What we need to do is change how Americans look at food. We were able to demonize tobacco, but you don’t need tobacco—you do need food, and you can’t demonize food. You shouldn’t demonize food. But we need to be able to look at food and say, “Boy, that’s nutritious; that’s going to satiate me; I’m going to feel good after I eat that.” Or to look at that huge portion and say, “That may taste good for a couple of seconds, but I’m not going to like myself in twenty minutes if I eat that.” My mental representation of that stimulus defines my behavior to a great extent.
For decades, the food industry has been able to argue that they’re just giving consumers what they want, meaning giving them what tastes good. And it does. It’s very sensory-stimulating. We now know that certain centers of the brain become activated and don’t shut off for millions of people who overeat. For them, [those centers] don’t shut off until the food’s gone. And they stay activated. So the food industry is not just giving consumers what they want—it is also creating a product that excessively activates the neural circuitry of millions of people.
So with that, there’s a joint responsibility. Just because it affects my neural circuitry, whether consciously or unconsciously, doesn’t mean I as an individual don’t have responsibility; but the food industry also has responsibility.
CH: Do you think that people develop conditioned hypereating through exposure to industrialized food (plus the media messages and advertising that go with it), and perhaps switching off that behavior can be accomplished partially by a return to whole foods?
DK: Absolutely. Our brains have been hijacked; we’ve been captured by these powerful stimuli. And once you learn that neural circuitry, the learning is very hard to undo. The only way you can undo it is to add new learning on top of that old learning. On top of those old neural circuits, you have to condition new neural circuits to change how you perceive the stimulus: “That’s not what I want. I want food that’s going to taste good but is going to sustain me. I want food that is natural. I don’t want food that is just layered and loaded with fat on fat on sugar on fat.”
It requires a real internal shift. No diet’s going to work. I mean, if I take you out of your environment, I can give you a plan for a few days; I can give you meal replacements. But if I then put you back in your environment, you still have those old neural circuits, and when I cue you again, of course you’re going to go back [to the old habits]. So the only way to change is to really internalize what you want. It requires a fundamental shift. For each of us it’s different, but it has to be lifelong and sustainable. You’re only going to be able to cool off the stimulus if you truly don’t want the stimulus; and the best way not to want the stimulus is to want something else more.
So what is that other thing you want more? For certain people, they start exercising, and exercise becomes a substitute reward. For others, it’s natural food and more healthful foods. It’s very important to start somewhere, whether it’s exercise or the types of foods you choose, because then you start associating yourself with a healthy lifestyle.
But you can’t deny reward. Eating food that doesn’t taste good is not going to work. You have to create your own environment, and you have to decide what it is that you value, and you have to have a plan. You have to be able to limit the chaotic and constant eating that we’ve become wired to do.
CH: In the book you discuss how emotional overeating often happens when people view food as a reward. But rewarding yourself with food once in a while doesn’t necessarily have to lead to out-of-control eating, does it? Many people are able to allow themselves treats in a responsible way.
DK: Right. It’s not going to work if we don’t have rewards. Deprivation, again, is only going to increase the reward value, so that doesn’t work. But what we have to each do is decide what are the rewards we want, and then have a plan to be able to control it. So if I get cued and my brain gets activated, I can say, “I don’t want that now because I’m going to have something else later that I want more.” But if you look at everything and everything looks appealing to you, it’s very hard to resist. We’ve always had hyper-palatable foods—our grandmothers made them, too—but there was always a limit to them. That kind of food was an occasional reward. Now all eating has become the reward.
Children ages two to five used to be able to compensate for calories: If you fed them more calories [than they typically ate in one meal], they would eat less later on. But now, by the age of five, that compensation is gone; they’re just eating for reward all the time. There are children who are age five and younger who have never been hungry in their lives; they’re just eating all day. There’s no limit.
I’ve just finally gotten to the point—and it’s taken me years—where if you put a huge portion in front of me, I look at that and I say, “Boy, that’s disgusting. I don’t want that. I’d rather have something half the size that’s going to sustain me.” But that’s how we have to recondition people in America. The real problem is “big” food. You go into a restaurant and it’s easy to consume 2,000 calories in one sitting. And it’s because we look at big portions and we’ve said, “Hey, that’s great.”
CH: Right—that’s a value meal, and I’m getting such a great deal for so much food.
DK: Rather than looking at it and saying, “Every time I eat that, that’s only going to strengthen my neural circuits to eat it again.”
CH: You argue in the book that we need a public education campaign to specifically address that issue of “big” food, and we need to get people early and expose them to a lot of information about this issue. But how do we go about that when the food industry in this country has so much lobbying power, so much influence?
DK: I think the question is, now that we know that the food industry is excessively activating our brains, what are they going to do about it? Fifty years ago, confronted with new scientific information, the tobacco industry decided to deny it and deceive the American public. We now have the science to understand what the food industry is doing. They’re producing highly palatable stimuli, and there’s a responsibility that comes with that.
Of course there’s a certain percentage of people who are eating in balance, and it’s important that what I say doesn’t necessarily apply to them. But to the rest of us, who have a hard time controlling our eating, if we ate half of what we were eating, we would still be satiated. So we really need to come to view huge portions very differently. We have to change how America looks at food. Nothing short will work.
And by the way, there’s nothing wrong with a hamburger. It’s when you add bacon and cheese and sauce and add fries and everything else to it. Four or five hundred calories a meal is fine. So it’s important to be able to find what you like and be able to control the size of it, because once your brain gets activated, it’s very hard to stop. We used to think we finished [huge portions] because our mothers taught us to clean our plates. Now we know it’s because this food is hyper-palatable. For most of us, the reward centers of our brain have so overpowered the homeostatic mechanisms that we don’t even feel satiation. At least for the tens of millions of people who have conditioned hypereating.
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