overeating and food marketers

Wake-Up Call: The Food Industry Is Making You Fat

You may not be able to cut all the bad stuff out of your diet, but recognizing how tempting food components are marketed makes them easier to avoid.

By Emily Main

Topics: salt, Fats, calories

Recognize the cues that tempt you to eat so that it’s easier to fight back against marketing tricks.

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05-06-09 RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—We live in a world of salted caramel hot chocolates, cheesy bacon cheeseburgers, and artichoke and spinach dip containing very little artichoke or spinach. These and other irresistible modern-day fare have three things in common: sugar, fat, and salt. David Kessler, MD, former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, says in his new book, The End of Overeating (Rodale 2009), that food companies prey on our biological addictions to those three food components in the same way tobacco companies have exploited the addictive properties of nicotine.

THE DETAILS: Food companies, Dr. Kessler says, have become very adept at playing on our brains’ pleasure sensors, and tricking our taste buds into craving food with unhealthy levels of calories and salt. They use tactics like deep-frying food, which drives down the water content that makes us feel satisfied and drives up the fat content that our brains are hard-wired to love. They chop ingredients into small bites that are easy to swallow, and therefore cause us to eat more and eat it faster—and spend money to buy more. “Increasingly, food has become multilayered and multisensory,” Dr. Kessler says. “The food industry has put fat, sugar, and salt in every corner and made it very entertaining.” He calls the altered foods “hyperpalatable,” and says they lead us down a dangerous road to “hypereating” and obesity.

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Speech David Kessler gave on CSPAN2 on June 13

Posted on June 22nd, 2009 by John Galluzzo

I was channell surfing and came upon this program, just wanted to say thank you to Dr. Kessler for basically confirming what I thought all along.

Incredible how programmed we are.

Thnx again

farming

Posted on May 13th, 2009 by Mell Randall

Organic Apple =the best, not the pesticide apple in most stores.I am grafting old time cultivars,no posion spray,it,s the way to go for ---health,your health.Here in Maine on the 45th.parallel,it,s almost blossom time..

ceo@getmotivatedwithgwin.com

Posted on May 7th, 2009 by Gwin Minter

I enjoyed this article; it was very informative and needed to be shared. So many times we use food as a comfort or stress reliever, like we take medications for what hurts us. Yet we do not realize that this only results in bad eating habits and poor health as we continue to age. I am a firm believer in "knowledge is power" what we don't know could kill us!

Thanks for the information and ways that we can identify our cues so that we can live longer and happier lives.

Gwin Minter

Serving size

Posted on May 7th, 2009 by Ashley

I agree...and what about serving sizes? On the one hand, portions in restaurants and even what we put on our plates at home are definitely too big. But on the other hand, as my husband pointed out to me yesterday, are the packaged-food manufacturers artificially reducing their serving sizes so that the calorie counts are "reasonable"...leaving us hungry for a more satisfying portion size, and tempted to over-eat?

Food Industry Practices

Posted on May 6th, 2009 by cserpent

Interesting article, but it didn't go far enough. Restaurants usually don't have or release nutritional and calorie info for their dishes, because the news is so bad. We need laws put into place to force that. People in the know are shocked to learn that one restaurant dish has their day's calories and salt intake, or more, and that they've ingested 20, 30, 40 grams of fat at one meal, including trans and saturated fat. And otherwise healthy restaurant meals are made unhealthy via fatty oils and dressings piled on, salty condiments, breads, and the additional of cheese on everything.

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