David Kessler somewhat repitiously brought home the point--the big brand food marketing machine has no interest in our health; they are only interested in making money. I guess we should already know that, but it is easy to fall prey to that insatiable craving for the dreaded fat, salt and sugar combo. After taking a close look at specific craveable items from major restaurant chains, there is no doubt why this nation is suffering from a severe case of morbid obesity. I listened to this audio book while on a road trip and boy did it make me crave good old home cooked fresh food and a big salad with no dressing. We ate a lot of fresh food that we carried with us, but when we did eat out in restaurants it was very apparent that the American diet needs an overhaul. The child's plates that we ordered for my 3-year old granddaughter were more than enough to feed an adult--to say nothing of the adult plates. Thanks Mr. Kessler for attempting to open our eyes. Mine were! ( )

Kessler is a physician, lawyer, and top FDA bureaucrat who in spite of being as well informed as anyone, didn't manage not to be fat. So eventually he went looking for the science behind this, which he presents in this book. It's almost 300 pages long, and he could have written it in 30 - but again, as with Shlaes, those 30 would have been intense and demanding (and wouldn't have counted as a book). This way, it's a readable book that can be skimmed with no major intellectual challenge.

Kessler's thesis, in one sentence, is that sugar fat and salt make us want to eat more sugar salt and fat. Whether they understand the science or not, the food industry has cracked this truth and does its best to offer what Kessler calls hyper-palatable food, which means irresistible.

I came away from the book with the conviction that the only food one should eat is unprocessed food. As an acquaintance of mine (who hasn't read the book but gets the message) has been saying all along: I never eat anything that was created in a factory.

Near the end of the book Kessler tries to offer ways to free oneself from the tyranny of industrial sugar-salt-fat. He recommends formulating and applying counter-commands, that will block the imperatives of the enticing food we see all around us. It occurs to me that this really may work. I eat only kosher food, so all those yummy-looking extravagances I see all around me when I'm in America: I've never had them, I have no chemically inbuilt memories of how much I crave them, and were I to reach for one of them, my own repulsion would be stronger. I'll bet they taste heavenly, but I have no urge to eat them. On the contrary. ( )

David Kessler demonstrates just why food can gain such control over some people with his careful synthesis of research literature from comparative psychology, neuroscience, marketing, the food industry, and medical science. I knew some of these facts before, but his synthesis creates an entire picture showing how the hyper-eating phenomenon gets started and maintains itself. Many of the things that one hears in meetings of Overeaters Anonymous - and which doctors and counselors often pooh-poohed - are shown be accurate.

I heard an interview on National Public Radio and was intrigued. I was surprised by Kessler's very accurate but sensual descriptions of food items in the opening pages of the book: it was food porn. On the one hand, the descriptions were necessary to convey the cycle of pleasure and habituation, yet - like porn - they were so explicit that reading them was like participating in the food orgy. I eventually skipped over most of them.

After those opening chapters, the book was much more scientific, describing experiments and interviews with researchers from around the globe. Kessler builds a credible and well-documented model of the basic biological response to various aspects of food. He shows how those basic biological patterns have been recognized and used by food manufacturers and - let's be honest - our culture's promotion of sensuality - to create foods and food-settings that fire all our brain's pleasure, pleasure-seeking, and habit-forming centers.

The last part of the book provides some basic advice for the types of action that are necessary if one is going to try to break free from the hyper-stimulated food cycle. These are helpful: going beyond all the hundreds of books of diet advice, they draw on the neuroscientific research. It's not only a matter of re-shaping the foods we eat, but also reshaping how we think about those foods, what we do with the cues and triggers and thoughts that prompt us to eat "bad" food, and how we handle the inevitable ads and messages that urge us to indulge.

I am glad that I read the book. The information it contains is worthy of all the media attention that it is receiving. I would have enjoyed it more if Kessler had not fallen prey to the same temptation that produced all these addictive food items in the first place by his food-porn descriptions. ( )

The most striking thing about self-help books to me is how individualistic they are. Kessler spends a bunch of time talking about how food has been deliberately designed to get us to engage in what he calls conditioned hypereating: packed and layered with sugar, fat and salt to make them hyperpalatable, so much beyond what exists in nature and so easy to eat--almost predigested--that we eat more and more, thinking less and less. And yet his solutions are (1) personal: commit to thinking really hard about food, a lot, and making tough choices again and again, and (2) at the societal level, label foods aggressively, stigmatize hyperpalatable food like we stigmatize cigarettes, and stigmatize the companies that make such foods. (He doesn't say stigmatize the people who eat such foods, but he doesn't say anything in defense of those people either, and given the cigarette analogy and the way in which disgust works, not to mention the current cultural dialogue around fat, his proposals would also stigmatize those people.) If we could rely on norms instead of regulations, we might not have all this hyperpalatable food around: he points out that Americans bring food to meetings where Europeans would never expect eating to occur; many of my students will be eating and drinking in class; etc. He doesn't discuss the ways in which the foods he decries have been heavily subsidized; he doesn't discuss what it would take to get less-processed food more widely available to Americans; he doesn't discuss money or why lots of people might feel like their lives are so hard that they deserve some reward or at least can't spare the time and energy to follow one more set of guidelines. Anyway, the book is clunkily written, with lots of overused formulations ("I asked X to tell me about ..."), but if you want a cognitive behavioral-type set of strategies for controlling your eating, combined with a lot of the scientific background for why today's food is so hard to resist--and who knows, such people may well exist--it's not terrible, just repetitive. ( )

This book was too similar to "In Defense of Food" (which I just read) for me to want to keep reading it. The author was basically saying the same thing. Eat "real" food, and don't eat sweets. ( )