How The Food Industry Makes Us Want to Eat More!!

at 3:55 PM

I am really devouring (no pun intended) this book (The End Of Overeating) by David Kessler.  As he delves into our how the food industry generates billions of dollars by hijacking our human reward system, I start rethinking the whole overeating phenomena.  For most of human history we survived and thrived on food that was simple; vegetables from the farm, animals from hunting and fruits from trees; now we eat foods that are optimized so that we can eat MORE OF THEM with NO CONTROL.  As told by Jerome Kagan, a psychologist at harvard to Dr. Kessler, that the most effective rewards are those that can change our feelings, stimulating our brains and providing temporary pleasure.  That is what hyperpalatable foods do.

Hyperpalatable foods like a plate of chocolate chip cookies demand our attention because over time we have learned that they bring pleasure.  And we seek those emotions, furthermore the power of memory plays a significant role in this cycle of pleasure seeking.  We are presented with the salient cue, we seek that pleasure because we have had plenty of positive re-enforcement, alas transiently!

Dr. Kessler talks about a cycle of 'cue-urge-reward-habit' that becomes hard-wired in our brain circuitry.  Remember that we have evolved to seek positive reinforcement and pleasure, so the same type of reward seeking goes on with foods that occurs with other pleasure-providing situations in our lives.  And from what I gather, this type of cycle is simply not present when we eat raw celery, fortunately or unfortuantely.  We MUST break the cycle over time which he terms "conditioned hypereating".   I will talk about the simple (but not easy) steps we can take to stop  the pleasure-seeking behavior that Dr. Kessler talks about in a future blog.