The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite

by David Kessler

Hardcover, 2009

Call number

613.2 K

Collection

Publication

Rodale Books (2009), Edition: 1, 336 pages

Description

Most of us know what it feels like to fall under the spell of food--when a handful of chips leads to an empty bag. But it's harder to understand why we can't seem to stop eating, even when we know better. Dr. David Kessler, the dynamic former FDA commissioner who reinvented the food label and tackled the tobacco industry, now cracks the code of overeating by explaining how our bodies and minds are changed when we consume foods that contain sugar, fat, and salt. Food manufacturers create products by manipulating these ingredients to stimulate our appetites, setting in motion a cycle of desire and consumption that ends with a nation of overeaters. This book explains for the first time why it is exceptionally difficult to resist certain foods and why it's so easy to overindulge. Dr. Kessler's cutting-edge investigation offers new insights and helpful tools to help us find a solution.--From publisher description.… (more)

Media reviews

It's a quick read, partly because of the short chapters, and partly because it runs a little to repetition, but for all that, it's a fascinating read.

User reviews

LibraryThing member detailmuse
An expose on the food industry: how sugar, fat, salt, flavor and texture are deliberately and repeatedly layered, one upon another, to create hyper-palatable foods that stimulate appetite rather than satisfy it. The resulting "conditioned hyper-eating" is compared to alcoholism, and former FDA
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Commissioner Kessler provides suggestions for "food rehab" (basically: cognitive-behavioral tips to avoid hyper-palatable foods). Good information but less science than I expected and poorly written, including choppiness and extreme repetition (which made me set it aside for over two years).
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LibraryThing member lindap69
I skimmed this book then listened to it on audio - the combination has imprinted a few hints for better eating - highly recommend this one
LibraryThing member PlantStrong
A good book with a general plan that makes sense and can be done. It lacks specifics, however, and some people may be disappointed by that. So, for someone to really benefit from Dr. Kessler's information, they have to be willing to commit - and stick to it, no matter what.

I think if we take into
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account the ridiculous amount of calorie/fat/sugar/salt overload that we see every day in the USA - in restaurants, groceries, and just at home - that it should be sufficient motivation to take action. Kessler names names when it comes to certain types of foods (in restaurants) that are really bad for us - and he's just scratching the surface.
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LibraryThing member waitingtoderail
I have to say I was quite disappointed by this book. Kessler has great credentials, and I expected a fairly dense tome full of facts and figures. Instead, this is a breeze of a book - I finished it in less than three hours - full of examples using Kessler's own food idiosyncrasies. His prescription
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for how to break the cycle sounds an awful lot like Weight Watchers, quite honestly. I don't really see anything new here for anyone with more than a passing interest in the food industry. I mean, big surprise, Applebee's doesn't employ massive numbers of sous chefs in their restaurants, it all comes to them premade and ready to heat up. I suppose if you had no interest whatsoever in where your food came from and all of a sudden it was sprung on you that a chicken nugget isn't really the same thing as a chicken leg, well, it might be valuable.
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LibraryThing member wenzowsa
As someone who has struggled with food for her entire life, I admit fully that I enjoyed this book. It further helped me to rethink my perception on what was actually going in my mouth (another great one for this is “In the Defense of Food”), and also to think about how the food industry plays
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a large psychological role on shaping people’s desires toward food – like my own.

Kessler’s book is well-researched. He cites numerous studies, experts, and restaurant nutritional information (I swear, I’ll never eat at Chilis again). While technical in nature, Kessler’s writing style is informal, and makes the book easily accessible to any audience.

In brief, I highly recommend this book. I know that I won’t be able to look at French fries or a chocolate bar in the same way after having read “The End of Overeating”
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LibraryThing member kitkatkt247
This book was alright. I had hoped that I had picked up a relaxing read- there is a lot of science in this book. Which is interesting, but not what I was looking for. " The End of Overeating" as a title would suggest that this book is more about the concept of stopping yourself from overeating.
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Instead, the majority of the book is about the big bad evil corporations that have created food that we are psychologically compelled to eat over and over again. Since I don't really buy into it being their fault the majority of the book to me seemed like pushing the blame off onto someone else. But the factual information was interesting and I found myself stopping more often when I was reaching for food that I didn't actually need.
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LibraryThing member dukefan86
This book helped me to think about eating in a different way. I especially enjoyed learning more about how chain restaurants prepare, serve and market their food.
LibraryThing member lildrafire
Great read with hard data on how we are marketed fat, salt, and sugar as addictive substances, how food is so processed we don't even have to chew it, even food we THINK is not processed, and steps to break the addiction. We are so much like Pavlov's dogs when it comes to fast food.
LibraryThing member jmoncton
This NY Times bestseller has been featured on several television and radio shows, partly because it is written by Dr. David Kessler, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Kessler spends a huge portion of the book discussing how food manufacturers and restaurants add fat, sugar
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and salt to make it more palatable and how our body reacts to these ingredients. He even dedicates whole chapters to chains like Cinnabon and goes over many of the tastier items on the Chili's menu. He discusses the biology of food addiction and he gives some suggestions (avoid contact with unhealthy foods), but after finishing the book, I didn't feel like I knew how to turn my penchant for sweets into a craving for celery. I did find myself craving a Cinnabon though. I admire Dr. Kessler for all that he has done in trying to get full disclosure in food labels and restaurant selections. His goal of ending childhood obesity is wonderful. But, his book is not going to end chubby thighs, at least for me. Hopefully his work will lead to healthier choices and a better overall awareness of the causes of obesity. So, if you are interested in how our food industry is contributing to obesity in our society or want to know how many teaspoons of sugar are in a Strawberry and Cream Frappuccino (18!!), then you will find this book interesting and informative. But, if you are looking for a diet book, then this is not it.
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LibraryThing member bragan
Why do so many of us have a tendency, or even a compulsion, to eat more than is good for us, and to eat things we know perfectly well aren't healthy? David Kessler answers this question in two parts. First, he discusses what happens in our brains when food gets associated with wonderful floods of
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reward chemicals washing over our neurons, and why that can have so much power over us. Then he talks about the food industry, and the ways in which it deliberately engineers food for "craveability." Which, yes, is an actual term they actually use.

Kessler lays out the facts and the scientific arguments and their implications in a clear and readable way, although he sometimes repeats things more than he really has to. And I could have done without the many detailed descriptions of how various restaurants cook up their various yummy dishes with remarkably similar salt-and-fat-infusing techniques, if only because they made me really, really hungry. Which undoubtedly helps to prove his point, but is nevertheless somewhat unkind. I also think he leaves out or downplays some of the more complex social factors that help determine how we relate to food. But his points all seem pretty good, as far as they go.

Then, in the last few sections, he addresses the question of what can be done about overeating, offering up some suggestions for those seeking to lose weight, including some that have worked for him. They're all very sane and sensible suggestions, offered up in a tone that is encouraging without downplaying the difficulty. And yet, I cannot help but come away with the depressing feeling that for those of us conditioned towards unhealthy eating, real change and lasting weight loss require such Herculean effort and the sacrifice of so many sources of joy and satisfaction that even the first step of convincing ourselves it's truly worth it may be insurmountably hard.

Also, I want some pizza now. And a chocolate chip cookie. Sigh.
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LibraryThing member thewalkinggirl
A fun mix of popular science and food industry reports with a little self-help section thrown in at the end. There's nothing really new here, but it's put together in an easily digestible way so it goes down very easily (and that's about as close to punning as I get).

A lot of the focus is on how
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the brain responds to food, particularly junk food, which is addicting because it sets off self-reinforcing triggers in our brains that cause not just a chemical reaction but also becomes habit forming and largely unconscious. The author referenced his own experiences in discovering his hand reaching for a cookie or walking into a fast food restaurant without him even being aware of it. Afterwords, he would feel bad about it, but until he trained himself to become aware of his eating, he was on auto-pilot for the before and during parts. What makes this even worse is that because so much of this type of eating is unconscious and because junk food has been basically pre-chewed, people have no real awareness of how much they're consuming. (They think they do, but studies have found that most people, especially overweight people, greatly underestimate how many calories they've consumed. It's not a lack of willpower, it's a lack of knowledge and self-monitoring skills.)

There were some parts that surprised me, like when the author was surprised by the inclusion of HFCS in bread (hello, it's on the label--which makes me wonder, if doctors aren't reading food labels, who besides me is?). I'm also curious about the process of how fast food became so ubiquitous. The author interviews a Japanese food industry exec who thinks American fast food is a sort of bland, over-sweetened goo (my words, not his), yet it's a global phenomenon. How did that happen?

It also doesn't go into how people acquire tastes for certain types of junk foods, but not others. For example, I can go to town on a bag of Cheetos, but the smell of Krispy Kreme donuts makes me want to vomit. What influences which forms of junk foods we find appealing, which foods will become our trigger foods?

The last few chapters provide advice about re-training your brain and becoming aware of and in control over your own eating habits. Once again, nothing terribly new, but it all makes sense.

I have a lot of friends who've done Weight Watchers, and this seems like it would be a nice complement to that program. Even if you're not trying to lose weight or don't have overeating issues of your own, this sort of practical information seems like it would increase empathy and awareness when dealing with friends and loved ones who are struggling with their eating.
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LibraryThing member rivkat
The most striking thing about self-help books to me is how individualistic they are. Kessler spends a bunch of time talking about how food has been deliberately designed to get us to engage in what he calls conditioned hypereating: packed and layered with sugar, fat and salt to make them
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hyperpalatable, so much beyond what exists in nature and so easy to eat--almost predigested--that we eat more and more, thinking less and less. And yet his solutions are (1) personal: commit to thinking really hard about food, a lot, and making tough choices again and again, and (2) at the societal level, label foods aggressively, stigmatize hyperpalatable food like we stigmatize cigarettes, and stigmatize the companies that make such foods. (He doesn't say stigmatize the people who eat such foods, but he doesn't say anything in defense of those people either, and given the cigarette analogy and the way in which disgust works, not to mention the current cultural dialogue around fat, his proposals would also stigmatize those people.) If we could rely on norms instead of regulations, we might not have all this hyperpalatable food around: he points out that Americans bring food to meetings where Europeans would never expect eating to occur; many of my students will be eating and drinking in class; etc. He doesn't discuss the ways in which the foods he decries have been heavily subsidized; he doesn't discuss what it would take to get less-processed food more widely available to Americans; he doesn't discuss money or why lots of people might feel like their lives are so hard that they deserve some reward or at least can't spare the time and energy to follow one more set of guidelines. Anyway, the book is clunkily written, with lots of overused formulations ("I asked X to tell me about ..."), but if you want a cognitive behavioral-type set of strategies for controlling your eating, combined with a lot of the scientific background for why today's food is so hard to resist--and who knows, such people may well exist--it's not terrible, just repetitive.
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LibraryThing member YaacovLozowick
Kessler is a physician, lawyer, and top FDA bureaucrat who in spite of being as well informed as anyone, didn't manage not to be fat. So eventually he went looking for the science behind this, which he presents in this book. It's almost 300 pages long, and he could have written it in 30 - but
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again, as with Shlaes, those 30 would have been intense and demanding (and wouldn't have counted as a book). This way, it's a readable book that can be skimmed with no major intellectual challenge.

Kessler's thesis, in one sentence, is that sugar fat and salt make us want to eat more sugar salt and fat. Whether they understand the science or not, the food industry has cracked this truth and does its best to offer what Kessler calls hyper-palatable food, which means irresistible.

I came away from the book with the conviction that the only food one should eat is unprocessed food. As an acquaintance of mine (who hasn't read the book but gets the message) has been saying all along: I never eat anything that was created in a factory.

Near the end of the book Kessler tries to offer ways to free oneself from the tyranny of industrial sugar-salt-fat. He recommends formulating and applying counter-commands, that will block the imperatives of the enticing food we see all around us. It occurs to me that this really may work. I eat only kosher food, so all those yummy-looking extravagances I see all around me when I'm in America: I've never had them, I have no chemically inbuilt memories of how much I crave them, and were I to reach for one of them, my own repulsion would be stronger. I'll bet they taste heavenly, but I have no urge to eat them. On the contrary.
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LibraryThing member sharlene_w
David Kessler somewhat repitiously brought home the point--the big brand food marketing machine has no interest in our health; they are only interested in making money. I guess we should already know that, but it is easy to fall prey to that insatiable craving for the dreaded fat, salt and sugar
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combo. After taking a close look at specific craveable items from major restaurant chains, there is no doubt why this nation is suffering from a severe case of morbid obesity. I listened to this audio book while on a road trip and boy did it make me crave good old home cooked fresh food and a big salad with no dressing. We ate a lot of fresh food that we carried with us, but when we did eat out in restaurants it was very apparent that the American diet needs an overhaul. The child's plates that we ordered for my 3-year old granddaughter were more than enough to feed an adult--to say nothing of the adult plates. Thanks Mr. Kessler for attempting to open our eyes. Mine were!
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LibraryThing member kristenn
Interesting new angle on the American obesity issue. Presented more as a study than an expose. This does mean many many supporting studies (including much animal testing) on the topic, even if the general public readers will have accepted the hypothesis after just one or two study results. Many
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tiny chapters. Somehow, despite all the in-depth descriptions of decadent menu items, I didn't get hungry reading it. No evil corporation rants. It was refreshing to read about a physiological motivation to overeating rather than the same psychological ones. It speaks to a different group of people (as well as to an overlapping one). But once the situation is laid out, the avoidance advice at the end is the same old not-too-helpful stuff about right thinking.
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LibraryThing member jellyneckz
A quick read with very short chapters. I was more interested in the sections on the food and restaurant industry trying to create dishes that people will eat more of than the descriptions of behavioral tests on lab rats and advice on how to stop overeating (which is not really a problem for me).
LibraryThing member jjlangel
Thought-provoking! An interesting review of the way our brains respond to rewards like yummy food, the way the food industry has learned to develop particularly yummy food, and how the combination has lead to nation of obese people.
LibraryThing member JeremyPreacher
The first half of the book is pure food porn. Detailed, multisensory descriptions of super-unhealthy menu items from chain restaurants or snack foods - it's just about perfectly designed to send you running to the refrigerator. It's not a huge surprise to discover that the addictive qualities of
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this kind of food are well-known to people in the restaurant and snack-food industries, and even less a surprise to be told they are, in fact, addictive. So that part is really only good for salivating over descriptions of fried food.

The second half of the book is just dumb. Having spent all of those pages citing behavioral studies in rats, industry studies of humans, and all sorts of information about the neurochemistry of certain salt-sugar-fat combinations, the author then spends the last third of the book basically telling people it's a matter of willpower. (After specifically saying that it's not a willpower issue in the introduction, at that.) Not once does he suggest, you know, eating whole, unprocessed food, fewer carbs, or any of the not-all-that-controversial ideas that seem eminently supported by his research.

To be fair, the hefty end-notes suggest that he had an editor with a machete handy, and the copious industry-insider interviews make me think that perhaps he softened his stance in order to retain their cooperation in future books, but it means that this book is pretty much a waste of dead trees. If you want to drool over the Chili's menu, go to Chili's. At least there you'll have pictures.
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LibraryThing member wyvernfriend
It basically boils down to thoughtless eating and that we should be more mindful eaters and watch our portions. We crave Salt, Fat and sugar and a lot of hte easy, fast food is laden with it to our waistline's detriment. If you use these as a very occasional treat rather than as normal and examine
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the reasons why you eat and ask yourself if the food will improve the mood or add to it, you will probably think again about eating it.

Interesting food for thought.
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LibraryThing member Lakenvelder
We all need to understand it is not only fast food restaurants like McDonalds but includes all chain restaurants such as Applebees and very every high end restaurants. This book opens your eyes to the world hyper palatable foods by explaining how the food industry deliberately layers fat on sugar
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on salt on fat.I agree with the author that it is time for the restaurant industry to give consumers the information they need to make an educational choice on their orders. That salad you ordered thinking is a healthy may be fat, salt and sugar layered on a few pieces of lettuce. You might be better off with a small burger and eating less calorie with other meals.
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LibraryThing member HopingforChange
This book was alright. Kessler definitely offers some new and intriguing theories about why so many of us find ourselves able to resist carrots but not carrot cake--or, why we eat what he calls "highly palatable foods" like cake when we aren't actually hungry and wouldn't eat healthful food. The
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problem is that a lot of the information Kessler presents seems a bit obvious to anyone who has thought consciously about his or her eating habits. I did learn from this book, but it wasn't as interesting as I had anticipated--hence the middle-of-the-road rating.
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LibraryThing member wineisme
Kessler investigates why the scales tip so much more in North America, than in other parts of the world. He criticizes a food industry that both intentionally, and unintentionally, alters the way people approach and react to food. Conditioned overeating is coined to explain this phenomenon.
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Dominating with psychological investigation, I had hoped for a bit more physiological analysis. A good read for someone who wants to understand why you feel less control over your food choices and eating behaviors.
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LibraryThing member amandamay83
I'm about half-way done with this book, and I really don't know if I'm going to finish it. I had high hopes, but I've been left incredibly disappointed. As others have said, the author states something, then finds ten other ways to rephrase it. He just keeps beating a dead horse. Over. And over.
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Example: he highlights a number of restaruants and companies (such as Cinnibon and Frito-Lay). But every company is essentially the same: humans like fat and sugar, so the companies find ways to pack even more fat and sugar into food. It was interesting the first time. After four or five nearly identical chapters....not so much.

Based upon other reviews, it doesn't look like this book gets much better, either.
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LibraryThing member KidSisyphus
But fat, salt and sugar taste so good, Doctor...
LibraryThing member Mary6508
Very informational book about how the food industry puts additives in our food products to make them super palatable, therefore enticing us to eat more and contributing to the obesity of our country. A must read.

Awards

Pages

336

ISBN

0771095538 / 9780771095535
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