Scarcity Brain by Michael Easter

Author:Michael Easter [Easter, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2023-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

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I spoke with my friend Mike Roussell about our new food and diet environment. He’s a PhD nutritionist who runs a nutrition consulting business and works with average people, professional athletes, and Silicon Valley–billionaire types who make him sign nondisclosure agreements.

“My dad has been a tailor for forty-five years, and he’s been busier than ever since the pandemic,” said Roussell. “No one fit into their clothes. The combination of inactivity, being around ultra-processed food all the time, and using food to relieve stress has led tons of people to gain weight. But the worry is that those new habits last.”

For example, candy sales hit a record during the pandemic. They boomed 15 percent. The candy trade group the National Confectioners Association wrote, “When times are tough, people turn to sweets to make themselves feel better. The pandemic not only gave people more license to buy goodies, it got them into the habit of buying them online and consuming them at home.”

They’re correct. Imagine the following scenario: We’re sitting at a counter. In front of us are bowls of two new kinds of M&M’s. The M&M’s in the first bowl are “low calorie,” while the ones in the second are “high calorie.” Scientists at the University of Miami found that when we receive cues of scarcity—say, a news story that mentions that all is not right with the world, such as economic decline, a pandemic, or really anything about American politics—we choose the high-calorie M&M’s and eat double the amount we would if we didn’t receive a scarcity cue.

Negative information, the scientists believe, triggers our brain to unconsciously assume a famine is nigh. This reaction to scarcity cues was a feature that first came about long before humans. Pick any animal. When it thinks resources are scarce, it responds by eating. A lot. It attempts to put on weight. Bulking up is a brilliant defense mechanism.

Pair our scarcity brain with the modern news cycle, the rat race of life, abundant ultra-processed food, and the limited-time release of the McRib. Congrats, you have an elegant formula for folks who waddle.

Roussell recently challenged his clients to go a month where 80 percent of what they ate were Tsimane foods.

“One of the biggest things to come out of it was that people realized that so many of the foods they thought were ‘healthy’ were ultra-processed,” said Roussell. “I had a guy on the challenge who ate a ketogenic diet. He discovered that most of his food was very processed because he was eating keto cookies, keto drinks, keto bars, keto packaged meals. Or there was a lady who would leave the office and go crush a workout at the gym. Then she’d buy this smoothie from the gym and go home and have a meal. The smoothie advertised itself as healthy and touted all these different health benefits, but it was full of added sugars and processed fruit goos, which made the smoothie check out around an unexpected nine hundred calories.”

Roussell continued: “People struggle to see through all the health marketing.

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