David A Kessler, author of The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite,
is a doctor and lawyer, med school dean and former FDA commissioner.
He’s also someone whose weight has yo-yoed back and forth all his life,
someone who is plagued with insatiable junk-food cravings. His new book
– grounded in research that included dumpster-diving chain restaurants
to read the ingredient labels on the foods whose makeup they wouldn’t
discuss, tries to answer the neurological question of why we crave
shitty junk food:
The labels showed the foods were bathed in salt, fat and sugars, beyond
what a diner might expect by reading the menu, Kessler said. The
ingredient list for Southwestern Eggrolls mentioned salt eight different
times; sugars showed up five times. The “egg rolls,” which are
deep-fried in fat, contain chicken that has been chopped up like
meatloaf to give it a “melt in the mouth” quality that also makes it
faster to eat. By the time a diner has finished this appetizer, she has
consumed 910 calories, 57 grams of fat and 1,960 milligrams of sodium.
Instead of satisfying hunger, the salt-fat-sugar combination will
stimulate that diner’s brain to crave more, Kessler said. For many, the
come-on offered by Lay’s Potato Chips – “Betcha can’t eat just one” –
is scientifically accurate. And the food industry manipulates this
neurological response, designing foods to induce people to eat more than
they should or even want, Kessler found…
“The food the industry is selling is much more powerful than we
realized,” he said. “I used to think I ate to feel full. Now I know, we
have the science that shows, we’re eating to stimulate ourselves. And so
the question is what are we going to do about it?”
