Huffington Post Blogger Louise McCready recently interviewed Dr. David Kessler, author of “The End of Overeating.” The Q & A was fascinating. Here are a few excerpts:

LM: This book started while watching an Oprah episode. Prior to that, had you ever seriously considered why food has such a pull over people in general, or you in particular?

DK: We implemented and helped design the food label–the modern nutritional facts that appear on the back of most packaged foods–back in the 1990s. That label was about the ingredients and nutritional value including percentage of daily values, but I never looked at the question that way. After watching that episode and that woman who couldn’t control her eating, I said to myself, “What’s going on?” As a physician, I asked myself, “What’s driving this?” I spent the next seven years trying to figure the answer to that out.

LM: In your book, you discuss the business of food, explain how the food industry tries to manipulate appetites, and go so far as to make comparisons to big tobacco by implying that food has a pull over people the same way drugs do. Do you think that these food industries will be vilified or held financially accountable for obesity related diseases in the future?

DK: Fifty years ago, the tobacco industry, confronted with the evidence that smoking causes cancer, decided to deny the science and deceive the American public. Now, we know that highly palatable foods–sugar, fat, salt–are highly reinforcing and can activate the reward center of the brain. For many people, that activation is sustained when they’re cued. They have such a hard time controlling their eating because they’re constantly being bombarded–their brain is constantly being activated.

For decades the food industry was able to argue, “We’re just giving consumers what they want.” Now we know that giving them highly salient stimuli is activating their brains. The question becomes what do they do now?

If a bear walked in here right now, you would stop listening to me and you’d focus on that bear. We’re all wired to focus on the most highly salient stimuli. For a lot of people, that highly salient stimulus is food. It could be alcohol, it could be drugs, it could be gambling, but for many people, it’s food. It’s not just people who are obese, or overweight. Even for people that are healthy weight, food activates the neural circuits of their brains, and they have this conditioned and driven behavior we call conditioned hypereating.

LM: What percentage of Americans would you say suffer from hypereating?

DK: It’s a continuum. For probably 15% of the population, and that’s just a guess, food is not a very salient stimuli in their life. You ask them, and they say, “I can eat or not. I have to eat in order to sustain myself, but it’s not a large part of my life.” That’s a minority of people. If you look at the rest, and you ask them whether they have a sense of loss of control in the face of highly palatable food, if they have a lack of satiation–a lack of feeling full–when eating highly palatable food, and a preoccupation of thinking about food in between meals, about 70 million people would score pretty high on all three characteristics.

To continue reading the interview, click here.

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