284 ‒ Overcoming addictive behaviors, elevating wellbeing, & thriving in an era of excess

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Scarcity Brain began with pandemic hoarding.

  Journalist Michael Easter, author of The Comfort Crisis, finished that book in March 2020 and watched people hoard canned food, toilet paper and sanitizer. Over the following months, drinking, drug use, shopping and weight gain all rose. That led him to ask how a brain built for scarcity copes with a world of abundance in food, stuff and information, the subject of his book Scarcity Brain.

• 02

  Obesity reflects an evolutionary mismatch with a cheap, hyper-palatable default food environment.

  Overeating once gave a survival edge, since stored energy carried you through the next lean stretch. Now food is abundant enough that the US throws out about a third of what it produces. Michael says Americans spend about 8% of income on food, versus over 40% in the past, and Mexican women once spent about five hours a day grinding corn for tortillas. Peter's 'default food environment' is palatable, calorie-dense, non-perishable and cheap. He doesn't see it as nefarious, but 'healthy' was never one of the design criteria. About 40-plus percent of Americans are obese.

• 03

  The Tsimane eat 'every fad diet's forbidden foods' but almost no ultra-processed food, and have remarkably healthy hearts.

  Michael traveled to Bolivia after reading a 2018 paper on this Amazonian forager-horticulturalist group. From La Paz it took a 12-hour drive and a six-hour boat trip up an Amazon tributary. The Tsimane eat white rice, plantains, sweet potatoes, corn, fish, small wild chickens and tapir, with few vegetables. Everything is a single ingredient, usually unsalted and fire-baked. CT heart scans brought out by researchers showed hearts that looked about 30 years younger. People who avoid accidents (snakebites are a real risk) often live into their 70s. The nearby Mosetén, who buy processed food and fry with oil, appear to have more heart disease.

• 04

  Kevin Hall's ultra-processed food study: about 500 extra calories a day.

  Kevin Hall at the NIH, an empiricist skeptical that processing mattered beyond calories, ran a metabolic-ward study. Volunteers ate as much as they wanted for two weeks each of ultra-processed and minimally processed diets matched for nutrients such as carbs and salt. On ultra-processed food they ate about 500 more calories a day and gained weight. On minimally processed food they spontaneously lost weight. One explanation is eating speed. A food-industry contact told Michael snacks need 'three Vs': value, variety (many intense flavors) and velocity (fast to eat). He says snacking barely existed as a habit before about 1970.

• 05

  Michael's one-ingredient diet experiment made him lose weight without trying.

  For a month at home he ate only single-ingredient foods, combined as he liked: oatmeal and eggs, air-fried plantains and fish, sweet potatoes, green beans, elk he had hunted, and fruit for snacks. Whole aisles at Costco were off-limits. He dropped weight so quickly from about 180 lb that he had to force-feed 'mountains' of plantains to stay near 175, eating 50–70% carbs. Social meals forced compromises. He suggests it as an experiment to find foods that fill you up, then eat that way 80–90% of the time. Michael says about 60–70% of the American diet is ultra-processed.

• 06

  The 'scarcity loop' is three parts: opportunity, unpredictable rewards and quick repeatability.

  Common casino myths (no clocks, songs only in the key of C, no right angles, pumped-in oxygen) didn't hold up. Michael found the real explanation at a Las Vegas research casino funded by 73 gambling and tech companies. Slot machines offer a chance at something of value, unpredictable payouts from nothing to $20,000, and instant replay: players average 16 games a minute, faster than we blink. Modern machines return about 85 cents per dollar, with frequent small wins. The same loop drives social media likes, dating apps, Robinhood's fee-free trades and spin-the-wheel discount ads, which he says raised conversion sevenfold.

• 07

  Addiction isn't purely a moral failing or purely a brain disease.

  Michael describes the 'moral failing' and 'brain disease' models. A counterexample: about 20–25% of US soldiers in Vietnam regularly used heroin. Under Nixon's Operation Golden Flow they had to pass a urine test to go home, and nearly all did. Back home, about 95% stayed clean, and those who relapsed tended to have used drugs before the war. Michael also reports from Baghdad, where war trauma, few other outlets and a flood of the stimulant captagon from Syria fueled a new drug epidemic, much as factory closures preceded the US opioid crisis. Drinking at 15 or younger carries a coin-flip chance of alcoholism, versus about 10% when starting at 21 or older.

• 08

  Happiness comes from enjoyment, satisfaction and purpose, which often require struggle.

  Peter favors Arthur Brooks's 'macronutrients' of happiness: enjoyment, which is deeper and more shared than pleasure; satisfaction, which is fleeting and highest after struggle; and purpose. Michael spent a week at a Benedictine monastery in New Mexico. The monks rise around 3 a.m., eat little, keep silence, are celibate and do about four hours of labor daily ('pray and work'). Researcher Alex Bishop has found them happier than average Americans. Michael's takeaways: hard-won rewards satisfy more, and serving something beyond yourself matters. Peter admits the routine would drive him mad.