Quote from Lucio Buffalmano on February 6, 2020, 5:14 pm

The Hacking of the American Mind explains how marketers and food producers got us all hooked to products and food that feel pleasurable, but that are instead making us sicker and sadder.

Pleasure is short-term & poor for long term, happiness is good

Much of Lustig's book is based in the difference between pleasure and contentment.

• Pleasure, or reward is the emotional state where your brain says "this feels good, I want more"
• Happiness, or contentment, is the emotional state where your brain says "this feels good, I don't want or need anymore"

The 7 differences between pleasure and happiness

• Pleasure is visceral; happiness is ethereal
• Pleasure is short-term; happiness is long-term
• Pleasure is usually achieved alone; happiness is usually achieved in social groups
• Pleasure takes; happiness gives
• Pleasure can be achieved with substances; happiness cannot be achieved with substances
• Pleasure often leads to addiction, but you can get as much happiness as you want without getting addicted.
• Pleasure is fueled by dopamine; happiness by serotonin

Serotonin is good, dopamine is bad

Lustig goes into biology, and explains that while both serotonin and dopamine make you feel good, only serotonin is good over the long term.

Junk food, chasing money, getting a like on social media, they all increase dopamine while driving down serotonin.
The problem is that dopamine is addictive, and what drives up dopamine usually does not build the foundations for a happy and successful life.

One of the reasons is that dopamine receptors have been targeted by unscrupulous marketers and producers, who seek to stimulate our dopamine with their unhealthy products and food.

To increase serotonin:

1. Make human connections
2. Contribute: do something that feels good to you, be part and work towards something bigger than yourself
3. Sleep as much as you need and exercise
4. Eat well

PROS

Great, potentially life-changing wisdom on short-term pleasure VS long-term happiness.

CONS

The major cons of this book:

1. Bias
2. Poor sourcing of information
3. Biased, poor, and at times even nonsensical interpretation of evidence

The author tries so hard to make his case more compelling that he ends up cherry-picking information and "massaging" evidence to make it sound worse than it actually is.

For example, he says:

life is going in the wrong direction, as witnessed by an increase in the American death rate and a decline in the median American life span

Nonsense.
How is life exactly going in the wrong direction if most indicators all point upwards?
Even zeroing in on life expectancy, he fails to mention that life expectancy has risen almost nonstop and it's near the all-time highs.

In some other passages, the author doesn't seem to understand what he's talking about.
For example, talking about the link between happiness and income:

Note that countries with monetary resources don't necessarily score higher. 
Saudi Arabia has oil, Nigeria has diamond. And they score 45 and 125, respectively.

To begin with, it's well-known that, below a certain threshold, income does correlate with happiness.
Second: having diamonds doesn't mean a country's population is rich. Nigeria's GDP per capita at the time of writing is less than 2.000 dollars a year.

He also equates GDP with people's wealth, which is idiotic.
Again, trying to show that the US is doing so terribly, he compared it to Norway and Denmark, and says:

What do they have that we don't.
A socialist country, Norway and Denmark pay very high taxes. And their GDP is one half of ours.

The GDP is an aggregate measure of economic output, it includes everyone in a nation.
If he wants to measure individuals' income he needs to take into account the population. That's such elementary stuff that it's difficult not to lose all your trust in the author.

I'm not even saying that the author is wrong.
I think northern Europe rocks when it comes to the quality of life and I would not personally live in the US.
But the measures and arguments he is using are ludicrous.

Review

The core concepts make a lot of sense.

People who understand the difference between pleasure and happiness are successful because they avoid short-term temptations and focus on the long-term stuff that is more likely to create happiness and success.

Why the low rating, then?

Lustig takes it too far.
He hints at machinations, he suggests the government has engineered our addictions, and he twists numbers and statistics to make the problem bigger than it is.

Finally, this is truly misplaced doom and gloom, backed by bias and misinterpreted evidence.

If you listened to him, we are living in the worst time to be alive.
Obviously, we are not.
That makes Lustig sound like a witch-hunter, instead of a scientist.
And any person who approaches this book with some critical thinking skills will find Lustig to be biased.