Why You Can't Eat Just One

"The pandemic may be seizing our attention at the moment, but another health crisis, with a longer arc, is nearly as worrisome.

 

Why has the incidence of obesity -- contributing to disease and early death -- been creeping dangerously upward in virtually all the world's countries for the past several decades? More specifically, why does the United States have an adult obesity rate, 42%, that is the highest in the world outside a few small nations?

 

The simple answer is that people are eating larger quantities of unhealthy food and smaller quantities of the food that's good for them. But precisely why have dietary patterns changed so much for the worse? In "The End of Craving," Mark Schatzker, author of "The Dorito Effect" (2015), shrewdly looks into the matter, presenting, among much else, laboratory studies that show how today's foods and beverages manipulate the brain and wreak havoc on the body.

Start with a staggering fact: 58% of calories in the American adult diet come from ultra-processed foods, 67% among children and adolescents. Such foods -- prepared meats, potato chips and other snacks, really almost anything in a package -- are high in sugar, salt or fat. Many also contain a witch's brew of ingredients that make nutrition labels unintelligible: sucralose, methylcelluloses, saccharin, microparticulated protein, Solka-Floc, maltodextrins, carrageenan.

 

Such ingredients are central to "The End of Craving." According to Mr. Schatzker, they create "a divergence between the nutritional content the brain senses as it consumes food and the actual nutrients that arrive in the stomach." The manipulation of nutrients "is what set so many of us on a path to weight gain."

 

He recounts an experiment conducted by Dana Small, a Yale professor, in which she gave people samples of five beverages. Each had a different calorie count, ranging from 0 to 150, but all had the same degree of sweetness. The 150-calorie drink should have triggered the most brain activity, but it was the 75-calorie one that did. In fact, the 150-calorie drink, in a follow-up study, didn't register anything at all (on a device known as a calorimeter). Clearly the drink's sweetness and its calorie count were misaligned. When they match, writes Mr. Schatzker, "calories are burned, the brain registers it, and the brain remembers."

But in this case there was a difference between "what the tongue sensed and what the stomach received," and the body's metabolic process appeared to shut down. In the words of Ms. Small: "It's like the system just threw up its hands and didn't know what to do." She calls this "nutritive mismatch."

 

A related source of mismatch, Mr. Schatzker notes, is "fake fats," like the infamous Olestra, that confuse the body by smelling and tasting like fat but delivering few if any calories. Americans consume more of these fats -- Mr. Schatzker labels them "brain-fooling products" -- than people in any other country.

 

Mr. Schatzker aptly calls today's food environment a "calorie casino," in which the probabilities of nutritional value are uncertain and seemingly subject to chance while also leading people to "behave in self-destructive ways." Drawing on the work of psychologists such as Daniel Kahneman and his collaborator Amos Tversky, Mr. Schatzkershows that when the brain experiences uncertainty, it tries to compensate by working harder and seeking more of the item that is triggering the uncertainty -- an evolutionary impulse reflecting a determination to avoid loss.

 

Consuming foods and beverages that have been designed to fool the brain into believing that it has received nutrition when it hasn't, says Mr. Schatzker, stimulates a desire to consume more of them. Cravings follow, and they're satisfied with the supersize concoctions that have become a defining -- and depressing -- feature of America's food landscape. A few years ago, a study confirmed this suspicion: The portion size of entrees at U.S. fast-food outlets, in roughly the past three decades, has grown 24%.

 

In Mr. Schatzker's telling, dietary deceptions are not the only reason for Americans' girth. In the 1940s, he notes, the U.S. government began mandating that enriched flour be fortified with B vitamins. The policy continues today, resulting in Americans ingesting niacin and thiamin at levels that are well beyond what's needed. Mr. Schatzker describes these vitamins as essential to calories being transformed into fuel, but he cautions that their excessive consumption results in the body metabolizing a higher share of calories. "With great obesity," writes Mr. Schatzker, "comes great B vitamin intake."

Are there remedies for this sad state of affairs? Mr. Schatzker mentions a few, like having the government prohibit the use of ingredients that manipulate our brains and eliminating the vitamin-fortification mandate. But he is also skeptical that such measures are the ultimate answer. For inspiration, he travels to Italy to determine why people there have a healthier relation to food -- and a lower obesity rate (under 8% in the north). There's no simple explanation, but he approvingly quotes a chef in Bologna who says: "It comes down to the difference between feeding and eating. . . . Italians don't want just to feed themselves, they want to eat. . . . They want an experience." Mr. Schatzker doesn't elaborate, but he clearly wishes that Americans could be more like Italians and appreciate food that is cooked -- and consumed -- in something close to its natural state.

It seems unlikely that on-the-go Americans will ever meet that admirable objective. (We spend less time eating each day than do the residents of other advanced economies.) Even so, with "The End of Craving" Mr. Schatzker has advanced our understanding of why we have undergone such a rapid transition from fit to fat -- and why more carrots are needed and less carrageenan." [1]

1. Why You Can't Eat Just One
Rees, Matthew.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 04 Nov 2021: A.17.