David Kessler is a pediatrician and lawyer. He was also the Commissioner of the US Government's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) between 1990 and 1997. The End of Overeating is his second book. An earlier book, A Question of Intent: A Great American Battle with a Deadly Industry, dealt with Kessler's attempts to change tobacco legislation during his time at the FDA.
The End of Overeating attempts to create a new eating category called 'conditioned hypereating'. Using a mix of neuroscience and psychology, Kessler argues that the modern food environment has changed the way people respond to food. A mixture of fat, salt and sugar has unbalanced eating habits. The brain's reward system has hooked its claws into this highly addictive mix, stimulating hypereating. Kessler quotes one food industry insider who admits the goal is to get consumers 'hooked' on their products. Another food industry professional goes so far as to say their products are 'spiked' with addictive taste enhancers.
So pernicious is the effect of this potent mix of salt, sugar and fat - what food industry experts call the 'three points of the compass' - that people will continue to overeat, even when it makes them feel sick.
The American Industrial Food Complex
The most fascinating part of The End of Overeating is the section dealing with the American food industry. Kessler interviews many insiders to provide a startling picture of how foods are made irresistible to the palate. Not only are foods spiked with lots of salt, fat and sugar, they are also processed to an extraordinary degree. The goal of this is to make these commercially produced foods easy to swallow, minimising the amount of chewing required. One food industry insider quoted in the book describes this as a kind of 'adult baby food'. The aim is to make it possible to effortlessly swallow larger amounts of food, adding to the industry's profits.
The book is revealing also for the amount of scientific research employed to make foods highly palatable. A wide range of chemical tastes - fake flavours and enhancers - are also added to industrial foods. Indeed, as The End of Overeating describes it, modern industrial foods are highly complex concoctions invented under intense laboratory conditions.
Problems with The End of Overeating
The End of Overeating makes inflated promises about having discovered the magic solution to the social ill of obesity. The book offers very little that is new in the obesity debate. That fat, sugar and salt are addictive is a no-brainer. It's practically common knowledge. All Kessler really manages to do is nicely dress this truism up in the impressive language of neuroscience and psychology.
The final section of the book simply offers all the usual strategies for dealing with food addiction. No new insights are offered.
Kessler seems to be going somewhere when he discusses the practices of the food industry, and the lengths it goes to when trying to hook consumers on their products. Yet his answer to the awesome power of this industry is to suggest a program of junk food inoculation. Or more simply put, self-control.
It would have been more interesting if Kessler had taken his explorations of the food industry and their effect on obesity further. The logical conclusion would be that the industry's ability to make large profits is facilitated by an obese population. The interests of the food industry and public health, it would appear, do not naturally converge.
The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite, is published by Rodale Books (2009). ISBN-13: 978-1605297859
Chris Saliba - Chris Saliba is a freelance writer. Read more of his workplace articles at chrissalibafreelancewriter.blogspot.com
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