Re: Why do we like junk food?
If I decide to eat chocolate I ate it because I'm itching for something sweet and it happens to taste quite good on a very basic level (my tastebuds send "this is good" signals to my brain).
Similar to when my grandmother used to make home made souvlakis. They tasted "good". The feelings I felt after eating both are not different. Although I'd usually have deadly gas after eating souvlakis, but that's besides the point.
Chocolate is a prime example of the media in action. Supposedly yes, it is proven to contain certain chemicals that may change how you feel in a very short time frame.
Media: "Wow this is a great idea, we can control how people feel, in both a positive and negative way. Let's tie chocolate into feeling warm/relaxed/etc instead of the negatives, and push it as hard as we can".
If the media showed severly overweight adults and children looking at a piece of chocolate cake with tears in their eyes, then suddenly went into a rage and attacked the cake with their mouth -- eating it in less than 5 seconds, while crying and sobbing. Then for good measure, showed a slideshow of random disgusting medical images at the end, can you say with 100% confidence chocolate would be as popular as it is today?
[Note: assume you never saw a positive chocolate ad in your entire life, and commercials similar to the above were being ran for the last 50 years]
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