The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts That Make Us Overeat

by Stephan Guyenet

To see if he could design a faster and more effective way to fatten rats, Sclafani went to the supermarket and bought a variety of calorie-dense “palatable supermarket foods,” including Froot Loops, sweetened condensed milk, chocolate chip cookies, salami, cheese, bananas, marshmallows, milk chocolate, and peanut butter. When Sclafani placed these foods into the rats’ cages, along with the obligatory standard rodent pellets and water, the rats immediately gorged on the human food, losing interest in their boring pellets. On this diet, they gained weight at an unprecedented rate. In a few short weeks, the rats were obese, and neither exercise nor an enriched environment were able to prevent it (although exercise did attenuate it). Sclafani named this the “supermarket diet,” although most researchers now call it the “cafeteria diet.”