From where David Kessler sits, Americans live in a whiz-bang, lights-flashing, bells-ringing, nonstop carnival of food. It\u2019s everywhere, and expertly blended to taste good. For most of us, that\u2019s too much to resist.<\/p>\n
The result is an obesity epidemic roaring out of control, sweeping up Kessler himself, along with two-thirds of Americans who are overweight or obese.<\/p>\n
Kessler, former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said Tuesday (March 9) during a talk at the Harvard School of Public Health<\/a> (HSPH) that obesity mirrors many traits that smoking had before public health efforts began to erode both its image and the number of smokers.<\/p>\n Chains and processed-food manufacturers have opened a restaurant or snack shop at most major intersections and bombarded the public with advertising that says processed and restaurant food makes you cool, makes you have fun, and makes you popular. Even as those images sink into the nation\u2019s psyche, food scientists have applied themselves to creating perfectly irresistible concoctions of sugar, salt, and fat.<\/p>\n The result, Kessler said, is something of a perfect storm of messaging, opportunity, and desirability that has successfully snagged all too many of us. Today, Kessler said, cultural barriers that once restricted where and when we eat have fallen. Americans now eat at mealtimes, but also between meals, in meetings, in cars, on sidewalks, and in university lecture halls. Excess is no longer frowned upon, it\u2019s celebrated, creating a supersized-food free-for-all that doesn\u2019t exist in many other countries, where eating between meals is rare and where eating in formal locations, such as lecture halls, is frowned upon.<\/p>\n Kessler, who led the FDA during the 1990s campaigns against tobacco, said the similarities to that predicament provide a roadmap out of this one.<\/p>\n Like tobacco, he said, unhealthy eating and eating to excess need an image makeover. Tobacco at its height bombarded the airwaves with images of cool smokers, manly smokers, sexy smokers. Smoking was allowed everywhere \u2014 including in restaurants and on planes \u2014 and was accepted in many homes. Slowly, however, public health officials successfully fought tobacco\u2019s general acceptance through campaigns against secondhand smoke and bans on advertising, eroding smokers\u2019 cool image and crafting an unhealthy one.<\/p>\n \u201cWe didn\u2019t change the product, we changed the perception,\u201d Kessler said.<\/p>\n Food will be a tougher nut to crack, Kessler acknowledged. Unlike tobacco, which everyone can survive without, people can\u2019t live without food. The neural circuits and urges that food manufacturers have successfully tapped are among the most basic.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s going to require everything that we\u2019ve learned with tobacco. It\u2019s going to take efforts on the public health side greater than anything we\u2019ve done to date,\u201d Kessler said. \u201cRemember the middle school child who said, \u2018Mom and Dad, please stop smoking?\u2019 We will know we\u2019ve made a change when that kid says, \u2018Mom and Dad, please don\u2019t take me to McDonalds.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Kessler delivered the annual HSPH Stare-Hegsted Lecture, named after two founders of the School\u2019s Nutrition Department<\/a>. He also has written \u201cThe End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite.\u201d<\/p>\n In his talk, which was introduced by HSPH Dean Julio Frenk<\/a> and Nutrition Department Chair Walter Willett<\/a>, Kessler described his own struggle with obesity \u2014 he said he owns suits in many sizes \u2014 and his growing fascination with its biological roots.<\/p>\n He described recent obesity-related research that shows that it\u2019s not just sugar, salt, and fat that make food attractive, but a combination of flavors that pull us toward specific foods. Behavioral pathways in the brain are created by eating those foods repeatedly, so if we\u2019re not careful we become behaviorally predisposed to eating certain foods at certain times and places, whether we\u2019re hungry or not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From where David Kessler sits, Americans live in a whiz-bang, lights-flashing, bells-ringing, nonstop carnival of food. It\u2019s everywhere, and expertly blended to taste good. For most of us, that\u2019s too much to resist. The result is an obesity epidemic roaring out of control, sweeping up Kessler himself, along with two-thirds of Americans who are overweight […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-416869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416869\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}