Eatertainment - July 27, 2009

Patients often tell me that they eat when they are either bored or lonely.
This emotional eating is usually their dietary undoing. There is an
excellent book review on eating as entertainment in the New Yorker this
week, I've borrowed this excerpt from it because I couldn't have written it
better:

David A. Kessler, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug
Administration, says that it’s not that sweet and oily foods have become
less expensive; it’s that they’ve been re-engineered while we weren’t
looking. Kessler spends a lot of time meeting with (often anonymous)
consultants who describe how they are trying to fashion products that offer
what has become known in the food industry as “eatertainment.” Fat,
sugar, and salt turn out to be the crucial elements in this quest:
different“eatertaining” items mix these ingredients in different but
invariably highly caloric combinations. A food scientist for Frito-Lay
relates how the company is seeking to create “a lot of fun in your
mouth” with products like Nacho Cheese Doritos, which meld “three
different cheese notes” with lots of salt and oil. Another
product-development expert talks about how she is trying to “unlock the
code of craveability,” and a third about the effort to “cram as much
hedonism as you can in one dish.”

Kessler invents his own term—“conditioned hypereating”—to
describe how people respond to these laboratory-designed concoctions. Foods
like Cinnabons and Starbucks’ Strawberries & Crème Frappuccinos are, he
maintains, like drugs: “Conditioned hypereating works the same way as
other ‘stimulus response’ disorders in which reward is involved, such
as compulsive gambling and substance abuse.” For Kessler, the analogy is
not merely rhetorical: research on rats, he maintains, proves that the
animals’ brains react to sweet, fatty foods the same way that addicts’
respond to cocaine.

If you would like to read the whole article, which is excellent, here's the
link:

New Yorker Article

Yours in health,
Pamela