Food fight

Former FDA commissioner David Kessler
leads the fight against fat

by JULIET WATERS

When I meet David Kessler, the former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the first thing he does is offer me half of his sandwich.

He’s been doing non-stop media for his book The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite, which argues that North Americans need to wrestle control of their food choices back from a manipulative, coercive food industry. In an hour, he’ll be on a plane to Chicago, so he’s grabbing a light lunch. Like most Americans, he’s watching his weight. By last count, one out of three was obese.

“For thousands of years the human body weight stayed remarkably stable,” he writes in a fascinating book that seems poised to become a staple on bestseller lists. “Throughout adulthood we basically consumed no more than the food we needed to burn. People who were overweight stood apart from the general population. Millions of calories passed through our bodies, yet with rare exceptions, our weight neither rose nor fell by any significant amount. A perfect biological system seemed to be at work. Then, in the 1980s, something changed.”

So the obvious first question is:

Mirror: How did this happen?

David Kessler: You take fat, sugar and salt. You make food multi-sensory. You layer it and load it into food. You put it on every corner. You make it acceptable to eat all the time. And you condition the brains of millions of North Americans.

M: Could this be a side effect of other massive social changes that happened during this time?

DK: Tell me the other things you think would account for it.

M: Well, number one, women going into the workforce. They don’t have as much time to plan and are less often the nutritional gatekeepers they once were.

DK: None of that is inconsistent. That gives the opportunity for the sugar, fat and salt to condition the brain, because that person hasn’t been around to keep structure. So you’re not cooking as much, you’re eating out more, you’re eating more processed foods.

M: What about the obesity rate in Quebec? It seems to be lower. But we still have a lot of junk food.

DK: Yeah, it’s about 22 to 23 per cent. There are a couple of differences. You tend to eat out less. You tend not to eat throughout the day as much. And, regrettably, there’s a higher rate of smoking.

M: So as our smoking rate goes down we’re in danger of getting fatter?

DK: Right.

M: In a Quebec study I read, they seemed to focus less on the food industry, and more on ways that Quebec society has started to imitate North American lifestyle trends. For instance, we work more hours than we used to.

DK: You’re not going to get obese if you don’t have the readily available sugar, fat and salt. It’s not going to happen. Just because you’re working longer, you’re not going to get fat. There are societies where people work harder, that don’t have this problem. It’s the availability of excess calories that’s going to do it. And the question is how does that fit into the cultural norm.

M: So it’s all conditioning?

DK: People who are overweight demonstrate all the characteristics of conditioned, driven behaviour. They tell themselves, “I can’t control my behaviour, I don’t feel full, something’s over-riding my attention.” Once I have this conditioned behaviour, then if I’m stressed, tired, if I’m trying to catch a plane, I’ll revert back to that conditioned behaviour. If there were nothing but crap here, I’d eat it. And if you were asking hostile question after hostile question, I’d probably go get a chocolate cookie.

M: Okay, I’ll try not to stress you.

DK: It’s okay. I’m just kidding.

THE END OF OVEREATING BY DAVID
KESSLER, M & S, HC, 324 PP. $29.99