Why "Fat Taxes" Won’t Work

Try to set aside any strong emotional reactions you might have to the following bluntly-phrased quote, and instead, let’s see what useful insights might be embedded here:

If we really wanted to curb fat through taxes, many economists would tell you, it would probably be more effective to tax fat people than fat food. Most fat-tax advocates are rightfully appalled by such a proposal, but I have yet to see a compelling reason why taxing fatty foods is any more righteous than taxing fatty folk. If obesity imposes an externality on others--as fat-tax advocates claim it does--then the only "fair" thing to do is to tax the source of the externality. The food police don't want to tax fat people, because it shifts responsibility from the "toxic food environment" to the individual. It's better to have an ominous-sounding enemy such as Big Food to blame than to look as if you're discriminating against overweight people.
--Jayson Lusk, from The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto About the Politics of Your Plate

Readers, what's your take on the idea of a "fat tax"? Here at Casual Kitchen, we’re more and more finding ourselves generally against the idea of fat, sugar and soda taxes. One factor is our deep disappointment with the fallacious logic and base appeals to emotion used by key proponents arguing for these taxes. We're also hesitant to embrace the idea because of one very likely unintended consequence: We’d be giving our incredibly competent political system[TM] the power to decide what foods get blessed as “healthy” (and thus are not taxed) and what foods are deemed “unhealthy” (and thus are taxed). That’s just a gigantic can of worms that I'd rather not open.

I’m a much bigger supporter of clear labeling regulations so consumers can have maximum information to make empowered food choices.

However, in the quote above from The Food Police, author Jayson Lusk bluntly tackles the subject of obesity and food taxes in a way I hadn’t really considered before.

Here’s what I mean: We know that obesity creates various societal costs. But so-called fat taxes transfer the costs of obesity to everyone, including people who are not obese. We can certainly have a debate on whether sharing these costs is societally appropriate or not, but it is undeniably an upside-down transfer of responsibility.

But worse, consuming junk food, sugary food or soda is not a necessary condition for being overweight! One can be overweight on a extremely wide range of diets. Thus many obese people won’t be impacted by a tax at all, either economically or in terms of incentives to select foods our authorities deem “healthy.”

But these reasons mewl pitifully at the feet of the most compelling reason fat, sugar and soda taxes are a bad idea.

Remember the Tobacco Settlement? In the late 1990s there was a gigantic legal settlement among the states of the USA enacting enormous taxes on cigarettes. And at the time, it was clearly understood that these tax proceeds were to be used towards tobacco education and smoking cessation programs. Note that this is exactly the same model fat tax advocates propose when they talk about using fat, sugar or soda tax proceeds to help fight obesity.

Except, as Lusk cites,

"...only about 2 percent of the funds from the Tobacco Settlement, which were promised to fight smoking, actually went for that purpose. The states spent the rest to fix budget shortfalls."

Just to make sure: Where does this shocking 2% figure from? Is it some phony statistic spun by someone with an agenda? Did Big Food dream it up as part of a secret plan to kill fat taxes and protect profits? Nope, not even close. It's from data supplied by the United States Government's own General Accounting Office in a 2004 report.

We're talking a grand total of $206 billion (billion!) in total Tobacco Settlement tax revenues over 25 years. All that money, and hardly any of it went where it was actually supposed to go.* To me, this is the proverbial elephant in the room when it comes to considering fat, sugar and soda taxes. No one seems to want to talk about it, yet it's still standing right there.

By now it should be clear. Fat, sugar and soda taxes transfer obesity costs away from the people who actually produce those costs. And unless you’re a wide-eyed optimist, it’s also pretty clear that these tax revenues won’t go toward what we’re being told they’ll go toward.

Readers, what do you think? I want to know.

* A quick but necessary tangent: You can arrive at an even more depressing conclusion here if you carefully think it through: a state that depends on tobacco tax revenues to plug budget gaps (or worse yet, issues bonds backed by tobacco taxes, as many states did), twists its incentives in a truly perverse way: they now have a macabre need for people to keep smoking. They need the money!

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Eat Less, Exercise More Doesn't Work. Wait, What?

Imagine you're invited to a celebratory dinner. The chef's talent is legendary, and the invitation says that this particular dinner is going to be a feast of monumental proportions. Bring your appetite, you're told--come hungry. How would you do it?

You might try to eat less over the course of the day--maybe even skip lunch, or breakfast and lunch. You might go to the gym for a particularly vigorous workout, or go for a longer run or swim than usual, to work up an appetite. You might even decide to walk to the dinner, rather than drive, for the same reason.

Now let's think about this for a moment. The instructions that we're constantly being given to lose weight--eat less (decrease the calories we take in) and exercise more (increase the calories we expend)--are the very same things we'll do if our purpose is to make ourselves hungry, to build up an appetite, to eat more.

--From Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes

Wrap your mind around these three paragraphs--especially the third one. It's enough to bake your noodle, isn't it? Essentially, this passage explains the foundational logic behind the view that eating less and exercising more doesn't work--a view that's increasingly catching on across the entire dieting and obesity establishment.

Look, the passage above is logical, no doubt about it: the things you do to eat more are exactly the same things your doctor will tell you to do to lose weight. Which... blows, basically.

But them I'm left with a different kind of question for readers: Is it counterproductive to make a blanket statement like "eat less/exercise more doesn't work"--even if it makes sense in this specific instance? Should we worry about the impact such a statement might have on the dialog on obesity? Most importantly, will it give people tacit permission to sit around, stay sedentary, and claim that everything is out of their hands?

Here's one more thought: once you finish your exercise and build up that appetite, what you eat matters. A lot. If you run for an hour (or worse, skip breakfast and lunch), but then gorge yourself on chips, beer, soda and ice cream.... well, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to conclude you won't lose weight with that "strategy." Eat foods like this to excess and your bloodstream will be literally swimming in insulin--which means you will quickly convert all of those delicious carbs directly into body fat.

I'll share one more nuance from my personal experience: When I'm running my typical 3-4 mile runs 3 or 4 times a week, I can pretty much eat and drink whatever I want without gaining weight at all. But my body doesn't crave junk food and sugary drinks when I do this. My body just doesn't want that crap food when I'm exercising regularly.

Hmmmm. So does exercise work or not?

Readers, what's your take on the idea that "eat less/exercise more doesn't work"?


I owe a grateful thank you to Gary Taubes and his book Why We Get Fat for prompting the ideas in this post.

Related Posts:
The Sad, Quiet Death of Campbell's Low-Sodium Soup
Uninstalling Limiting Beliefs With Healthy Food
Ask A Mindful Carnivore: Books For Further Reading
A Conversation With An Angry Vegetarian
Butter Or Margarine? What's a Girl To Do?
I'm Offended!






How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Death of a Soda Tax

Recently, efforts to institute a new soda tax in New York State failed, as the tax died a relatively quiet death last week on the floor of the New York State legislature. It was one of the first soda tax efforts nationwide, and as such, it sends a signal to other states considering similar legislation.

So, is this a good thing or a bad thing?

I'll try and frame up the debate by throwing out a few thoughts. First, I'd support the soda tax if I could reasonably trust in two things: 1) the data used to justify the tax, and 2) that the state would actually apply the tax revenues towards effective anti-obesity programs.

I'll be honest, I'm struggling on both points.

The experience with tobacco settlement proceeds over the past decade or so gives us a highly instructive example. Sadly, almost every state that received tobacco settlement money simply blew the bulk of the money up front to plug existing budget holes. The money, uh, kinda sorta just got spent. Worse, even after all that money washed though the system, smoking rates didn't really decline all that much. As a society, we lost an enormous opportunity there.

A related point: many people don't understand why the beverage industry spent so much money trying to fight off this tax (The New York Times claims that the American Beverage Association spent some $9.4 million to oppose soda taxes in 2010 alone).

I'm not sure I can justify that spending, but I can at least attempt to explain the logic behind it. First, once you GET a new tax, it's very difficult, politically speaking, to stop it from going higher. See cigarettes as Exhibit A, and notice that while New York failed to pass a new tax on sweetened drinks, they had no problem jacking up the tax on cigs by another $1.60 a pack (trick question: how much of the proceeds from this tax increase will go towards effective anti-smoking efforts?). This might help explain why the beverage industry felt it was worth spending what seemed like an out-of-proportion amount of money to try and prevent the tax in the first place.

Look, I lurve the idea of people drinking less soda. Long time Casual Kitchen readers well know that soda is a prime example of a second-order food. It's loaded with extra processing, transport, branding and marketing costs--all borne by the consumer. Worse, drinking these beverages is an easy way to ingest frightening amounts of calories. I preach about this regularly here at Casual Kitchen.

And that's why, initially, it seems so easy to make an argument for this tax. Almost too easy. Charge a little more for soda, give the money to the state, and use a little social engineering to try and do something about obesity. Hey, you never know. Maybe you'll massage peoples' behavior for the better. (Of course, your ability to make statements like these also depends on your philosophical position on the government's role in making our choices for us).

Finally, theory and idealism about how a tax should work is one thing. But as always, the devil is in the details, specifically with the state's tenuous promise to use the money appropriately and judiciously.

Readers, where do you stand on soda taxes, and why? [Strong opinions are welcome, but as always, please keep it civil.]

Related Posts:
The Food Spending Poll: Results and Conclusions
Why Do Products Go On Sale?
Obesity and the Obama Administration
Let That Other Guy Pay! Saving Money in Two-Sided Markets
How Food Companies Hide Sugar in Plain Sight


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me from your own blog, or by subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

How to Resist Temptation and Increase Your Power Over Food

I've spent a lot of time over the past few months thinking about the concept of temptation as it applies to food, and this post is an attempt to organize some of my thinking.

And since this post is a bit on the long side, I'll start with the conclusion: We already have far more power over food than we think.

Yes, I know: some foods are irresistibly tempting (Doritos and dark chocolate are my twin demons for example). Moreover, it's obvious from just a cursory view of Western society that many of us have great difficulty restraining ourselves from eating far in excess of our needs.

But this doesn't mean we are hopeless victims of our temptations. On the contrary, the exact opposite is true. Food temptation is resistible--in some cases laughably easy to resist. And in today's post, I'm going to show you how the basic process of food temptation is nothing more than an easily breakable chain of events.

I'll begin my excursion into understanding temptation by taking a quick sidetrip to consider smoking, arguably the most tempting of all habits.

Here's a fascinating quote from the exceptional book The End of Overeating, in which author David Kessler describes smoking in a way that gives us excellent insights into the psychological aspects of temptation:

By itself nicotine is only moderately reinforcing, but that begins to change with the building of layer upon layer of sensory stimulation: The sight of the packaging, the crinkling sound of the wrapper, the tactile sensation as you light a cigarette and hold it between your fingers, and the sensory characteristics of the first puff all bolster the reinforcement. Factor in the times of day and the location where you often smoke, and smoking becomes conditioned behavior.

Okay. Does all this talk about layers of stimulation, conditioned behavior and habit sound familiar at all?

It should. Because this is exactly what happens when we're tempted with food.

Your Favorite Pizza Is Just Like Smoking
Imagine your favorite pizza from your favorite pizza joint. There's that delicious smell that hits you when you walk in the door--it fills you with anticipation. There's the visual appeal of a well-made pizza--your favorite toppings, the bubbling cheese, the crispy crust. There's the familiar tactile sensation of picking up a delicious piece of pizza in your hands. And most importantly, there's the complex and intense sensory experience of eating the pizza--the salty-sweet flavors, the various textures, even the masochistic pleasure of searing the roof of your mouth with sauce and cheese. All of these things combine to make pizza an utterly irresistible food.

When you compare Kessler's description of smoking to my description of eating a pizza, the details may differ, but the complex interaction of stimulus, anticipation, habit and conditioning is utterly identical.

It's Harder to Tempt You Than You Think
"Wait," you say, "I thought you said I was going to have more power over food! Now you're telling me that pizza is as tempting as smoking? How can I have any power over food with all these stimuli and other factors collectively ganging up on me?"

Here's the encouraging part--and it's the crux of my entire argument: These temptation factors do not gang up on us. Rather, they must combine. One factor--heck, even a few factors of temptation--isn't enough to tempt us.

Instead, several factors have to be in place: The food has to be extremely palatable. We have to be both habit-based and entirely mindless in our eating. We have to eat quickly and pay little to no attention to the food as we are chewing and swallowing it. The setting and environment have to be just right to encourage overeating. We have to be oblivious to the many tricks our mind plays on us--or that we can play on our minds--to mismeasure our appetites and the amount of food we've eaten. Even our mood and psychological state have to be just right--we need to be in a negative or mind-identified mental state.

Break Just One Link in the Chain
Do you see where I'm going with this? There's an entire chain of events and a complex set of conditions and habits that all must be in place to cause you to engage in unhealthy eating behavior.

We've now arrived at the most important truth in this post: if you can take just one (just one!) of the habits, stimuli or elements of behavior conditioning that we talked about above, and replace it with a more mindful and healthy habit, you will break the stimulus/response chain that leads to overeating.

Here are some ideas to get you started: Select mental images that help you become a mindful eater--like imagining yourself looking like Mr. Creosote or imagining yourself stumbling into a walk-in angioplasty clinic. Build the habit of chewing more slowly. Drink water between bites, or select any one of a long list of healthy habits and techniques from my post on how to avoid mindless eating. Start every meal off with a large serving of raw vegetables. Remove offending foods from your home so they aren't around to tempt you in the first place. (If you have more ideas to share that you've used successfully, please share them in the comments.)

The point is for you to set your conditions and choose your habits. Choose your conditions--don't allow yourself to be conditioned. Select healthy habits of your choosing, rather than habits that are mindless, unconscious or blindly reactive to your surroundings.

If it requires an entire chain of factors to cause us to be tempted by food, it therefore follows that it only takes one habit change--one new learned behavior--to break that chain and make yourself powerful in the presence of food.

Think: what single change in your habits or circumstances could you make in your life? Make it! You'll surprise yourself with the results.

The edifice of temptation is far less sturdy than you'd think. And you are far more powerful than you think.

A note to readers: I've spoken before about the exceptional book The End of Overeating by David Kessler. Once again, let me take this opportunity to recommend it to readers. Finally, note that Casual Kitchen receives a small affiliate payment whenever any reader decides to purchase books or other merchandise from Amazon.com using links from this site. There's no extra cost to you, and yet you play a big part in supporting my efforts here at Casual Kitchen. Thanks as always for reading!

Related Posts:
Mindful Chewing: How To Cut Your Calorie Intake in Half--Without Feeling Hungry
Food Hacks: How to Use the "Satiety Factor" of Foods to Your Advantage
My Seven-Day Raw Foods Trial
The Priming Reflex: How to Control Your Appetite (And Turn Your Back on a Million Years of Evolution)

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Mindful Chewing: How To Cut Your Calorie Intake in Half--Without Feeling Hungry

Everyone knows that there are enormous health and dietary benefits to eating more slowly. In this post, I'll talk about a laughably easy technique you can use to help you cut your eating speed and caloric intake in half--perhaps more. Best of all, you won't feel the least bit hungry or deprived.

How? By chewing.

Chewing is the one thing everyone does, but nobody thinks about. But this overlooked and underappreciated first step in digestion is one of the easiest ways to slow down at a meal and achieve satiety on considerably less food.

When you mindlessly rush through meals and swallow large chunks of insufficiently chewed food, it's not only far easier to overeat (we'll discuss why shortly), but you risk incurring digestive problems like indigestion, bloating and even intestinal blockages.

In contrast, when you properly chew your food, your entire digestive tract works more smoothly. Careful chewing also helps you appreciate and enjoy all of the complex and subtle taste sensations of a food.

Taste is the doorway. You must appreciate taste... It is not just about being thankful, it is to make eating a holy experience, so the energy from the food can enter your body.
--from The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield

Is there a magic number for how many times you should chew your food? Not really. It depends on the crunchiness and the caloric density of what you're eating. For example, a homemade tortilla chip might require more chewing than a bite of chocolate mousse, but because chocolate mousse may contain far more calories per bite, you might want to "chew" the mousse much more than necessary to slow down and prevent yourself from eating too much.

In short, there's no magic number here. But I've found in my own experience that I tend to enjoy my food more, and eat far more slowly, when I make a point of chewing at least 15 times per bite of food.

And yes, lately I've been literally counting in my head while I'm eating, because I'm actively trying to build mindful chewing into a consistent habit at the dinner table. So if you happen to be eating dinner with me and I get a strange faraway look on my face, you'll know why.

Finally, the most important benefit of slow, mindful chewing is the automatic delay factor that it builds into a meal. We've discussed elsewhere in this blog how your body doesn't figure out that it's full until after a lag of some 20-30 minutes. This 20-30 minute period is the most precious part of every meal, because it represents critical fulcrum time during which you can avoid dangerous overeating.

The key benefit of mindful and careful chewing is that it slows down the entire eating process, allowing your brain to catch up to your stomach and figure out that it's full long before you've eaten too much. Result? You'll enjoy your food more, eat far less, and you will push back from the dinner table without feeling hungry or deprived.

Readers, how do you approach chewing at the dinner table? What habits have you built upon to help you eat more slowly and mindfully?

Related Posts:
Review: The End of Overeating by David Kessler
My Raw Food Trial: Full Archive of Posts
Nobody's Colon Blew: Reader Q&A On My Raw Food Trial
How Food Companies Hide Sugar in Plain Sight
The 25 Best Laughably Cheap Recipes at Casual Kitchen
The Pros and Cons of Restaurant Calorie Labeling Laws

Photo Credit: Bruce Tuten

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

How to Feel Less Hungry on Fewer Calories: Hacking the Satiety Factor of Foods

Most of us are aware of the connection between how filling a food is and how many calories it has. A double cheeseburger may have 20 times the calories of a healthy plate of plain lettuce, but if you knew your next meal wouldn't be for another six hours, you'd grab the cheeseburger, right? I certainly would.

That, in a nutshell, is the problem with trying to lose weight by mindlessly cutting calories. If we tilt our diets too far toward light and low-calorie foods, we're going to spend a lot of our lives feeling ravenous and miserable. This is a key reason why diets tend to fail.

Photo credit: MR+G

Thankfully, the relationship between calories and how filling a food is isn't quite as simple as it seems. In fact, some foods can fill us up for a long time with surprisingly few calories. And on the other side of the spectrum, there are foods with horribly high calorie counts that hardly satisfy our appetites at all.

Here's the punchlines: both types of foods offer us opportunities to beat the system by creating a diet around foods that are both filling and healthy. And in today's post, we're going to hack into the secrets of the satiety factor of foods to find out how to take in fewer calories without feeling hungry or deprived.

Before we get started, let me define four terms:

Satiety: In a dietary context, satiety is just a fancy word for being full to the point where you limit further eating.
Satiety Factor: The relationship between how full a food makes you feel and how many calories that food contains.
High Satiety Factor Foods: Foods that fill you up yet contain relatively few calories, and therefore foods you should eat more of if you want to lose weight.
Low Satiety Factor Foods: Foods that don't fill you up yet contain a large amount of calories, and therefore foods to avoid if you want to lose weight.

Let's get back to beating the system. Thanks to a study done in Australia in the mid 1990s, we now have a way to measure a food's satiety factor. The authors of this study fed a group of adults a variety of foods, measuring the effect each food had on the subjects' appetite over time.

Idiosyncrasies of the Satiety Factor Scale
Here's where we get to the intriguing part. It turns out that some foods offered extremely high satiety on very few calories, while some foods offered a horrendous amount of calories and didn't fill the subjects up at all.

Here's a list of the types of "good foods" that offer an exceptionally beneficial trade-off between calories and satiety:

High Satiety-Factor Foods:
Boiled potatoes, skin on
Whole grain pasta
Beans
Lentils
Fiber-rich whole grains, especially oats
Lean meats, such as chicken, white turkey meat or lean cuts of beef
Fish
Eggs
Cheese
Leafy greens (swiss chard, collards, kale, spinach and cabbage)
High water content/high fiber vegetables (grapes, apples, oranges, grapefruit, carrots, bell peppers, eggplant, etc.)

On the other hand, some foods, like donuts or candy bars, are shockingly high in calories, yet they offer very little satiety. Here's a list of typical "bad foods" that offer a terrible trade-off between calories and satiety:

Low Satiety-Factor Foods:
Croissants
Donuts
Candy Bars
Ice cream
Peanuts
Yogurt
Potato Chips
White bread
Corn flakes
White pasta
Cookies

I know I have some of the smartest readers in the food blog world, so I'm certain that by now that you've figured out the secret of hacking the satiety factor: Eat more foods from the first list, and limit foods from the second list. Yep--that's pretty much the secret.

By the way, there are some notable surprises on both lists, aren't there? Some relatively fatty foods like cheese offer surprisingly attractive satiety factors, in part because high-fat foods take a long time to pass through the stomach. At the same time, some seemingly healthy foods don't offer as good a tradeoff as you'd expect. For example, corn flakes and white pasta have shockingly low satiety factors--they're not much better than cookies.

Two additional insights:
1) You can make a big difference in your weight without experiencing any extra hunger if you simply cut out just one or two "worst offender" foods from the second list and replace them with one or two foods from the first list.

2) You'll also notice that many of the foods on the "preferred" list are first-order foods that lack embedded processing, cooking or branding costs. Many of these foods, including potatoes, lentils, eggs, beans, leafy greens and oats, are extremely nutritious and cost very little money. Still more evidence that food does not have to be expensive to be healthy.

Yes, there really are foods out there that offer us the caloric equivalent of a free lunch!

Related Posts:
When High-Fat Food Can Actually Be Healthy For You
The Pros and Cons of a High-Carb/Low-Fat Diet
Make Your Diet Into a Flexible Tool
Scarred For Life By a Food Industry Job

Resources for Further Reading:
The Fullness Factor at Nutritiondata.com
What Really Satisfies at Mendosa.com

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

How to Resist Irresistible Food

Raise your hand if you've ever uttered these phrases:

1) I'm only going to eat a couple of bites.
2) I've been good all day, so I'll indulge myself just this once.
3) I deserve a treat every once in a while--I'm going to help myself.

Anyone who's familiar with the terms rationalization and justification knows that our so-called "higher brains" can be exceptionally good at making excuses and explaining away our behavior--especially when we're around tempting food.

Usually, the higher brain does its job of thinking ahead and planning quite well. But sometimes it falls down on the job. Badly.

For example, when your lower brain sees a delicious plate of chocolate chip cookies (and feels an understandable impulse to dig in), your higher brain often conspires with your lower brain, using one of those three statements above to justify unwanted eating behavior. Before we know it, we're doing our best imitation of the cookie monster.

Presto: we just did something we don't really want to do--without even thinking about it. And yet we think we thought about it. And as any second year Psych major can tell us, since we think we thought about it, our higher brain quickly engages in after-the-fact activity that helps excuse or even covers up our eating behavior. There are a number of studies that show, convincingly, that people dramatically underestimate the volume of foods they've recently consumed, and in some cases people don't remember at all what they've eaten.

In short, when we're in the presence of hyperpalatable food, our higher brains can be as useless as our lower brains.

So how do we stop our brains from rationalizing and justifying, and instead teach our brains to deter us from tempting, hyperpalatable foods?

It starts with re-framing how we think about hyperpalatable foods in the first place.

First of all, don't blame yourself for being tempted by tempting food. It's natural, and it happens to all beings at every level of brain complexity. And let's face it, if humans weren't tempted to eat in the presence of palatable food we'd have never made it to the present era.

However, remember that humans have a capability that animals don't have. We can think in the abstract about what will happen in the future if we take an action now. Most importantly, we have the ability to notice, observe and reroute our autonomic impulses.

Let me borrow a quote from David Kessler, from his book The End of Overeating, as he explains how he retrained himself to think about large portions:

For me, it was about altering my perceptions of large portions. Once, I thought a big plate of food was what I wanted and needed to feel better. Now I see that plate for what it is--layers of fat on fat on sugar on fat that will never provide lasting satisfaction and only keep me coming back for more. With that critical perceptual shift, large portions look very different to me [emphasis mine].

We aren't going to be able to change the fact that our lower brains will experience temptation in the presence of hyperpalatable food. But our higher brains don't have to automatically follow along. Instead, we can use the higher brain to subvert the stimulus/response reaction of our lower brains. How? By engaging our higher order brain functions to notice, and disrupt those patterns.

Try this the next time you are in the presence of tempting food: Openly notice and acknowledge that you are experiencing feelings of hunger and temptation. But then, use your higher brain to map out a future that contains an honest assessment of the ramifications of acting rashly based on that hunger.

In our chocolate chip cookies example, we can imagine the butter or margarine in those cookies clogging up our arteries. A mental picture that I use involves me imagining myself eating tempting food, but then staggering into a walk-in angioplasty clinic afterward (yep, I'm completely serious, and this mental image works wonders for me). Another idea: notice and acknowledge your feelings of hunger, but then envision yourself in future years weighing an extra ten, twenty or fifty pounds.

Don't try to alter your initial temptation impulse--there's simply too many millions of years of evolution behind that impulse to resist it. Instead, alter the higher brain's reaction to that impulse. Before you know it, you'll build a habit of consistently rejecting the unhealthy foods around you.

Readers, what successful techniques have you used to help you resist hyperpalatable food? Share them below!

Related Posts:
Ten Strategies to Stop Mindless Eating
15 Creative Tips to Avoid Holiday Overeating
Review: The End of Overeating by David Kessler
Applying the 80/20 Rule to Diet, Food and Cooking
Eat Right to See Right: Foods for Better Eye Health

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

The Priming Reflex: How to Control Your Appetite (And Turn Your Back on a Million Years of Evolution)

Why do "appetizers" make us hungrier, when in theory they should make us less hungry? Why is it so easy to keep picking and nibbling at the food in front of us, even when we're full? And why do we always have room for dessert?

It's all because of priming.

Psychologists use the term priming to explain why people become reflexively hungry in the presence of a large supply of tasty food.

There's a simple logic to why this trait exists. Back in prehistoric times, food was scarce and infrequently available. That delicious mammoth that your tribe just roasted up might just be your last meal for a while. Having the ability to summon an enormous appetite so you could consume extra food would significantly increase your odds of surviving until the next mammoth roast. That's why it made a ton of sense for our brains to develop adaptations which would enable us to eat far beyond satiety when the (infrequent) opportunity arose.

In the modern era, however, we are constantly surrounded by cheap, palatable and energy-dense foods. And this has turned the priming reflex into a singularly harmful adaptation. It drives us to wolf down our food, ingest calories far beyond our needs, and worse, do it again the next day, the day after that, and the day after that. After all, the food never runs out, and neither, it seems, do our appetites. As a result, priming has become one of the key drivers behind the global obesity pandemic.

What can you do to help fight off the priming reflex? How can you stop it from subverting your health and your diet?

1) Wait.
Everyone knows that the sensation of fullness occurs with a lag. Your stomach always waits a good twenty to thirty minutes before it decides to tell your brain that it's full. This time lag is in fact a key part of the priming reflex, because it makes it lot easier to eat beyond satiety.

The trick is to recognize that those twenty to thirty minutes are the most precious minutes of mealtime. They offer you a fulcrum moment: you can overeat during that time and hardly notice, or you can take your time, slow down and eat sparingly for the first half hour of your meal. These delaying tactics will allow your brain to catch up to your stomach, helping you push away from the table without eating too much and without feeling hungry or deprived. (See more ideas on how to avoid overeating at the dinner table.)

2) Think, don't react.
Remember, priming is just a reflex. It's nothing more than an autonomic urge. You, however, are are much more than the product of your reflexes and urges: you're an intelligent human being, blessed with an enormous cerebrum that sits up on top of those unruly, instinct-based parts of your brain. If you use your higher brain to intellectualize the urges and appetites you experience, you'll find that your unhealthy instincts and reflexes suddenly have a lot less power:

"I know that chili relleno platter looks amazing to me right now, but if I eat the whole thing I will feel awful in an hour. If I split it with my friend, then I'll still get to taste plenty of food, and I won't regret it later."

Having a quick internal dialog like this is a great way to bring higher-order mental processes into an eating situation. If you can train yourself to have a higher-brain conversation like this each time you sit down to eat, you'll find it a lot easier to outwit the priming reflex.

3) Notice.
Finally, build a habit of using noticing and mindfulness techniques every time you sit down to eat. Pay close attention to the taste, smell and sensation of your food, starting with the very first bite. Chew slowly and carefully, and take the time to savor and enjoy the full experience of eating. Do this throughout your meal.

Mindful eating is in fact a perfect synergy of all three of today's eating tips. It helps you enjoy your food on an intellectual (higher brain) level, rather than a reflexive (lower brain) level. It slows you down. And most importantly, while you're carefully chewing your food, you're also chewing up the clock, making it all the more easy to use up that critical 20-30 minutes of critical "fulcrum time" while your brain catches up to your stomach. Result? You will eat much less, yet still leave the table perfectly satisfied with your meal.

Remember, hunger is often a highly misleading mental state, and the priming urge causes us to experience hunger far out of proportion to our nutritional and caloric needs. With the help of our higher brains and a few minor habit changes at the dinner table, we can permanently put the priming instinct where it belongs--in the dustbin of human history.

Wait, think and notice, and recognize that hunger doesn't have to be mindlessly obeyed.

Related Posts:
Applying the 80/20 Rule to Diet, Food and Cooking
Ten Strategies to Stop Mindless Eating
Guess What? We Spend Less Than Ever on Food
A Recession-Proof Guide to Saving Money on Food

I owe a debt of gratitude to David Kessler's The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite for prompting me to think about the issues in this post.

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Obesity and the Obama Administration: A Blogger Roundtable Discussion

Ask any doctor or health expert to tell you what's the most pressing medical issue in American today and he or she will say, "Obesity." Not cancer, not heart disease, not high blood pressure, but obesity. All it takes is a simple look around the country to see that most Americans need help with their diets.

Once again, I thought this was a perfect issue to bring to the Casual Kitchen Blogger Roundtable (see other Blogger roundtable discussions here at Casual Kitchen). And so, I sent this question around to our roundtable team members:

What is your top suggestion for the Obama administration to help solve America's obesity epidemic?

As expected, their responses were blunt, creative and further proof that great ideas come when we think together. Here are their thoughts:

Joy, author of What I Weigh Today:
The most important thing is to implement health insurance reform that would provide income-sensitive coverage for everyone and that would include prevention, nutrition counseling, access to fitness centers, early and regular testing for the so-called lifestyle diseases and mental health care.

Another extremely important action the Obama administration could take would be to remove the subsidies built into the farm bill that make it profitable to mass produce the kinds of food that compromise our health while making it expensive and difficult to grow the kinds of food that promote health. Greater oversight and regulation of the processed food industry is also urgently needed.

Joanne, author of Eats Well With Others:
First of all, BAN HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP. Unlike glucose or other sugars, the human body has difficulty regulating the absorption of fructose, and it can easily lead to insulin-resistance and diabetes.

Second, EDUCATION IS KEY. Before I set about losing my fifty pounds I had no idea what a calorie was. Sure, I knew what was “good” and “bad” but only in a very abstract way. For example, how many people realize a 1500 calorie McDonald’s value meal is equal to their calorie expenditure for the day, or one lemon poppy seed muffin from Costco has the same calories as 10 apples?

A good way to remediate this would be to start teaching kids about nutrition when they are young. We can teach them the difference between first and second order foods and introduce them to fruits and vegetables in an appealing way in the same way we have DARE programs in schools to teach children that drugs and alcohol are bad.

Tara, author of Beach Eats:
My suggestion would be to focus on some combination of nutritional education and the revision of school lunch programs. I believe its important to build a foundation for life-long healthy eating and what better place to start than with our nation's youth? If school lunch programs could be revamped to focus on fresh, whole foods, rather than salty, fatty, manufactured junk, we might begin to develop a broader segment of the population committed to eating well from the start.

Jules, author of stonesoup:
Educate, educate, educate. If people don't know the basics of preparing fresh, nutritious inexpensive and most of all satisfying food, we will never be able to beat obesity.

Tyler, author of 344 Pounds:
While the obesity epidemic is a serious health risk to America, I don't believe it's the responsibility of any government--Republican or Democrat--to tell anybody how they should live their lives, even if it's "for their own good." While I support trying to solve the obesity epidemic in America, I don't believe it's the government's job to protect people from themselves.

That being said, there are wonderful organizations operating with private donations (including mine) like Bill Clinton's Alliance for a Healthier Generation. It tries to educate our youth on the benefits of eating healthy, exercise, and the risks of obesity.
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Readers, here's your chance to sound off. What are your thoughts on this issue?

Related Posts:
How Food Companies Hide Sugar in Plain Sight
Stacked Costs and Second-Order Foods: A New Way to Think About Rising Food Costs
15 Creative Tips to Avoid Holiday Overeating
Why Our Food Industry Isn't So Bad After All
The Problem with Government Food Safety Regulation

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Review: The End of Overeating by David Kessler

Note: An expanded version of this post is on my book review blog, What I Just Read.
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Why is it impossible to eat just one Dorito? Why do we crave some foods and not others? Why is it easy for many of us to eat far beyond satiation--even though we know we're going to regret it?

Why, in short, do we overeat?

These are the fundamental questions that former FDA Commissioner David Kessler asks in his new book The End of Overeating.

In this book, you'll learn why some foods, tweaked and optimized by food designers and engineers to be "hyperpalatable," drive us to irrational cravings. You'll learn how our biology and our psychology conspire with these hyperpalatable foods to lead us to engage in "conditioned hypereating," causing us to eat far past the point where we're full.

You'll also learn how foods are processed, standardized and saturated with sugars and fats before being served at casual theme restaurant chains across the country. One particularly disturbing example describes chicken breasts pierced with hundreds of needles (for a more tender texture), injected with water or saline (to add moisture and bulk), breaded with sugary, salted flour (for extra palatability), and then par-fried, frozen and shipped to your local restaurant franchise. After a second frying, the chicken is practically pre-chewed by the time it arrives at your table.

Sheesh. And I thought I had already come up with all the best reasons to avoid second-order foods.

Needless to say, it is not normal to eat food prepared this way. But because so much of the food in restaurants and grocery stores is heavily processed, who's to say what is even normal anymore? And while there is an enormous amount of personal responsibility each of us can exercise between our forks and mouths, you can't help feeling after reading this book that the food deck is stacked against all but the most iron-willed of people.

This book has a few flaws: The first section contains some 10-15 pages of borderline erotic descriptions of chocolate chip cookies, pizza and M&Ms as Kessler gradually sets up his arguments against engineered foods. Two or three pages would have sufficed and would have left me quite a bit less hungry. And at times Kessler plays an unconvincing innocent, wandering Michael Moore-like into meetings and conversations with industry insiders and expressing affected shock at the techniques and methods used in the food business. The innocent guy act might work if Kessler wasn't one of the most politically savvy civil servants ever to head up the FDA--and a key force behind most of the new food labeling regulations passed during the 1990s.

But these are minor criticisms of an otherwise exceptional, insightful and shocking book.

Read The End of Overeating and you'll learn how our biology and psychology cause us to crave and consume foods to the point of irrationality. Read it to learn how the food industry entices us to eat more than we should of foods that are less healthy than they could be. But most importantly, read this book to become a more aware eater and a more aware consumer.



Readers, those of you familiar with my reading blog know that I love putting together reading lists from the books I read. If you're interested in further reading on the many subjects touched on in The End of Overeating, here's a list of some of the most interesting books Kessler used as sources:

1) Fat Girl: A True Story by Judith Moore
2) Waistland: The R/evolutionary Science Behind Our Weight and Fitness Crisis by Deirdre Barret
3) The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8. Lee
4) Dieter's Dilemma: Eating Less and Weighing More by William Bennett and Joel Gurin
5) Willpower's Not Enough: Recovering from Addictions of Every Kind by Arnold Washton and Joan Zweben
6) Biting the Hand That Starves You: Inspiring Resistance to Anorexia/Bulimia by Richard Maisel, David Epston and Ali Borden

Related Posts:
Does Healthy Eating Really Cost Too Much? Blogger Roundtable
A Question of Food Quality
Why Our Food Industry Isn't So Bad After All
Just Say No to Overpriced Boxed Cereal

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!