[Nodrog]

Originally Posted by Dante Hicks

Addictive is one of those words that's mis and over-use has rendered it pretty meaningless, but certain foods definitely seem to be incredibly hard to give up for certain people (in the same sense that something like gambling might be). Sweet and fatty foods certainly give people a certain type of mild euphoria (or comfort) in the same sense that certain drugs seem to give people. But then I'm not sure if "addiction" is a useful term to use in discussions like this.

Well there's a certain trivial sense in which anything that people enjoy can be called 'addictive', in that they dont want to give it up. Most people are addicted to sex, Michael Jordan is addicted to basketball, and so on. But the only real reason to talk in this manner is if youre trying to score points in an "X is Bad"-style debate; there's a fairly obvious difference between physical addiction (in the sense of morphine/nicotine/etc), and psychological addiction, even though the the line can be blurred in some cases and psychological addiction is presumably mediated by physical symptoms.

I mean, if there's a campaign against (say) drug use among kids which is something along the lines of "If you take drugs then you will mess up your life, die early, generally be a loser, and everyone will hate you!" then I (as a druggie parent) can take one of two approaches. Firstly I can say "Well, I don't want my kids to live the same life as I do, so it's important they stay clear of drugs..." or I can say "Well, I took/take drugs, and I'm OK, why shouldn't my kids be like me? Are you saying something is wrong with me?". The latter opinion I suspect might dominate among this sort of crowd.

And the balanced position would be to assess the claims the school is making, and act accordingly. Most drug 'information' provided in schools is just propaganda verging on outright lies, so the parents would be justified in questioning it, regardless of whether they were druggies. Similarly a parent is fairly justified in questioning whether being forced to eat boiled cabbage rather than a packed lunch is going to have a noticable positive effect on the kid in the long run (rather than, eg, turning them against the desire to be healthy by propagating the cultural myth that healthy food tastes bad). If the parents were objecting to the school telling students that being fat is bad for you in the long run and that some degree of nutritional eating aids health then that would be a different matter, since this is actually true.