David Kessler, M.D.

We have all seen books with wonderful writing and a few moderately valuable tips on diet or time management do stunningly well on the market. This book is the opposite. It should be famous and have done stunningly well in the market. It should have been on the bestseller lists for months to years and beyond. While the writing may deserve a good solid B, it is the Kessler’s identification of the reasons behind the fattening of America (and now the world) that are stunning and of crucial value.


Consider for a moment. What if some nefarious cabal paid some of the best scientists and marketers in the world billions and billions of dollars to addict you to a substance? Is there a chance that they would succeed? Drug dealers on the street succeed at this all the time and let’s face it, their research budget is about zero.

This is exactly the scheme that Kessler describes.

Consider again. You are a restaurateur and you open a new eatery. You want to wow the patrons and to get them to come back again and again. You need to keep the costs reasonable so you can stay in business. You hire a chef to design the best (tastiest) foods in your particular niche, perhaps you engage a prominent consultant, someone who has helped well-known restaurants go national. Suddenly it works. Your patrons become your best advertising, they come back again and again. Lunch time you have a waiting list. Evening you are full from 6 to 10 every night. Homerun. Success. The money rolls in. You manage to pay the staggering startup costs and suddenly for the first time in a year you can actually pay yourself a salary and your family can stop living on your overdrawn credit cards.

What happened? You and the Chef designed food filled with sugar, salt and fat. The consultant taught you how to package it, minimize the number of chews per bite and maximize the re-orders of the products with the greatest profit. . The customers came back again and again.

Despite your passion for tasty and healthy food you stepped onto the slippery slope of American Industrial food. You discovered that it is terrible hard to feed your own family by owning a restaurant unless you follow the current trends in our culture. This trend is tasty, quick and addicting food. Addicting means – food that caters to “supernormal stimuli.”

The science of this should give us pause. In building the companies that give us food the owners and shareholders have all faced this. When the consumer is given what they want, they buy. When they are not given what they want, they do not buy. When this happens,whether the business is large or small, it fails. Mothers and fathers lose their jobs and business. Sometimes families lose homes and miss meals.

A failed business is a serious thing. At any size.

So the owners step on the slippery slope and make a science out of giving us what we want. They pour millions and then billions of dollars of money into this science. Recipes and research. From the question of do we add more salt. (The answer is almost always yes.) To cutting edge research on “supernormal stimuli.”

A “supernormal stimuli” is a stimulus that is massively exaggerated and not available in nature. A potato chip is a basic example. That extreme combination of fat and salt along with the fascination of just the right crunch and mouth feel can never occur in nature. So, the science is in exaggerating each of the oft desired stimuli and in combining them in a memorable way.

Add repetition of both the marketing and the experience of the supernormal stimuli product and “poof.” In many individuals we have addiction.

“Our research supports the theory that high-fat/ high-sugar foods (they tested Oreos against cocaine) stimulate the brain in the same way that drugs do,” Schroeder said. “It may explain why some people can’t resist these foods despite the fact that they know they are bad for them.”

Comments on a study by Joseph Schroeder PhD., Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Connecticut College. Connecticut College. “Are Oreos addictive? Research says yes.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 15 October 2013. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131015123341.htm>.

The truth is quite straightforward. Billions have been spent to addict us to foods that in their current form are not only not good for us, but they are slowly killing us. Look at the obesity epidemic in the U.S. that is spreading around the world.

Mostly, I do not blame the businesses. They have given us what we asked them to give us. But, with the advent of many new dietary insights over the last few years, we now know better or should.

Don’t take my word for it. Get informed. Read the book. Make your own decision.