Just finished Dr. David Kessler's
End of Overeating:Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite. I read a review of it in the Wall Street Journal the day it came out and was quite impressed with the sound of it.
WSJ Article here
I read the first 70 pages at the bookstore and decided it was worth ponying up the $25 for it. I have to say I'm pretty impressed. It does read like a textbook, but his research is excellent and his conclusions do make a lot of sense.
He takes up some of Michael Pollan's points made in Omnivore's Dilemma, which I liked. A particularly interesting observation was that much of the prepared food we now eat has been practically "pre-digested" and pumped up with water to make it easier to swallow and digest. This naturally makes it possible to eat even more food than when we had to chew diligently to get it down. He used apples and applesauce as one example.
The final part of the book addresses a real problem that I know I have--why are some foods so hard to put down, and how can you retrain your brain to not do the same cue-response that it has always done when faced with foods of your obsession?
His descriptions of the foods sold at chain restaurants like Chili's was disturbing--there is a certain
gross factor of knowing how they manipulate ingredients so, for instance, the tortilla wrap soaks up more grease, making the fat-salt-fat layering more effective. He describes the three main ingredients in foods that he calls highly palatable as those containing fat, salt and sugar. If a food is able to incorporate all three, then it will surely be a home run in the grocery store.
Reading it made me very conscious of food cues and how I react to what is on my plate or in my refrigerator. He makes a good parallel between big food and big tobacco. Particularly legitimate was his observation that gov't regulations aren't the answer to our increasing obesity as a nation, but a change in public opinion and what is considered acceptable food--not unlike when smoking became socially unacceptable. Interesting from a former FDA official.
