The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains by Robert H. Lustig reveals how desire for profit has capitalized on our desire for pleasure. Here is a compilation of some of my highlights:

Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing. —JOHN BUTLER YEATS TO HIS SON WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, 1909

These past forty years have witnessed the twin epidemics of the negative extremes of both of these emotions: addiction (from too much pleasure) and depression (from not enough happiness).

I will also demonstrate that this hack—the systematic confusion and conflation of the concepts and definitions of pleasure and happiness—has been inserted into the limbic system (the emotional part) of our brains, thereby precipitating a slow-motion crash of a substantial percentage (somewhere between 25 and 50 percent) of individuals and exacting a severe detrimental impact on our whole society.

In fact, pleasure is the slippery slope to tolerance and addiction, while happiness is the key to long life.

Pleasure (reward) is the emotional state where your brain says, This feels good—I want more, while happiness (contentment) is the emotional state where your brain says, This feels good—I don’t want or need any more.

Reward and contentment rely on the presence of the other. Nonetheless, they are decidedly different phenomena. Yet both have been slowly and mysteriously vanishing from our global ethos as the prevalence of addiction and depression continues to climb.

Reward is short-lived (about an hour, like a good meal). Get it, experience it, and get over it.

Last and most important, reward is driven by dopamine, and contentment by serotonin. Each is a neurotransmitter—a biochemical manufactured in the brain that drives feelings and emotions—but the two couldn’t be more different. Although dopamine and serotonin drive separate brain processes, it is where they overlap and how they influence each other that generates the action in this story. Two separate chemicals, two separate brain pathways, two separate regulatory schemes, and two separate physiological and psychological outcomes. How and where these two chemicals work, and how they work either in concert or in opposition to each other, is the holy grail in the ultimate quest for both pleasure and happiness.

Aristotle expanded on the Jewish concept and argued that happiness consisted of being a good ethical person, a manifestation of reason and virtue, and coined the term eudemonia, a synonym for “contentment” (the concept on which this book is based).

For the rest of this book, pleasure, derived from the French plaisir for “to please,” is defined as the concept of gratification or reward. The keys to this definition are: (1) it is immediate, (2) it provides some level of excitement or amusement, and (3) it is dependent on circumstance.

Conversely, happiness is defined as the Aristotelian concept of eudemonia—that is, “contentment” or well-being or human flourishing, or, as in the introductory quote from Yeats, “growth”—physical and/or spiritual. The keys to this definition are: (1) it’s about life, not the afterlife, (2) it’s not prone to acute changes in one’s life, and (3) it is unrelated to circumstance, so anyone can be happy, not just the rich and the powerful.

Our current collective wisdom does not distinguish between reward and contentment at the etymological level, and fails to acknowledge the personal and societal consequences of mistaking one for the other at the biochemical level. And there are consequences, to be sure. That’s what this book is all about. Because chronic excessive reward eventually leads to both addiction and depression; the two most unhappy states of the human condition.

Over the past forty years, the dark underbelly of American enterprise has waged war on the American psyche. City College of New York sociologist Nicholas Freudenberg coined the term “corporate consumption complex” for the six biggest industries that sell us various hedonic substances (tobacco, alcohol, food) and behavioral triggers (guns, cars, energy).

America has devolved from the aspirational, achievement-oriented “city on a hill” we once were, into the addicted and depressed society that we’ve now become. Because we abdicated happiness for pleasure. Because pleasure got cheap.

Your feelings of reward and contentment are just downstream readouts of your neurochemistry.

But it derives from the same basic tenet: the biochemistry drives the behavior. Because the biochemistry always comes first.

You see declining school performance. I see inefficient brain mitochondria. You see the diabetes pandemic. I see liver and muscle fat accumulation causing insulin resistance. You see drugs of abuse. I see presynaptic transporters and postsynaptic receptors. You see teenagers glued to their iPhones. I see dysfunction of their prefrontal cortex, the area charged with maintaining attention. You see economic stagnation and societal unhappiness. I see the limbic system, the primitive part of the brain with neural inputs and outputs that drive everything from joy and elation to depression and helplessness.

You see the result. I see the cause. Treating the result never works; it’s too late, the horse is out of the barn. Plus, treating the result just papers over the real problem: the cause is still there. Treating the cause works. But you have to understand the cause before you can treat it.

Studies of married couples show that the contentment derived from the commitment of an interpersonal union generates added individual benefit: people within such unions tend to live longer and develop fewer diseases than those who have never married (odds risk ratio 2.59) or those who are previously divorced (odds risk 3.10).9 Because it’s actually about the feeling of social connection that comes with marriage. Those with positive social connections and affiliation are happier, and they live longer because of it.

But too much dopamine starts the downward spiral toward misery. If you can put “-aholic” on the end of the word (alcoholic, shopaholic, sexaholic, chocaholic), then the dopamine pathway is in play.

Dopamine is a Jekyll-Hyde neurotransmitter. Without it, you’re a laconic couch potato; too much and you can get aggressive and paranoid. In other words, like so many things in science and medicine, there is a sweet spot, an optimal level within the dynamic range of experience where the system functions at its best.

Dopamine is akin to the foreplay before sex (which also releases dopamine): the experience isn’t quite complete until the consummation, the euphoria, the pleasure—which is mediated through another set of chemicals, the endogenous opioid peptides (EOPs), whose cell bodies are in the hypothalamus, the brain area that controls hormones and emotions.15 The most famous of these is beta-endorphin, the brain peptide with properties similar to morphine.

The problem is that EOPs and their drug counterparts, the opiates, also down-regulate their receptors through the law of mass action. And when opioid receptors down-regulate, you go from wanting to needing. That’s the neurochemical equivalent of addiction.

Stress is inevitable. Suffering is not.

Long-term exposure to large doses of cortisol will kill you . . . but slowly.

However, chronic marijuana users show long-term cognitive decline to the tune of 8 IQ points,10 so, in the end, they may be less stressed about reality anyway.

When your PFC is under fire by cortisol, your rational decision-making ability is toast.

And what is America’s preferred drug of choice in dealing with stress? The one that is closest at hand. And that would be—you guessed it—sugar.

Cortisol is an appetite stimulant; infusion of cortisol into humans rapidly increases food intake.

It gets worse. Cortisol actually kills neurons that help to inhibit food intake. Thus the stress and reward systems are linked, with food (usually sugar) being the drug,35 breeding a new generation of stress eaters. Break out the Ben & Jerry’s.

When you’re under stress, your cortisol is up, your PFC is inhibited, your dopamine is firing—all of which will drive you to the chocolate cake or another drug of choice.

Those dopamine receptors need more, but deliver less. You’ll soon become tolerant or, worse yet, addicted.

The down-regulation of receptors is a phenomenon called tolerance; the receiving neuron is becoming tolerant to the excessive stimulus. This is both good and bad. It’s good because it means your neurons aren’t dead. It’s bad because the next time you go looking, you’re going to need more of the substance in order to get the same level of reward.

But when neurotransmitters bludgeon the receiving neuron en masse and without cessation, they can overstimulate and eventually kill that neuron through a process of programmed cell death called apoptosis.

Apoptosis is inherent to all cells in the body; it’s the self-destruct program that keeps good cells from turning bad (e.g., cancer).

There are two ways for a cell to die: necrosis (poisoning it from the outside) or apoptosis (self-destruction from the inside).

Yet many of us spend our lives bombarding our synapses with substances and behaviors that down-regulate receptors through the law of mass action (see Chapter 3) or that act as poisons (e.g., alcohol), taking out perfectly good neurons, or with substances that provide different forms of excitation, including illicit drugs of abuse, or too much coffee, too much stress, and not enough sleep.

This process is different from developing tolerance. Tolerance is the down-regulation of receptors with the chance of coming back. Once a neuron is dead, it ain’t never coming back.

Every substance and behavior that drives up your reward triggers will just as quickly drive down your reward receptors.

Why is it that alcoholics can consume so much more booze than your average drinker? Their livers have a much higher tolerance, because repeated and high exposure has increased their capacity to metabolize the alcohol.

People in recovery from illicit substances have a motto: “Once a cucumber becomes a pickle, it will never be a cucumber again.”

Some, like delirium tremens (DTs) from alcohol withdrawal, or hallucinations from benzodiazepine (benzos) or barbiturate (downers) withdrawal, can be life-threatening.

Similar to taking drugs of abuse, overperforming each of these behaviors can also manifest the phenomenon of tolerance (i.e., performing the behavior more and more to get less and less reward).

What these studies show is that the dopamine comes first: the drugs drive the dopamine signal, and the dopamine signal eventually drives these behaviors.

People abstaining from one substance will frequently find themselves embroiled with another drug or activity (sex, gambling) that can generate the same effect.

Addiction transfer is a standard alternative: when the addiction you have becomes unacceptable to yourself, your spouse, or society, you move on to the next. A rational person would opt to switch from more addictive, dangerous, and societally eschewed substances to socially acceptable alternatives.

For heroin or cocaine, you need a dealer and a wad of cash. For alcohol or nicotine, you need an ID. But for sugar, all you need is a quarter or a grandma.

And it’s only one of two addictive substances that are legal and generally available (the other one being caffeine). That’s why soda is such a big seller: it’s two addictive substances rolled into one.

Everyone has become a willing consumer of the two lowest common denominators. Sugar and caffeine are diet staples for much of the world today. Coffee is the second most important commodity (behind petroleum), and sugar is fourth.

How can a food—like sugar—that is necessary for survival also be addicting? Because certain “foods” are not necessary for survival.

But there are only four classes of essential nutrients: (1) essential amino acids (nine out of the possible twenty found in dietary protein), (2) essential fatty acids (such as omega-3 and linolenic acid), (3) vitamins, and (4) other micronutrients, such as minerals. Just add water and stir.

None of the foods that contain these essential nutrients are even remotely addictive. Of those substances that also contain calories, only alcohol and sugar have been shown to be addictive. The other addictive consumable found in food is caffeine.

Can you name a substance that: (1) has calories, (2) is an energy source, (3) is not required by any biochemical reaction in the body, and (4) is not nutrition by anybody’s estimation, (5) when consumed in excess causes damage to cells, organs, and humans, (6) we love anyway, and (7) is addictive? Answer: alcohol.

Fructose, the sweet molecule in sugar, contains calories that you can burn for energy, but it’s not nutrition because there’s no biochemical reaction in any eukaryotic (animal) cell on the planet that requires it.

And when consumed in excess, sugar fries your liver, just like alcohol. And this makes sense, because where do you get alcohol from? Fermentation of sugar: it’s called wine. Sugar causes diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver disease, and tooth decay.

Sucrose establishes hardwired pathways for craving in these areas that can be identified by fMRI. Indeed, sweetness surpasses cocaine as a reward in rats.

Is soda a food? Is there anything in soda that you need that could make it a food? Sugar—that’s an additive. Caffeine—another additive. Both addictive. Phosphoric acid, caramel coloring? No. Sodium? We’re all consuming triple what we need as it is. Water? Water’s necessary, but it’s not a food—it’s water.

The DSM-V says all you need for addiction is tolerance and dependence (engaging despite conscious knowledge and recognition of their detriment), with resultant misery.

You might call dopamine the dark underbelly of our consumer culture. It’s the driver of desire, the purveyor of pleasure, the neurotransmitter of novelty, the lever that business pushes to keep our economy going, but at a clear, perceptible, and increasing cost. We’ve purified our substances to concentrate their effects, and we are perpetually in need of the next shiny object.

Consider the fact that major depressive disorder (MDD) affects 16 to 18 percent of the U.S. population at some time in their lives, and that at any given moment 6 to 8 percent of the people you know are affected.

When Prozac, the first in the class of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), hit the market in 1986, prescriptions for antidepressants shot up a record 400 percent over the next fifteen years. The genius of Prozac was that it didn’t matter which form of depression you had. Whether you were climbing the walls or plumbing the depths of your psyche, Prozac could bring you to ground.

Today, SSRIs are the number three most prescribed class of drugs; more people under age sixty-five take antidepressants than any other medication, and as many prescriptions were filled for antidepressants as for cholesterol-lowering drugs.

Currently 11 percent of all adolescents are taking an antidepressant, not just for depression but for anxiety, anger management, premenstrual syndrome, and obsessive-compulsive disorder as well.

But serotonin differs from dopamine in many ways, which makes it difficult to understand and to study. First, serotonin is utilized by different parts of the body. The overwhelming majority (90 percent) is produced and used in the gut, where serotonin is involved in neural and hormonal responses to feeding and how full you are. Another 9 percent can be found in the platelets of our bloodstream, where serotonin helps our blood to clot. That leaves a total of 1 percent of all of your body’s serotonin in the brain itself.

One form of happiness, the nurturing behavior that occurs between parents and offspring, is mediated by oxytocin (the “bonding” hormone) rather than serotonin.

Serotonin is an ongoing requirement throughout life. Its primary building block is the amino acid tryptophan, which you must eat—you can’t make it.

For instance, triptans are a class of drugs that bind to two specific serotonin receptors, and they are the best anti-migraine medications that we physicians have at our disposal.

Alternatively, the serotonin transporter is a protein that recycles serotonin from the postsynaptic neuron back to the presynaptic neuron so it can be repackaged and used again the next time the neuron fires. These serotonin recyclers/transporters perform the same function as the dopamine transporter mentioned in Chapter 3, acting as “hungry hungry hippos.” They will suck the serotonin back into the neuron to be recycled and released again. This is the site of action of all the newer selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), like fluoxetine (Prozac), sertraline (Zoloft), citalopram (Celexa), and escitalopram (Lexapro) to increase the amount of serotonin within the synapse in order to elevate mood.

Going overboard on serotonin can take someone who’s morose and give them just enough brain activity and mental energy to make them suicidal, which is why people on antidepressants shouldn’t dose themselves.

There is no doubt that repeated daily dosing of LSD leads to reduction of effect due to down-regulation of serotonin-2a receptors,33 which might have long-term sequelae that we just don’t know about.

These studies provide yet another line of reasoning to support the assertion that I am trying to drive home—that our emotions are just the inward expression of biochemical processes in the brain. In the case of hallucinogens, signaling of the serotonin-1a receptor drives contentment, whereas signaling of the serotonin-2a receptor drives the mystical experience. In our modern society the role of mind-altering drugs to achieve heightened consciousness and/or contentment has yet to be determined, and will require careful scientific investigation in controlled settings along with philosophical and ethical debate before the public can be trusted with the key to nirvana.

We are our biochemistry, whether we like it or not. And our biochemistry can be manipulated. Sometimes naturally and sometimes artificially. Sometimes by ourselves but sometimes by others. Sometimes for good and sometimes for ill.

Thus, the tryptophan in your diet goes a long way toward determining how well you sleep, and how well you sleep goes a long way in determining your level of contentment. Our increased levels of sugar and caffeine in the diet sure don’t help matters any.

Eggs and fish have high concentrations of tryptophan, nuts and poultry are not too far behind, and spinach and soy make the list as well.

Furthermore, corn-fed beef has higher levels of branched-chain amino acids (leucine, isoleucine, valine) that contribute to liver fat, which drives the metabolic syndrome (see below). Chicken is the one processed food staple that contains a reasonably high quantity of tryptophan, but there’s a big catch. Chickens raised for the processed food industry are corn-fed, just like the cattle, and contain a lot of branched-chain amino acids as well.

Metabolic syndrome is the smorgasbord of chronic metabolic diseases from which America, and indeed the entire world, now suffers. To name them: how about heart disease, hypertension, blood lipid problems such as hypertriglyceridemia, type 2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, chronic kidney disease, polycystic ovarian disease, cancer, and dementia.

At the cellular level, the avalanche of energy from a processed food meal overwhelms your liver’s cellular power generators—the mitochondria.

When these liver mitochondria get overloaded, they have no choice but to turn the extra energy into liver fat. These molecules of liver fat have one of two fates: either (1) your liver can package them into very-low-density lipoproteins (VLDL), which can lead to heart disease and obesity, and which your doctor can measure as serum triglycerides on your lab panel; or (2) your liver can’t package them, they turn into fat droplets, and they make your liver sick. A sick liver doesn’t respond well to insulin, causing the pancreas to release excess insulin. Eventually your pancreas gives out, and now you have type 2 diabetes. You’ve got metabolic syndrome and are losing years of life as your cells and your body age more quickly. How can all this be happening when you’re dieting and buying low-fat products? That’s just what causes it! That’s what’s happened to America, and the world. We lowered the fat and put in more sugar to make our food palatable. And all of that increased sugar in the diet is a leading contributing factor to metabolic syndrome. I wrote a whole book about it (Fat Chance).

Both forms of diabetes share high blood glucose as the primary phenomenon. But type 1 diabetics are deficient in insulin, while type 2 diabetics have too much insulin but are resistant to its actions.

You might think that your gut microbiome, consisting of 100 trillion bacteria representing several hundred species and residing inside your intestine, would not be immediately connected to your brain. Nonetheless, your gut microbiome appears to have a mind of its own, and it very well may control yours.

Remember, 90 percent of the serotonin made in your body is used by the gut for various purposes; serotonin happens to be pretty versatile. Only 1 percent of your total body’s serotonin is in your brain, impacting, among other things, your level of well-being and contentment. Apparently a happy gut means a happy you. These bacteria may alter our emotional state and our dietary preferences through indirect communication with the emotion centers within our brain.

But fear not, there does appear to be one dietary item that can mitigate the damage that sugar does to the brain and promote the biochemistry and the processes that can predispose us to happiness. And perhaps not surprisingly its presence in the diet correlates positively with tryptophan and negatively with sugar. What is this magic chemical? It’s omega-3 fatty acids, of all things.

Fish don’t make omega-3s; fish eat omega-3s. Rather, omega-3s are made by green leafy plants either in the sea or on land. Algae are the best source of omega-3s around.

But wild fish eat algae. Farmed fish eat pellets. Sometimes the pellets are made from other fish, which, even if they ate algae, are now pretty diluted.

Why don’t SSRIs stop working over time? Because, in contrast to dopamine receptors, the postsynaptic serotonin-1a receptors don’t down-regulate in response to increased serotonin.

Serotonin does not exist in a vacuum. It is both directly and indirectly impacted by different neurochemicals, including other drugs, cortisol (stress), lack of sleep, and crappy diet. All the things that negatively affect dopamine as well.

OK, clinical depression is roughly 7 percent of the population, drug addiction requiring rehab is about 9 percent . . . but everyone is stressed nowadays, and for most of them, it’s chronic stress.

As you might expect, cortisol is the anti-contentment hormone. Contentment means all is well and it’s OK to chill. If the adrenal glands are releasing cortisol, something must be wrong: time to get some butt in gear—mobilize the glucose, mobilize the fat, grab a chain saw and prepare yourself for the zombie apocalypse.

Indeed, stress and cortisol are the mortal enemies of the serotonin-1a receptor, and cause down-regulation throughout most species—

Normally, cortisol goes up in the morning before you wake up to help you mobilize glucose, raise your blood pressure, and get ready for the day. By the time nighttime arrives, cortisol levels are in the sewer. This circadian rhythm of cortisol is missing in depressed subjects: their cortisol is always up and you can’t even suppress it with medications, making this a tough nut to crack.

The worst of all chronic cortisol problems stems from adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs (better known as child trauma). Pick your abuse (physical, sexual) or your stress (parents’ divorce, fighting, bullying): ACEs can result in cortisol dysregulation into adulthood, including increased risk for addiction and depression.

And what does America suffer from across the board? Chronic sleep deprivation. If you really want to make someone unhappy, deprive him or her of sleep. Given that roughly 35 percent of the adult population doesn’t get enough sleep (on average less than seven hours per night),34 what effect does this have on happiness?

Not only does insomnia and sleep deprivation wreak havoc on our mood and emotions, it messes with our waistlines, increasing insulin resistance, glucose intolerance, obesity, and all the other diseases of metabolic syndrome.

Indeed, one of the most pernicious causes of unhappiness across populations is bad food. Remember from Chapter 9 that tryptophan is low in the fast-food diet, yet the competing amino acids tyrosine and phenylalanine are abundant. More precursors for dopamine means more occupied transporters, which means less chance for tryptophan to get across into the brain to be converted to serotonin. It would seem that any pleasurable item we consume that drives dopamine up (sugar, alcohol, processed foods) can also drive serotonin down, possibly directly, or indirectly through metabolic syndrome. Conversely, weight loss that reverses metabolic syndrome can also improve symptoms of anxiety while at the same time increasing blood serotonin levels,44 although blood levels are not necessarily relevant.

Serotonin keeps dopamine in check, yet it appears that the same things that raise your dopamine can also tank your serotonin. Add cortisol to the mix, and happiness becomes unattainable.

Doctors prescribe SSRIs while people self-prescribe marijuana, all to accomplish the same effect; no wonder they’re both such hot sellers. But there are other, more sustainable solutions

Nature wired our brains for both contentment and motivation, two seemingly dichotomous states. Everyone wants to believe they have free will—that they have choice over their own actions. Then why would anyone freely choose addiction or depression, with more “choosing” them every day? Addiction and depression are not choices that people make willingly. Our environment has been engineered to make sure our choices are anything but free. It chronically nudges us toward reward and drives us away from happiness and contentment.

No man is an island,” wrote British poet John Donne (1572–1631). Each of us influences everyone else around us, whether in our family or our community. Wise words. The quote continues: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

We’re told we should be ecstatic, but we’re not. Because what we’re told is based on a faulty premise—that pleasure and happiness are one and the same. A premise ingrained in the American psyche, and indeed throughout Western civilization. Industry and government call it economic progress, but it is they who have subverted the meanings of these two emotions—reward versus contentment, pleasure versus happiness—for their own purposes.

We spend money on hedonic pleasures, trying to make ourselves happy, and in the process we drive dopamine, reduce dopamine receptors, increase cortisol, and reduce serotonin, to ever further distance ourselves from our goal.

Obesity and gout, both markers of metabolic syndrome and both consequences of his sugar habit, rendered him functionally disabled just as it does 25 percent of Americans today.

Aristotle argued “the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain is a first principle; for it is for the sake of this that we do all that we do.” Yet it looks like our avoidance of pain has taken precedence over our pursuit of happiness, and it’s come home to roost in the guise of our national opiate crisis.

Prior to the year 2000, the strongest narcotics, such as fentanyl, morphine, and heroin, were only available intravenously, which left many people out of the drug culture—because train tracks were grounds for losing your job or a Child Protective Services referral. However, in the late 1990s several potent oral opiates became available, such as OxyContin, Lortab, and Vicodin.

If the backbone of the middle class finds itself squeezed economically, drug addicted, and dying young, it sure doesn’t sound like America is particularly happy.

Perhaps the most obvious display of America’s current unhappiness is the state-by-state switch from one anti-anxiety agent to another. Five states and the District of Columbia have now legalized marijuana for recreational use, and another twenty-eight states approve its medicinal use.

What does long-term use do? Numerous studies document that frequent cannabis users have a high prevalence of anxiety disorders, and patients with anxiety disorders have high rates of cannabis use. But again, is this cause or effect?

The fact that thousands of people have turned their backs on SSRIs in favor of pot in order to deal with their anxiety says two things: (1) they’re unhappy, and some may even suffer from undiagnosed subclinical depression, and (2) they’re willing to spend a lot of money in an attempt to get happy.

When the U.S. government starts subsidizing marijuana (mark my words, it’s coming), you’ll know we’ve hit rock bottom.

Former Harvard president Derek Bok states that the percentage of Americans describing themselves as either “very happy” or “pretty happy” peaked in the 1950s, and thereafter has remained virtually constant, irrespective of rises in absolute or relative income.

Supermodel Kate Moss chimed in, saying, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” In other words, no matter your personal wealth, there’s always the impetus for more—or for your personal weight, there’s always the impetus for less.

However much you have (or don’t), it’s just not enough. And therein lies the problem. Because there is no amount of monetary increase or body weight decrease that can activate the serotonin system to provide contentment, especially if you are food restricting. Why? Because money and food trigger our dopamine systems, not serotonin. So we will always want more (or less). Does chasing money bring happiness? And is Kate Moss really happier? Her history of cocaine use belies her $9.2 million salary and mega-stardom. Chasing the wrong dragon. Perhaps that’s how she stayed so thin.

Once needs were met, more income did not generate more contentment. It would appear that the acquisition of stuff and property beyond the basics doesn’t up your Zen quotient. The pursuit of property is not the pursuit of happiness. In fact, it can just leave you wanting more.

If you want an analogy of the degree to which one man can change the landscape of America, think back to Frank Capra’s timeless Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

The junk food industry started to take off in the 1970s in part due to (1) improved harvesting and food processing technologies by companies like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, and (2) the enormous federal subsidies for corn, wheat, soy, and sugar supplied to processed food companies as part of the Farm Bill, which made them cheap.

Special interests grew exponentially in the 1970s, especially after the Supreme Court verdict in Buckley v. Valeo. In 1970 there were 175 lobbyists in Washington, D.C.; by 1980 there were 2,500. In 1970 there were 300 established political action committees; by 1980 there were 1,200.

They are very good at what they do. In the process they have honed the ability to exploit human emotion. It is called marketing. By conflating the notions of pleasure and happiness, they know how to get a rise out of your dopamine and cortisol.

How about “I’m Lovin’ It” from McDonald’s? This was the company’s tagline from 2003 until 2015. They veered off course in 2012 by tipping their hand with something a little too close to home: “Crafted for Your Craving”—in essence admitting to consumers that they have addictive intentions in mind. But that campaign didn’t last long. McDonald’s sales are currently flagging in part due to international consternation over the overwhelming links between processed food, obesity, and diabetes.

Every day, McDonald’s serves up 3.2 million Happy Meals, grossing more that $10 million per day, and kids who order them now account for 14.6 percent of customers.

Cell phone use is linked with stress, sleep loss, and depression in young adults (although of course causation cannot be proven).

In a tragic example of distraction by technology, a South Korean couple obsessed with raising their two “virtual children” online let their actual three-month old daughter starve to death.

At the extreme, teenage digital media abusers exhibit the “descent into Hades” (Chapter 5); interestingly, for boys it’s video game addiction, while girls instead appear to suffer from social media addiction.

Data on the alcohol industry is harder to come by, but one report says that alcohol revenues in 2013 were $308 billion. Twenty billion dollars was profit due to the high taxes on alcohol. But only 61 percent of the population imbibe alcohol, and 20 percent of America are problem drinkers (9.6 million) who spend $3,200 per person annually.

Now let’s look at the food industry. The food industry grosses $1.46 trillion a year, of which 45 percent is gross profit (which makes gambling and tobacco and alcohol look like chump change). Yet the U.S. health care system in 2015 spent $3.2 trillion per year,25 of which 75 percent are diet-related chronic metabolic diseases, and of those, 75 percent could be prevented.

And now, since we’re talking about more than 50 percent of the U.S. population afflicted with some form of chronic metabolic disease (driven by the sugar in processed food), this is an enormous problem.

Which addictive substance is the cheapest to procure, yet the most expensive burden to society? Nicotine used to be the cheapest. At its worst, lung cancer claimed 443,000 people a year, and cost health care $14 billion annually. But it also made society money, because the average smoker died at age sixty-four, before they started collecting from Social Security and Medicare.

Far and away, the most expensive burden is sugar. Because it wastes $1.8 trillion in health care spending, and kills slowly, thus reducing economic productivity. And of course it’s the one that is subsidized by the federal government.

Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer, and dementia are among a set of diseases known collectively as metabolic syndrome, and they threaten to bring our entire health care system to its knees.

Ultimately metabolic syndrome will be the straw that breaks Medicare’s back. Currently 9.3 percent of the adult American population is diabetic, and another 40 percent is prediabetic.

while 80 percent of the obese population is metabolically ill, that means 20 percent are not. They are what we call “metabolically healthy obese,” or MHO.

Conversely, 40 percent of the normal-weight population harbors these same diseases, but they’re not obese. If normal-weight people get them as well, how is this related to obesity? Rather, we now know that obesity is a marker rather than a cause of metabolic syndrome.

Social security is a legal Ponzi or pyramid scheme. Lots of young people at the bottom of the pyramid pay in, with the expectation that the money will be there once they make it to the top.

Now we’re talking about diseases that don’t kill you quick, like lung cancer. We’re talking diabetes, fatty liver disease, heart failure, kidney failure—diseases that take twenty years of misery and money before you succumb. Worse yet, what if social security is paying out to all these debilitated young people in benefits?

One big portion of the problem is that we have focused all of our efforts on health care rather than health, on treatment instead of prevention.

We plow billions of dollars into drugs and surgeries and nutraceuticals, some of which have in fact reduced death rates, but none of which has reduced the actual rates of disease.

The results showed that of all those who had specific diseases, you were more likely to survive them if you were happy by a factor of 25 percent.

In 1965, health care amounted to 5 percent of gross domestic product. In 2014, health care took up 17.5 percent of GDP. And by 2022 it is projected to be 19.9 percent.

Newer research argues that this is the first generation to live shorter lives than its parents.

Worse yet, Obamacare was predicated on a false premise—that the healthy people would pay for the sick people, and that access to a doctor would keep them out of the ER.

We doctors can keep these people alive, but we can’t stop people from getting heart disease or diabetes or fatty liver disease or kidney disease with pills, just like we can’t stop people from getting obese.

Prevention may sound good on a bumper sticker, but it doesn’t make any money for doctors, for hospitals, for insurers, or for politicians for that matter. Prevention is a zero-sum game.

And if you think that other people getting sick is their problem and not yours, chew on this: 65 percent of all health care expenditures are paid out of government dollars. That means your taxes. You’re paying twice—more for your own insurance premium, and more for everyone else too.

The large insurance plans have cut administrative costs to make the 85 percent minimum loss ration (MLR), but they hiked both premiums and deductibles, so that it became harder to use the health care you got. This resulted in the big insurers making even more money and doling out bigger executive bonuses.

Under the casino model, the insurance company wanted you to get sick. More people getting sick was their excuse to raise the premiums and make more money.

We could, if we would just reduce the most ubiquitous dietary item that is driving it upward: the cheapest of thrills—sugar.

In other words, drinking sodas, juices, and sports drinks doesn’t just hurt you when you’re older. It hurts you now, when you’re supposed to be at top earning potential, when you’re supposed to be paying into the system.

In America, it’s no better. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps, is a $75 billion program that covers 15 percent of adult Americans and 33 percent of children. What do these people buy? Sugared beverages are number two, and some other form of sugar-containing food are numbers four, five, ten, eleven, and twelve; amounting to 27 percent of all expenditures. Why should we care what they buy with our taxpayer money? Because people who get their food on the SNAP program are 50 percent more likely to die of heart disease or diabetes than SNAP-eligible people who don’t participate, and three times more likely than those who are SNAP ineligible.

Philosopher Eric Hoffer was quoted: “The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”

In the first fifteen chapters of this book, I hope I have made a cogent case that: (1) reward is not contentment, and pleasure is not happiness; (2) reward is dopamine, and contentment is serotonin; (3) chronic excess reward interferes with contentment; (4) business has conflated pleasure with happiness consciously and with clear-cut intent, specifically to get you to buy its junk or engage in hedonic behaviors favorable to industry; (5) government has passed legislation to make it easier to buy that junk or make easier access to engage in those behaviors to drive profit and GDP, and the Supreme Court has justified and supported these practices; and (6) buying that junk or engaging in those behaviors long-term and without thought can leave you and society fat, sick, stupid, broke, addicted, depressed, and most decidedly unhappy.

Consumption is related to the health of an economy, but clearly not the index of health of a society.

Here now, I delineate the Four Cs of Contentment: Connect, Contribute, Cope, and Cook.

Well, what can offer up mystical experiences without drugs? One place is religion. Interestingly, Karl Marx called religion “the opiate of the people,” placing it squarely in the reward/pleasure pathway.

But at its best, religion impacts your serotonin and can bring contentment. As you’ll learn in this section, when it activates dopamine, not so much . . .

Without doubt, one major appeal of organized religion is its basis in community, sharing a collective belief/purpose with like-minded people, attending services, and/or simply knowing that a group supports you.

Many people pursue their paths to individual happiness through religion. Yet, over the past two decades, more people (not just Americans) have been taking paths away from religion

When you are a part of something larger than yourself—whether united by religion, or tribal origin or heritage, or a worldview, or a hobby, or a common goal—you feel a greater sense of contentment.

People find contentment in being part of a community, which evinces social relationships. Social support correlates with positive emotions, greater reward activation, and increases in serotonin.

Facebook is now used by a total of 1.7 billion people—that’s 25 percent of the world’s population—and 1.1 billion log in at least once a day to engage in socializing, entertainment, self-status seeking, and information gathering.

And if the connection is not interpersonal, can you generate mirror neurons, synchrony, PFC activation, empathy, contentment, or serotonin? Are we all just, as MIT’s media researcher Sherry Turkle surmises, “alone together”?

A two-week time-lag analysis suggests that the more people use Facebook, the less subjective well-being they experience.

In other words, being “social” on Facebook meant being less social everywhere else.

Many in the psychiatric field have posited that Facebook actually makes us less content. Think about it—in Japan, a photo service called Family Romance sends fake friends to your house to take pictures for posting to unnerve your ex after you’ve broken up.

Is it any wonder that individuals who have withdrawn themselves from social media experience the same sort of withdrawal as from alcohol, nicotine, or sugar?44 And that we now have social media rehab services?

It’s Not What You Look at, It’s What You See

She argues that our digital diet has created a dissonance between empathy and compassion: there is a 40 percent loss of empathy in college students as a result of possessing a smartphone.

In order to reclaim our contentment, we need to reclaim our capacity for solitude, which is undermined by our technology and our devices. Solitude isn’t just being alone; it is a sense of self that is not derived from internet connectivity.

“If we don’t teach our children how to be alone, then we doom them to always be lonely.”

“You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away . . . the ability to just sit there. That’s being a person.” Those are the children I see in my clinic today. They are the ones who prefer to text than talk, who can only communicate through Snapchat and won’t make eye contact. They are the ones whose iPads have assured that they have never had, and never will have, a dull moment. And that’s a whole lot of unhappiness.

Madonna may have been the first Material Girl, but we are all living in her material world. Rather, I will argue that it isn’t the money that ups your serotonin. It’s what you do with the money and your time. Coco Chanel got it right: “There are people who have money, and there are people who are rich.” Money can facilitate the contribution you provide to others.

As Kahneman and Deaton posited (see Chapter 12), are they measuring pleasure (that is, “life satisfaction”) or are they measuring happiness (emotional well-being)?

Any study that requires looking backward must be taken with a grain of salt.

Going further into the weeds, food consumed outside the home has increased from 26 percent in 1970 to 50.1 percent in 20144 . . . so we do have a sous-chef! But eating out doesn’t necessarily mean eating well, even if you think you are.

In other words, America buys a whole lot of more pleasurable food for less money than the rest of the world, but in general, with the exceptions of some people on the two coasts, we’re not buying better-quality food.

Those who valued financial success appeared to derive less contentment from life.

If their affinity for materialism increased, their subjective well-being worsened, and vice versa.

The takeaway from all of these examples is that wealth can exaggerate your current situation, but it can’t fix it.

If you’re fulfilled, have enough to pay for necessities, and enjoy a life of strong relationships, money won’t actually make you more content, because the serotonin effect is not driven by wealth or income.

Ben Franklin said, “Money never made a man happy, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more of it one has, the more one wants.”

Before buying the next product that you just have to have that is going to make you happy, engage your PFC first.

There are jobs that make you feel good about yourself and others that destroy your self-esteem.

But if you’re one of the lucky ones, you experience your job as (1) self-transcendent (i.e., it matters more to others than it does to you), (2) poignant (challenging at difficult times), (3) episodic (with peak experiences that vary), (4) reflective (you can see the role that the completed work product will have on society), and (5) personal (you are proud to have performed it), then you have a job that can provide both life satisfaction and contentment.

Altruism is the process of performing tasks that contribute to the “greater good” while deriving no personal gain or reward. Altruism doesn’t activate dopamine but instead drives serotonin.

Does your achievement contribute to a goal—that is, a goal that’s bigger than you, that involves others?

Our moral decision-making capacity is biochemically determined and potentially subject to influence, depending on where and how dopamine and serotonin are acting.

Although we don’t have the hard neuroscience behind it, one easy way to increase contentment and derive health benefits is through volunteerism.

By offering your spare time to a cause bigger than yourself, without thought of personal gain, you can derive meaningfulness and contentment and eudemonia.

Winston Churchill, brought up with all the advantages money had to offer, famously said, “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” President George H. W. Bush in his convention’s acceptance speech in 1988 spoke about the “thousand points of light,” imploring Americans to take up charitable causes.

When research subjects are told to spend their “experimental charity” on themselves, their happiness index barely moves a notch. Yet when they are told to give that money to another person (prosocial spending), their happiness increases by the amount they gave.

Nurturing our PFC should be our prime directive; unfortunately, our environment has claimed our PFC as collateral damage. We have three simple methods to give our PFC the rest it needs—sleep, mindfulness, and exercise—but unfortunately none of these are simple in modern society, although each is crucial to your physical and mental well-being.

The brain after a good night’s sleep processes information differently than a sleep-deprived brain, with decreased activity in the amygdala and increased connectivity to the PFC.

Sleep deprivation also takes its toll on the immune system. If you give a group of a healthy adults a cold virus and isolate them for five days, which factors influence whether or not they get sick? Sleep.

At the present, 35 percent of Americans get less than seven hours of sleep per night (optimally you should get eight), and clinical insomnia (they can’t fall or stay asleep) befalls 23 percent of the adult population.

But unfortunately, while naps acutely improve cognitive functioning, they do not repair the negative mood of chronic sleep deprivation.12 And most people don’t take naps: they drink coffee or take 5-Hour Energy drinks. The caffeine will worsen their chances for restful sleep, and they get the added bonus of kicking their dopamine reward system into overdrive.

But the blue light emanating from the screen keeps your melatonin (the hormone in your brain that tells you when it’s dark outside) from rising, causing a phase shift in your sleep cycle and guaranteeing that you’ll feel awful in the morning.

Many prospective trials have now been conducted, and the overwhelming majority demonstrate that exercising is better than not exercising; exercise is about as good as SSRIs are in treating depression; and exercise + SSRIs is better than SSRIs alone.

Sugar is the stealth ingredient that’s been added to virtually every industrial recipe to make processed food palatable, and ultimately saleable.

If most of the food in the grocery store is spiked with added sugar, and you don’t know, because there are fifty-six names for sugar on the label and you don’t know them, then how do you avoid it?

And if its biochemical properties fry your liver, and its hedonic properties fry your brain and make you want more, how do you keep from succumbing?

However, American adults consume an average of 19.5 teaspoons of added sugar per day, and children consume an average of 22 teaspoons per day.

That means that 49 percent of the sugar we consume is in foods and drinks that we didn’t know had sugar. Salad dressing, barbecue sauce, hamburger buns, hamburger meat, as well as so-called healthy options, like granola and muesli. And don’t get me started on the health benefits of fruit juice, which is basically just sugar without the fiber.

Sugar makes food brown. This is why bananas brown and why we paint barbecue sauce on our ribs on the grill. It’s called the Maillard, or “browning,” reaction. Well, that reaction is happening inside your cells all the time, and when it does, two things happen: proteins unravel, and free radicals form, which further damages cells. The Maillard reaction has another name: the aging reaction. Every time this reaction occurs, it throws off an oxygen radical, which is similar to hydrogen peroxide: it’s great for killing bacteria on your skin, but it also kills liver cells, which is why so many people who have fatty livers progress on to cirrhosis. And fructose causes that aging reaction to occur seven times faster than glucose. Your body, and especially your liver, is aging faster with sugar. Just like it does with alcohol. Not good for your physical or mental health.

Sugar is a humectant (it attracts and maintains moisture). How soon does fresh bakery bread become stale? Maybe two days? How about grocery store commercial bread? More like three weeks.

By slowly adding sugar not just to desserts but to diet staples and condiments as well, the food industry has been able to hook us and keep us hooked

My public policy colleagues at UCSF have unearthed industry documents dating back to 1965 that show that the Sugar Research Foundation (the PR arm of the sugar industry) paid two scientists a handsome sum ($50,000 in today’s dollars) to publish two reviews in the New England Journal of Medicine that exonerated sugar and pinned the blame for heart disease on saturated fat.

Five out of six studies funded by the industry show no effect of sugared beverages on weight gain, while ten out of twelve studies by independent scientists show a clear effect on weight gain.

More recently, Coca-Cola was exposed in paying off three scientists to form the Global Energy Balance Network to pin the blame for the obesity epidemic on lack of exercise.

At the other end of the spectrum, the diet sweetener industry has argued that “a calorie is a calorie” means that their products, by providing sweetness without calories, is the better choice and certainly the best choice for those with obesity.

I offer to you my single most important key to happiness: COOK REAL FOOD FOR YOURSELF, FOR YOUR FRIENDS, AND FOR YOUR FAMILY!

Connect, contribute, cope, cook: each of these has the capacity to pull you out of addiction by limiting the need for reward by optimizing the effects of dopamine and reducing cortisol—and lift you out of depression by increasing contentment and the effects of serotonin.

People shoot up to recapture the pleasure of their very first hit. But they never can. So they inject more and more to derive less and less pleasure. It is not a coincidence that this woman misconstrued pleasure for happiness; this is exactly why she was an addict, albeit now in recovery.

And don’t forget, things that generate pleasure often can be expensive, but things that generate happiness are dirt cheap.

The prediction of our demise due to our quest for pleasure is attributed to Aldous Huxley, who pronounced, “What we love will ruin us.” In Brave New World (1932), he described a human race that by the year 2540 had been destroyed by ignorance, technology, constant entertainment, and material possessions.

Conversely, Tolstoy buffs will recall that in War and Peace (1865), after protagonist Pierre Bezukhov is incarcerated by the French, he has ample time to ponder the meaning of existence. Awed by the serenity of a fellow prisoner, Pierre learns “not with his intellect but with his whole being . . . that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity.” In his captivity, Pierre postulates the virtuous simple life as the shortest route to contentment: “The satisfaction of one’s needs—good food, cleanliness, and freedom—now that he was deprived of all this, seemed to Pierre to constitute perfect happiness.”

There is plenty of room for pleasure in life, and lots of things can bring you pleasure. But no thing can make you happy.

Experiences can make you happy. People can make you happy. You can make you happy.

To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, a great pleasure seeker himself: Those who abdicate happiness for pleasure will end up with neither. The science says so.

May we learn to find contentment – Not that I speak from need, for I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am. (Philippians 4:11)

Associate Pastor – Discipleship.  The Church at LifePark

Professor of Discipleship, Columbia International University

Follow me on twitter:  rickhiggins5