the Holocaust, Stanley Milgram was concerned about the power of social pressure. He conducted an experiment where individuals would “face a dilemma—to do what the person in authority orders, or to disobey and follow one’s conscience.”

Quick context: Subjects were recruited. They’re brought into a lab. They meet a friendly older guy in his 50s who, unbeknownst to them, is an actor who is part of the experiment—the “Learner.” Then they are greeted by another guy—the “Experimenter”—who is a stern character wearing a white lab coat.

They are told that they will be studying whether punishment in the form of electric shocks can improve memory. They are brought into a room and watch the “Learner” get hooked up to some fearsome-looking shock generator—with his hands tied down, presumably so he won’t hurt himself. Then they are taken into a separate room with a panel of electric switches to control the shocks they will be administering to the Learner.

These shocks range from “slight shock” (15-60 volts) to strong shock (120-150 volts) to “very strong shock” (210-240 volts) and finally to the highest level that says “Danger: severe shock” (375 volts). As Lisle and Goldhamer say, “A chilling warning of extreme danger—“XXX”—was beneath the final switch of 450 volts to indicate lethality.

The experiment continues. The Learner gets shocked and the subject can hear him responding in pain as the shocks are administered—starting with a small “ouch” to agonizing screams, begging them to stop. If the subject looked like they wanted to stop, the Experimenter (in the white lab coat) would tell them “Please continue” or “Please go on.”

How far would the subjects go? Would they shock an innocent person who’s screaming for them to stop? Or would they stop relatively early in the experiment?

“In the months after he had collected the results of his experiment, Stanley Milgram asked diverse groups of people what they thought the results of his study might be. All groups that were asked this question had nearly identical intuition—none anywhere close to the truth. A group of 39 psychiatrists predicted that most subjects would not go beyond 150 volts, at which point McDonough is demanding to be freed. They predicted that less than four percent of subjects would reach “300 volts,” and that one subject per thousand would reach the highest level on the board (450 volts-“XXX”). None of the groups surveyed predicted any subject would be successfully pressured to reach the end of the switchboard.
What Milgram found was that well over sixty percent of subjects, regardless of age, social class, or education, were sufficiently intimidated by the Experimenter to shock McDonough to the maximum degree (450 volts-“XXX”).”

“First and foremost, we recommend that your household adopt a simple rule: No junk food in the house! The rule is offered out of respect for the power of the pleasure-seeking and energy conservation mechanisms that reside in each of us. If we keep enticing high-fat, high-sugar, drug-like foods in the home, they will wind up inside of us.

The key is not to demand perfection, but simply to put resistance in the path of transgression: Make it necessary to go out for such items. We have also often observed that even if our clients are able to control themselves with junk in the house, its presence can be mentally exhausting. With pleasure-seeking instincts tugging away, and with an open path of little resistance, it can be taxing to constantly battle the question of whether or not to indulge. In our 20 years of helping people work toward healthy living, Strategy #1 is the most important tool we have discovered: ‘No junk food in the house!’”

“We cannot be certain as to the precise length of the average night’s sleep for our ancient ancestors, but there are several methods we can use to make an educated guess: (1) We can observe what happens to people when they go camping, without the benefit of artificial light; (2) We can observe people in sleep laboratories, where subjects have no idea whether it is day or night; and finally, (3) We can observe people in the non-industrialized world where Edison’s gift has yet to fully arrive. These investigations all point to the same conclusion: We are designed by nature to sleep while it is dark, about nine to ten hours each night.

This finding is consistent with what we know to be true of people in our own country prior to electric light. Historical documents indicate that people slept between nine and ten hours before the ingenuity of Thomas Edison illuminated the night.”

“The problems that face us now are almost never genetic ‘flaws’ to be most effectively exorcised by yet-to-be-discovered miracles of modern medicine. The problems we now face, and will continue to face in the 21st century, are overwhelmingly problems of dietary excess and recreational drug use, along with deficiencies of sleep and exercise.”

“We now live in a world that is both artificial and wondrous. In the eye-blink of a single century, the timeless threats of scarcity and its misery have been all but conquered by most of the world’s peoples. For this, we should be more than thankful. But the road before each of us is still filled with great challenges.

It is our hope that these words may be useful in helping you find the road home to your birthright, to the pursuit of health and happiness unencumbered by the pleasure trap. For those willing to make the effort to undertake this journey, we offer a warning and a promise: It is likely to be the most difficult, and yet most rewarding, path to choose.”