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January 3 - January 20, 2023
People do not eat too much because they are lazy, self-indulgent, or weak. They eat because they want to. They are tormented by a desire, a craving—a force—that springs from the very core of their being.
The stories you see on TV of people “miraculously” losing ten pounds in a single week are true. Every diet works. I repeat: every diet works. Just not for long.
The brain is not some bumbling, famished imbecile trapped in that warm liquid attic, perpetually barking out orders to eat.
The brain regulates body mass as keenly as it regulates temperature. Fat cells release hormones that tell the brain how much fat there is.
AND NOW for the most surprising fact of all: The brain doesn’t just resist losing weight. It resists gaining weight.
Maximizing pleasure or minimizing pain, either now or in the future, is how decisions get made.
The brain is the wizard behind the curtain. It knows how much the body weighs. It knows what it wants the body to weigh. It knows how to get there. And the quest for pleasure is its guide and its fuel.
Dopamine is incentive. Dopamine is motivation. Dopamine is excitement. Dopamine is Go! Dopamine is craving. It is, quite simply, desire. But it is a deep and visceral kind of desire, a primordial urge that is separate from rational thought. Berridge calls it “wanting.” Not all desire is “wanting,” which is why Berridge always writes the word using italics or quotation marks.
You can think of it as the temptation-overload theory of addiction. It’s not the high that does addicts in. It’s the desire to get high, even though that desire doesn’t actually deliver the high they so badly want.
As with addictive drugs, the food problem isn’t fueled by an overindulgence in pleasure, it is fueled by the desire to obtain that pleasure.
Life with obesity is a kind of cruel prison. To eat is to experience raging bursts of desire followed by an underwhelming dribble of pleasure.
What the brain ultimately cares about isn’t how food tastes. It cares whether food is useful.
This is part of what makes slot machines so exquisitely unpredictable, which, as we shall see, is what makes them so irresistible. But make no mistake: these games are rigged, and no strategy or technique can turn things to the player’s advantage.
Gambling, especially problem gambling, is a lot like obesity in that way. Both are self-destructive, often ruinous forms of pleasure seeking.
For example, parents often restrict access to unhealthy foods, such as cookies, in an effort to reduce the amount their children eat. Studies have found that this strategy often backfires, bringing about the opposite result. Restricting food elevates its allure. Cookies become a fixation.
Lots of food isn’t what makes rodents overeat. It is uncertainty that cranks up “wanting.” And fake sweetness is one way to create uncertainty.
THE WORRY that artificial sweeteners may be harmful to our health is anything but new. They have been studied almost as long as they have existed. And the results are all over the map.
Compounds such as xylitol, isomalt, and maltitol, for example, are twice as sweet as sugar, calorie for calorie. These don’t deliver sweetness with no calories, just fewer calories. They are members of the family known as sugar alcohols, they tend to cause diarrhea, and Americans collectively consume about three hundred and sixty-five thousand tons of them every year.
The picture is at last becoming clearer. The thing that changed—the event that energized “wanting” and created this artificial, inescapable hunger that has ensnared so many of us—is nutritive mismatch. For the first time in the history of our species, the information the brain senses about food has become consistently unreliable.
We were not born to be fat. The problem is we are being goaded into a game we cannot resist. And it is killing us.
The mouth is a more than a hall of frivolous chewing. It senses important information about food, information that forms the beginning of the long process whereby food is taken in, broken down, and used.
Our processed carbs come prepackaged with the vitamins necessary to metabolize them. Weight gain is set to “optimal.” It is the law. We eat like pigs and we gain like pigs.
Vitamins don’t just passively show up in the stomach. They must be consumed. Eating is a behavior. For an omnivore, balancing a diet is something you have to go out and do—like
People with obesity literally think differently, and those differences go beyond how they think about food.
Hilbert’s patients have “the wish” to lose weight, but many are simultaneously stubborn and unwilling.
Food played such an outsize role in the emotional lives of her patients that for some researchers in a lab coat to expect them to just extinguish that relationship seemed not only unrealistic but cruel.
What is dieting, after all, but yet another desire, a promise of deliverance that has almost no hope of coming true.
So here, then, is the theory spelled out: the obesity epidemic is being fueled by advancements in food technology that have disrupted the brain’s ability to sense nutrients, altered eating behavior, and given food an unnatural energetic potency.
This is what set so many of us on a path to weight gain. We changed food and it changed us.
So much of what we now eat is engineered to mislead the brain. The information we sense as we eat has become unreliable.
Because every time we have embraced some simple fix—whether it’s a diet, the demonization of carbs or fat, or some idiotic form of coffee—it hasn’t worked. It’s easy to imagine a world where the food is pure and everyone is skinny and healthy again. But that’s a wish.
This is the quintessential American question about food: How will this affect my body? This is the quintessential Italian question about food: Is this the best recipe?
