Sweet Tooth, Sour System: How Capitalism Capitalizes on Our Decay

     Before the Industrial Revolution, few people needed to brush their teeth because cavities were rarer than today. Animals also rarely get cavities; only the heavy starch-eating ones do. Because the post-industrial diet was suddenly overloaded with refined sugar and processed flour, our teeth became chronically overwhelmed by sheets of chemical biofilms that accelerated tooth decay. People who gorged on processed foods in Western countries were suddenly far more likely to get cavities, and it has only gotten worse as time goes on.
    For this reason, before World War 2, dentists frequently advised people not to eat too much sugar. It was healthy and responsible for a dentist or doctor to warn their patients about the risks of sugar addiction. The primary reason they relinquished this lesson is that the invention of toothpaste made it unnecessary, so long as people were brushing their teeth twice a day. Another possible reason is that the sugar epidemic became highly profitable, not just for dental services but for manufacturing dental equipment as well.
    It makes the whole industry look like a product of society's sugar addiction. And like other industries, these side effects are propagating to the rest of the world, as it adopts our way of living. There is a common thread in the modern economic paradigm that seeks to exploit our addictions for profitable gain. It reaches us through social media algorithms, the pills we swallow, the desensitization of pornography, the useless junk we buy, the five-second entertainment clips that give us brief yet powerful dopamine spikes.

    The concept of addiction needs to expand from its cozy clinical definition that only includes chemical or psychological dependence to include the new forms we are seeing, whether they be in gaming, diet, tech, or any other modern industry. Last century, the tobacco companies lost because it was easier to sue them for knowing their products were harmfully addictive. The companies today all know what they are doing. Addiction can take so many forms that capitalism has hoodwinked our vulnerable biology, powerfully conditioning us into believing hedonism is good, right as we are most desperately trying to stop it.