The end of craving Recovering the lost wisdom of eating well

Mark Schatzker

Book - 2021

"For the last fifty years, we have been fighting a losing war on food. We have cut fat, reduced carbs, eliminated sugar, and attempted every conceivable diet only to find that eighty-eight million American adults are now pre-diabetic, more than a hundred million have high blood pressure, and nearly half now qualify as obese. The harder we try to control what we eat, the more unhealthy we become. Why? Mark Schatzker has spent his career traveling the world in search of the answer. In The Dorito Effect, he revealed the startling relationship between flavor and nutrition. In Steak, he was one of the first authors to recognize the critical importance of regenerative agriculture. Now, in The End of Craving, he poses an even more profound q...uestion: What if the key to nutrition and good health lies not in resisting the primal urge to eat, but understanding its purpose? Beginning in the mountains of Europe and the fields of the Old South, Schatzker embarks on a quest to uncover the lost art of eating and living well. Along the way, he visits brain scanning laboratories and hog farms, and encounters cultural oddities and scientific paradoxes--northern Italians eat what may be the world's most delicious cuisine, yet are among the world's thinnest people; laborers in southern India possess an inborn wisdom to eat their way from sickness to good health--that reveal how decades of advancements in food technology have turned the brain's drive to eat against the body, placing us in an unrelenting state of craving. Only by restoring the relationship between nutrition and the essential joy of eating can we hope to lead longer and happier lives. Combining cutting-edge science and ancient wisdom, The End of Craving is an urgent and radical investigation that will fundamentally change how we understand both food and ourselves." -- inside book jacket

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Subjects
Genres
Self-help publications
Published
New York : Avid Reader Press 2021.
Language
English
Main Author
Mark Schatzker (author)
Edition
First Avid Reader Press hardcover edition
Physical Description
257 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 207-244) and index.
ISBN
9781501192470
  • Introduction: The Mystery
  • Part I. One Disease, Two Cures
  • 1. The New Road to Better Nutrition
  • 2. The Old Italian Way
  • Part II. You Are a Metabolic Genius (and You Love It)
  • 3. You're Hot. Then You're Not
  • 4. The Quest for Pleasure
  • 5. Too Much of a Good Thing
  • Part III. Nutritive Mismatch
  • 6. How Sweet It Is
  • 7. Not Losing Isn't Everything. Its the Only Thing
  • 8. Creamfibre 7000
  • Part IV. The Help That Hurts
  • 9. Why Does Food Taste Good, Anyway?
  • 10. You Are Eating Pig Feed
  • Part V. The Brain-Changing Power of Good Food
  • 11. The End of Craving
  • 12. Can This Be Fixed?
  • 13. A Visit to the Old Road
  • Acknowledgments
  • Bibliography
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Decades of fad diets have missed the fact that "additive by additive, food has become a strange imitation of itself," according to this zippy and fascinating survey. Science journalist Schatzker (The Dorito Effect) argues that by attempting to alter foods for weight loss, food companies have instead created "the perfect conditions" for obesity. Schatzker begins with a comparison of how the governments in Italy and the U.S. reacted to the revelation that a disease, pellagra (which struck the Southern U.S. specifically), was caused by a vitamin deficiency. This discovery led to a 1941 federal government decree that flour be enriched with B vitamins, and thus began the downfall of the American diet. The 1950s saw a boom in modified starches and artificial fat replacers, and since then, preservatives, artificial sweeteners and fats, and additional vitamin and mineral enrichments have "disrupted the brain's ability to sense nutrients" and led to high rates of obesity. Meanwhile, Schatzker notes, the Italians set out a program of baking bread in communal ovens and encouraged the poor to raise rabbits for meat (the yeast in their unfiltered wine contained niacin, too, which didn't hurt), and as a result, in northern Italy, where pellagra was endemic, there is an 8% obesity rate, compared to 47% in Mississippi. Schatzker supports his case with copious research from the fields of food science, psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics. (The quirky anecdotes, such as those about Goethe's travels in Italy, are a nice bonus.) This is a real eye-opener. (Nov.)

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