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

Right. Processed food tends to have all sorts of stuff added to it that you wouldn't expect. The extra stuff is there to maximize profitability, not health, and people generally don't realize that the extra junk can cause unexpected problems.

Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food" and David Kessler's "The End of Overeating" have interesting things to say on this topic. They both suggest eating real food, but come from significantly different directions about why.

For example, you'd expect "grilled chicken" to be just be chicken. Here's the list of ingredients that McDonald's puts in the "grilled chicken on their salads (from here):

> Chicken breast filets with rib meat, water, seasoning (salt, sugar, food starch-modified, maltodextrin, spices, dextrose, autolyzed yeast extract, hydrolyzed [corn gluten, soy, wheat gluten] proteins, garlic powder, paprika, chicken fat, chicken broth, natural flavors (plant and animal source), caramel color, polysorbate 80, xanthan gum, onion powder, extractives of paprika), modified potato starch, and sodium phosphates.

Wheat gluten's in there, as well as all sorts of other potentially problematic stuff that you wouldn't put in if you'd cooked it at home. The food processing industry wants you to believe they're equivalent, but they aren't.

Lots of people find that chronic health problems go away when they stop eating processed food and prepare food themselves from whole ingredients. Paleo, raw food veganism, Michael Pollan's Food Rules, etc. all have this in common.

Following the "avoid gluten" strategy also used to push people in the "avoid processed food" direction. I suspect that many of the people who saw benefit from "avoiding gluten", particularly those who were not diagnosable with celiac disease, were also deriving a significant benefit from eating real food instead of processed.

The recent move towards improved labeling is great. However, my worry about the current "gluten free" climate is the implicit assumption that eating processed crap is fine so long as it doesn't have gluten. I know that "gluten free" convenience foods make life significantly less inconvenient for celiacs and their families, but will embracing them also negate other health benefits that "gluten avoiders" didn't realize they were reaping?

Focus on your health and not your weight. Weight and appearance are extremely complicated issues emotionally and are not going to help you to improve your health. Accept your body as it is right now. It does not mean that you are at your ideal weight, but you need to be comfortable with who you are.

Your long-term project should not be weight loss. It should be achieving and maintaining health. And it does not end if or when you reach some target weight. It continues for the rest of your life. Your goal is to eat a healthy diet and get enough exercise. Weight loss is not the goal, but is an indicator that your are making real progress.

Read In Defense of Food and The End of Overeating for diet information. The China Study is very controversial, but it has been a great motivator for me. Read ACJN and other journals on a regular basis - doing research is a great motivator.

In terms of exercise, what worked for me was making a goal of working out an hour every day. The challenge is then to see how many days I can do this for. On average it works out to about 4 - 5 days a week at about 90 minutes per day.

You need to build up your cardiovascular strength a lot. Start by waking an hour or so a day. When walking does not get your heart rate up that much any more, switch to riding a bike. Whenever possible, exercise outside. Expose some skin and don't use sunscreen (not 11am - 4pm though) so that you get some vitamin D out of it too.

I have been fat since puberty. Not as high a BMI as you, but emotional pain is not exactly proportional to BMI. I didn't have any friends in college. I had no boyfriends. It took me 15 years to figure out how not to feel like shit. When you are a little girl/boy, you have an image of what you will be when you grow up. Then you grow up and it's nothing like what you expected. You need to get over it. You are fat and if anyone has a problem with it, fuck them.

Read this book. It will help you understand why you feel powerless sometimes and give you some strategies to try and turn it around. Very helpful.

>Thus, these brain pathways...also perform previously unidentified functions that include the detection of gastro-intestinal and metabolic signals.

or better yet.

>Food palatability and hedonic value play central roles in nutrient intake. However, postingestive effects can influence food preferences independently of palatability, although the neurobiological bases of such mechanisms remain poorly understood. Of central interest is whether the same brain reward circuitry that is responsive to palatable rewards also encodes metabolic value independently of taste signaling. Here we show that trpm5/ mice, which lack the cellular machinery required for sweet taste transduction, can develop a robust preference for sucrose solutions based solely on caloric content. Sucrose intake induced dopamine release in the ventral striatum of these sweet-blind mice, a pattern usually associated with receipt of palatable rewards. Furthermore, single neurons in this same ventral striatal region showed increased sensitivity to caloric intake even in the absence of gustatory inputs. Our findings suggest that calorie-rich nutrients can directly influence brain reward circuits that control food intakeindependently of palatability or functional taste transduction.

It's good to know there is also a reward system that stems from neurons in the gut, as well as the ones in the tongue. Great observation.

>This is a troubling idea

I am not sure why this is troubling. The gut-brain pathways are exactly not well understood. What is understood is exactly the taste-bud opioid pathways and how to exploit them.. Is there a way to fool the gut system? Surely. The early easy fruit show this has to do with chewing and saliva processing. There are probably even better ways to do this.

The implication of the conclusion is that we are wired for overeating, whereas the conclusion from the actual study, indicates we are wire to overeat palatable food with some component that exists in the gut that can also be trained to overeat. Not exactly the same thing.

Read what the former FDA commissioner says about the business of food. You feel the way you do, because you are supposed too. As in it is happening by design to practically everyone.

The End of Overeating

I've seen sample chapters online if you search for the pdf...

About how big chains use science to make "alleged" food irresistible to as many victims that they can. I wish I would have read it 10 years ago. Very enlightening.

You are probably just trolling but it is just not that simple for a lot of people. Some reasons:

1. In the US and many of those other countries, the environment is such that tempting, fattening, not very nutritious food is everywhere. Try finding healthy food at an airport. For someone like me who visits the US from time to time, I am astonished at what is on offer. Even the "wholegrain" bread there tastes like cake and is full of fructose. Salads are accurately described as "oil with a lettuce leaf and cheese".
   
   
2. Food companies deliberately design foods to be as addictive as possible. Yes, addictive - they fire up the same parts of the brain that cocaine lights up. Rats will make almost at much effort to get to processed breakfast cereals as they will to get to cocaine. See http://www.amazon.com/End-Overeating-Insatiable-American-Appetite/dp/1605297852 for a long discussion of these issues.
   
   
3. Quite a few people come from a genetic background of famine and poverty that has led to selection of people who put on bulk whenever they get the chance. For these people losing weight is orders of magnitude harder than it is for those who are effortlessly thin.
   
   Losing weight is a bit like holding your breath - easy to do for a while, but for many people it is impossible to sustain. Try holding your breath for 4 minutes - you will see what I mean. Something lower down the brain kicks in and overrides your best intentions.

There is a [book] (http://www.amazon.com/End-Overeating-Insatiable-American-Appetite/dp/1605297852) about how food manufacturers basically are very aware of this, and they deliberately manipulate sugar, salt, and fat levels in foods to make them more addictive.

I'll be more specific...

I struggle with what The End of Overeating describes as "conditioned hypereating". I am wondering if cutting out casein could create less of a dopamine (et al) response thus resulting in less of a powerful urge toward hedonic eating.

Read This It's not a diet book, it's a how to stop being obese book. It educates how the food industry plans on keeping obese people obese.

Since I'm in marketing I find most of it all too telling >_<

This message is going to get buried, but I hope by chance you read it. Two books on food changed my life and helped me eat a very healthy diet and lose weight and keep it off permanently:

http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dilemma-Natural-History-Meals/dp/0143038583/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266444146&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/End-Overeating-Insatiable-American-Appetite/dp/1605297852/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266444075&sr=8-1

First off, by the numbers you mention, it does not sound like you're a "fat" person.

As someone who has struggled with being overweight for 20 some-odd years, and gained/lost/gained/lost and am finally 80 pounds lower than my heaviest weight, here are my tips:

• Intuitive Eating, all the way. Eat when you are hungry, don't eat when you're not. In life, often the best answers are the simplest. I think this goes for eating. When you are truly hungry, EVERYTHING is delicious. Once you get used to it, you don't need to count calories (not to say you should be unaware of them). Growing up a fat kid/fat young-adult, I had some horrible habits. But I'd always be very interested in how "thin" people ate. I noticed that they pretty much ate whatever they wanted. I figured my genetics just made me fat. Not so. I just ate WAY too much. But once you can really hone in on your body's signals of hunger and fullness, you can just follow them to success. I finally lost the last of my weight (40 lbs) doing this (well, I would still like to drop a few more). At first, I didn’t trust that I wouldn’t over eat. But magically (not really, the body is just really an amazing piece of evolution) I lost weight! In that way, you can eat whatever you want. That being said, I prefer eating healthy, balanced meals. Just makes me feel good.
  
• Plan your meals. For the most part, I wake up in the morning knowing what I'm going to eat that day and have prepared accordingly. Trying to figure out what you're going to eat while you are hungry is dangertown. This is especially important when you first start out.
  
• Failure is part of the process. I wouldn't have finally found success if I hadn't "failed" so many times. I've lost weight eating "low-carb" and by severe calorie restriction. I, of course, gained it all back. (By the way, I've lost weight eating mostly meat and while being a vegan--so, don't believe all the bullshit (that I totally bought into) with low-carb or any of that crap. It's all about eating less calories than you burn. A calorie is a calorie.
  
• Read The End of Overeating and watch Food Inc. I think an understanding (and despising) our food system is very helpful to making better food choices.
  
• Exercise is great, but you're probably going to just eat more to make up for it. I'm not saying exercise doesn't matter, it does, but it's not the end-all be-all of weight loss. I feel that it's so much more about what/how much you eat.
  
• Know that if you're doing it right, it's a relatively slow process. Dramatic weight loss will come back on (and probably more), I guarantee it.
  
• Also, know that if you're doing it right, it's becomes easy and second nature.
  
  Best of luck!
  

I lost 65lbs in less than 6 months simply by following the advice of David Kessler.

Just thought after reading your comment that you might like this book, I am reading it now.

http://www.amazon.com/End-Overeating-Insatiable-American-Appetite/dp/1605297852

the author used to be the head of the FDA. It's pretty good and goes into what you are talking about.

jebus, they talk about it like its the gd deficit. It's not rocket science. Here, Olive Garden, allow me to help you out: Stop over buttering everything. Stop using so much oil. Use higher quality grains in your bread and they will be more filling, so people will eat less of them. Increase the amount of vegetables in your sauces.

Oh, here's one, TRY MAKING STUFF FRESH? Don't they have everything in ready to microwave bags? It's another chain restaurant that's essentially serving you giant t.v. dinners reheated for use.

And Red Lobster... try less butter, oil, frying, refrying... I was reading a book which talked about different chain restaurant food, and the process it goes through. For example, chicken tenders at Chili's... they're first deep fat fried at the slaughter house! They're deep fried again at the processing plant and then for the third and final time to warm them before getting them to you. This is often the case, they're tender and moist when they get to you - but you're not getting one layer of deep fat fry...but three. Which is sad, because that's why foods are so immediately tasty; sugar, fat and salt.

Our palate as a nation is unfortunately seeped in unpleasant things. It's a billion dollar industry that works hard at chemical food flavoring (cheese, bbq flavor, all of those include no trace of the original flavor they're mimicking)... so to some, the real thing doesn't even taste right anymore. I hate cooking with a passion, but I do it. And now when I go out, like TBickle said, the food just tastes awful, like it wasn't even worth the gas to go eat there.

The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite by Kessler is absolutely indispensable when it comes to understanding and recognizing the mechanism of food/sugar addiction, and how painfully hard all these companies try to make us addicted to their products. Can't recommend it enough.