This is something I've tried explaining again and again to people who say that poor people can't be that poor since they are fat. Store brand macaroni and cheese is about 35 cents a box and other cheap, empty carbs are similarly cheap. You feed families on that and they can afford to overeat and be still be poorly nourished.

It's a vicious cycle, and it won't be broken easily. Children who grow up on such diets are essentially like houses with poor foundations. No matter how many times you try to rebuild them, the house will never be as sound as one built on a sound foundation.

Great, something else to feel guilty about.

On an individual level, I call BS. Sugar and salt are just not tastes I enjoy, let alone that make me lose all self-control and sense of satiety. Clearly, my bizarrely sensitive sweet and salty tastebuds are anecdotal evidence here, but it convinces me that the entire human race is not hardwired and duped into overeating every time we're presented with a cookie or pretzel.

More generally, though, I think this sense of guilt and shame over food is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Assuming that some arbitrary number of calories is what your body needs and feeling terrible every time you exceed that (even if you're shaking with hunger as you do) or as a matter of morality putting all food into good and bad categories and then feeling terrible after eating the wrong ones are both behaviors that make it harder, not easier, to learn to stop eating when done. Once I stopped assuming that just because I am x size I should eat x food, and decided that the c-word was to be banned from all eating-related decisions, it became much easier to find the point at which I was done eating.

It's interesting that 2 out of 3 commenters above mention guilt. I don't think it is the intent of either the book's author or the reviewer to make anyone feel guilty. And I don't think the fact that some people will feel guilty whenever anyone talks about processed food means that we shouldn't talk about it. The average diet of most people (in terms of both content and portion size) has radically, radically changed over the past few decades or so and I think it would be very strange not to talk about it for fear of making guilt-prone people feel guilty.

I have not read the book yet but I have seen/heard several interviews with Dr. Kessler in the past couple weeks, and my impression is that when he talks about how sugar and salt work in terms of one's eating habits, he is not necessarily talking about an immediate effect (like in the cookie or pretzel example Tangledgray gives) but that he is instead talking about a cumulative effect that happens when someone has eaten a diet of highly processed food for years and years. And that is something that makes a tremendous amount of sense to me, because I stopped eating highly-processed food (or pre-made food, whatever you want to call it; I mean food that only needs to be heated rather than cooked, such as frozen meals and fast food and chain restaurant food) a few years ago and now when I taste it, it's really, really noticeable how the sugar and salt are amplified to mask the poor quality of the other ingredients, and also, I think, to make it taste familiar to people who are accustomed to it. I agree that it's not productive to get hung up on calorie-counting but I don't think that's what the book is about.

I really wish there had been some kind of analysis of this article instead of just a rote repetition of it's points. What a shame. Especially from "huge lovers of mac n' cheese".

The original article is nothing of what this site promotes - good food in moderation. Rather it says that "By eating food that is extremely palatable, we keep wanting more, whether or not we are hungry."

If she believes this, is she advocating unpalatable food?

Wherefore critical thinking?