The End of Overeating

After reading Salt Sugar Fat, I checked The End of Overeating from the library again. I’d read this book by David A. Kessler, M.D., former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a few years ago, and I remembered that he discussed the same salt, sugar, and fat in the context of restaurant meals and fast food, such as Chile’s, Cinnabon, Hardee’s, Burger King, IHOP, etc. This guy spends a lot of time in airports and restaurants.

Dr. Kessler covers a lot of the same territory as Salt Sugar Fat, explaining why these ingredients combine to create irresistibly delicious foods and discussing the food and restaurant industries’ engineering and marketing of foods created to get us to eat more, more, more (and thus produce more profit for the food pushers). But he goes beyond that to discuss conditioned hypereating and the culture of overeating. He then provides steps to take to break the eating habits that have been created by our culture and food purveyors. Dr. Kessler himself struggles with his weight, so he is both extremely practical and kind in his discussion of how to break the habits of overeating.

The chapters are short, and the book is easy to read. The advice is practical. As it happens, eating plans such as Eat to Live and VB6 incorporate a lot of what Dr. Kessler advises. Eliminating processed foods, restaurant meals, and fast food goes a long way towards breaking the eating cues provided by hyperpalatable foods loaded with salt, sugar, and fat. Going back to whole foods, real foods, home-cooked foods can help reduce the conditioned response to salt, sugar, and fat that helped create the habits of overeating in the first place. Eliminating snacking and getting used to smaller portions of food can help, too.

Once you are aware of the engineering and marketing of food in the United States, you begin to see the insidious nature of the problem we are facing. We record the Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives marathon on the Food Network on Mondays and watch several episodes of Triple D in a row during the week. After reading Salt Sugar Fat, watching Triple D became almost a joke between us. Pulled pork? Check. Loads of cheese? Check. Lots of salt and sugar in the dry rub on the meat, the pan gravy, the biscuits, the sauces – everything – check. Butter, oil, lard, mayo, cream, sour cream, etc. Check. So it is not just the large corporation and the chain restaurants and fast food joints – it seems that everyone who sells food has caught on to the power of salt, sugar, and fat to keep us coming back for more. Judges on cooking shows chide the contestants for not salting food enough more often than they complain that the food is too salty. Reading the label on something as innocuous as frozen vegetables leads to the discovery of not only salt added to the peas, but sugar, too.

I don't mean to say that I am never going to eat processed foods again, or that I am never going to eat in a restaurant again. But I have found that totally staying away from these types of food has broken the hold that they once had on me. I also know that when I eat these types of food again, I am going to have to be careful not to get sucked back into eating them on a frequent basis. 

If you want to know more about the cue-urge-reward habit cycle and how to break it, I recommend reading this book.