(Mother Earth News) The following is an excerpt from The End of Overeating by David A. Kessler, M.D. (Rodale, 2009). Drawn from the latest brain science as well as interviews with top physicians and food industry insiders, The End of Overeating is a groundbreaking investigation into why we eat the way we do, and how our modern diets — highjacked by the food, restaurant and advertising industries — have contributed to our current national health crisis…
Our diet today is mostly made up of “easy calories.” According to Gail Civille, founder and president of the food industry consulting firm Sensory Spectrum, in the past Americans typically chewed a mouthful of food as many as 25 times before it was ready to be swallowed. Now the average American chews only 10 times.
In part this is because fat, which has become ubiquitous, is a lubricant. We don’t eat as much lean meat, which requires more saliva to ready it for swallowing. “We want something that’s higher in fat, marbled, and so when you eat it, it melts in your mouth,” Civille says. Food is easier to eat when it breaks down more quickly in the mouth. “If I have fat in there, I just chew it up and whoosh! Away it goes.”
John Haywood, a prominent restaurant concept designer, agreed. Processing, he said, creates a sort of “adult baby food.” By “processing” he means removing the elements in whole food — such as fiber and gristle — that are harder to chew and swallow. What results is food that doesn’t require much effort to eat. “It goes down very easy; you don’t even think much about eating it,” Haywood says.
The food consultant who told me about his industry’s secrets had much the same perspective. “We’ve gone through some kind of a metamorphosis over the years. We’ve made food very easy to get calories from.” He talked about the greater degree to which we refine foods now; an example is how we mill away the bran from brown rice and whole-wheat flour. As a result the food is “light, it’s white, it’s very easy to swallow. It doesn’t obstruct you in any way. It’s easy to get a lot of calories without a lot of chewing.”
Because this kind of food disappears down our throats so quickly after the first bite, it readily overrides the body’s signals that should tell us, “I’m full.”…
Instead of paying attention to what goes into our mouths, we’re engaged in a “shoveling process,” says Nancy Rodriguez. An expert on the sensory properties of food and head of the product development firm Food Marketing Support Services, Rodriguez asserts, “We eat to be belly filled.”
[Click the title, above, to post a comment.]