The End of Craving: Recovering the Lost Wisdom of Eating Well

by Mark Schatzker

Addiction wasn’t caused by too much “liking,” as everyone always thought. Addiction was a case of too much “wanting.”

The brain doesn’t just keep tabs on how much sugar enters the mouth or how much sugar winds up in the stomach. It even keeps track of what happens to that sugar. In another mind-bending experiment—he has a reputation for them—Araujo gave mice a drug that blocked sugar from being turned into energy. The mice tasted the sugar and it was sensed in the stomach, but if it couldn’t be used as fuel, sugar it lost its magnetic pull. What the brain ultimately cares about isn’t how food tastes. It cares whether food is useful.

Small tested drinks with sugar, drinks with no calories, and drinks where sweetness and calories were mismatched. Once again, the results were as amazing as they were alarming. The mismatched drinks—and only the mismatched drinks—impaired insulin sensitivity.

So here, at last, we have found a fundamental aspect of food and eating that has changed: the sensed nutritional value. For as long as humans and their ancestors existed, the taste of a calorie matched the energy it delivered. In the span of just a few decades, that has changed. Calories don’t “mean” what they used to. We are tampering with the very way the brain perceives food, and the implications are still revealing themselves. We know nutritive mismatch is harmful to the human body, that it disrupts metabolism on an elemental level. Here then is an even more disturbing question: What is its effect on the brain?

Scientists in Singapore recently found that if a person just imagines him- or herself interacting with a wealthier, better-educated, and more respected peer, he or she becomes more sensitive to the energy density of beverages.

Food itself is now coaxing the brain into a disturbed state of “wanting.” The reason we can’t stop eating, we will see, is simple. Uncertainty has been baked into the taste of the food we eat.

Lots of food isn’t what makes rodents overeat. It is uncertainty that cranks up “wanting.” And fake sweetness is one way to create uncertainty.

In randomized controlled trials—experiments in which one group of people is fed artificial sweeteners and another group is not—it usually, but not always, looks as if artificial sweeteners may help people lose a tiny amount of weight. But when scientists observe people in the real world over long periods of time who use artificial sweeteners versus those who do not, they find that those who consume artificial sweeteners are at higher risk for weight gain, heart disease, metabolic syndrome, and diabetes.

Names such as Methocel, Beta-Trim, or Lycadex sound painfully corporate and do little to arouse the palate. These are the industry brand names, the cheesy monikers for which the creators of processed food have a peculiar affinity. You’ll never find one on an ingredient panel. Simplesse goes by “milk protein” or “whey protein concentrate,” which makes it sound as if it came from a farm. According to its brochure, Genutine “can help you create a range of gelatin-like textures for desserts, confectionery and dairy systems,” while Genugel “is used to create rheological profiles ranging from free-flowing liquids to thixotropic liquid gels and self-supporting solid gels with a wide range of textures, setting temperatures and melting temperatures.” But you know them, if you know them at all, as “carrageenan.” One of Creamfibre 7000’s many attributes is its “clean label.” It shows up on the ingredient panel using an absurd but technically correct alias: “citrus fiber,” which sounds not only healthy but as if it might prevent bowel cancer.

Each of these products is a bit fatlike on its own, but not one is anything close to the real thing. However, when you add them together—one for bulk, one for flow, one for creaminess—magic happens. The simulation of fattiness becomes so effective you don’t know it’s happening. The food business refers to these mixtures as “combination systems.”

Maltodextrin, the miracle starch Dana Small used in her experiments, may be the most fantastically mismatched substance in all of creation. It can add body to fruit juices and forms the powdery base for potato-chip seasoning, yet it can also function as a fat replacer in dressings and spreads. Some forms of maltodextrin are flavorless, while some taste sweet. It was created in 1967. Before that, maltodextrin-induced nutritive mismatch did not exist.

Then there are “flavorings.” Long before the boom in artificial sweeteners and artificial fats, the flavor industry exerted a transformational effect on food, thanks to a device called a gas chromatograph, which became commercially available in the 1950s. The GC, as it is known, made it possible to capture and identify the flavor compounds that give foods their vivid character. One of the first moves industry made was to identify flavor compounds in butter and add them to margarine. Artificial berry flavorings, which had long tasted painfully fake, soon became astonishingly real. The mouth told the brain, “Berries!”—but all the stomach received was a little jumble of chemicals.

Oikos Triple Zero Blended Greek Yogurt tastes creamy, sweet, and fruity but contains no fat, no added sugar, and no fruit. Halo Top Blueberry Crumble ice cream stimulates sweet receptors with stevia and erythritol (a sugar alcohol), aroma receptors with natural flavors, and mimics the sensation of fat with milk protein concentrate, whey protein concentrate, organic carob gum, acacia gum, and organic guar gum. Uncertainty.

The picture is at last becoming clearer. The thing that changed—the event that energized “wanting” and created this artificial, inescapable hunger that has ensnared so many of us—is nutritive mismatch. For the first time in the history of our species, the information the brain senses about food has become consistently unreliable.

Did fortification—or “enrichment,” as it is known if the government does it—affect them? Did all that niacin, thiamin, and riboflavin change the eating behavior of a nation? One way to explore that question is to examine which foods provided Americans with niacin prior to enrichment. A sizable contribution came from beans, the very food Joseph Goldberger insisted on feeding to sick orphans. Prior to enrichment, the American bean story was a happy one. Bean consumption had steadily been ramping up and reached an all-time high in the early 1940s, at just under ten pounds per person per year. The future, you would think, should have looked rosy. The country was pulling itself out of the Great Depression and would soon enjoy the abundance and prosperity of the postwar years. That’s not how things turned out, however. As the nation’s grain millers began adding B vitamins to refined flours, bean consumption began a long and dismal decline, finally bottoming out in 1980, just as the obesity epidemic was taking flight. Now that everyone was getting their niacin in bread, pasta, and doughnuts, it was as though the inner need for beans faded away.

When given the choice between a scientifically formulated “supplement” and the alfalfa sprouting all around them, something in the pigs’ brains said, Alfalfa. It was as though mixing vitamins in with carbs flicked a switch inside the pigs. It made them eat differently. When given nutritionally complete feed, the pigs lost interest in greenery and became carb-munching, weight-gaining machines. But if the carbs were presented on their own—rich in calories but nutritionally incomplete—the pigs reverted to their omnivore ways. They foraged on alfalfa and dug up roots and did what pigs are born to do.

In 1920, the average American consumed about 1.4 milligrams of thiamin each day, which is just over what scientists recommend an average male consume. Then the government set out on the path of “enrichment” and gave companies the green light to add vitamins themselves. Today the food supply isn’t enriched with vitamins so much as drenched. A serving of Kellogg’s Froot Loops Tropical—without any milk—has at least 20 percent of the daily requirement of five vitamins. That is a lot of calorie-metabolizing potential. The average American now takes in three milligrams of thiamin per day. It may sound minuscule, but this is the thiamin requirement for a 550-pound man. With great obesity comes great B vitamin intake.

Of all the B vitamins we drizzle into the food supply, the most worthy of scrutiny is the one connected to pellagra: our old friend niacin. As far back as 1949, scientists at the National Institutes of Health discovered that among the many different carbohydrates—glucose, dextrin, maltose, sucrose, fructose, and so forth—two, and only two, had an unusual relationship with niacin. For rats to gain weight while consuming these two carbohydrates, they required at least three times as much niacin as compared to other carbohydrates. If they didn’t get an extra-large dose of niacin, they would develop a deficiency. What were those two carbohydrates? Sucrose and fructose—the first we know as table sugar and the second is a component in high-fructose corn syrup. Put more simply, if you’re going to eat a lot of sugar and metabolize that sugar, you need to eat a lot of niacin, too.

OVER IN Italy, the vitamin situation couldn’t be more different. A typical Italian consumes around a single milligram of thiamin per day—less than what Americans consumed in 1940. Italians consume half as much niacin and riboflavin as Americans do today. Italians look more like Team D. Their growth is “normal,” whereas in America weight gain is “optimal.” Italians have access to some legendary sweets, not to mention bottled juice and soda. Could it be that one of the reasons they don’t overindulge is that on some level the Italian brain understands it doesn’t have the niacin to metabolize all that sugar? Perhaps the vitamin is acting like a leash on weight gain.

It isn’t impossible to become obese in Italy, but it’s much harder to pull off. You have to eat a wider variety of foods, and you have to eat more of them. Now imagine an American eating white bread with butter, or doughnuts, cake or crackers, or any other combination of processed carbs and fat. No matter how much of these foods this person eats, his or her brain will never detect a nutritional imbalance, thanks to government-mandated fortification. The appetite for some other food will never be wakened. Thanks to ancient government policy, Americans can consume vast amounts of calories without running out of the vitamins necessary to turn those calories into fat.

And can we rethink the now-ancient practice of enriching processed carbs? It has been nearly a century since pellagra was wiped out. Are we still running dangerously low on niacin, riboflavin, and thiamin?I Some countries—wealthy, advanced, science-forward nations that include Denmark, Finland, France, Japan, Korea, Spain, and Sweden (and Italy, obviously)—do not fortify their flour with vitamins. Amazingly, they do not face epidemics of pellagra every spring. They do, however, have lower rates of adult and child obesity. Can consenting adults of voting age at least have the option of buying unenriched flour with their groceries?

Not all B-vitamin fortification is, by its nature, suspect. There is strong evidence that the addition of folic acid to the food supply prevents birth defects.

I had come to Italy to answer a question. Why did Italy turn out so differently from America? After the discovery of vitamins, the road of nutrition forked. Governments faced with an epidemic of malnutrition could take the new road, as America did, and biochemically fix the problem, which seems like the obvious thing to do. Or they could stay on the old road. Italy stayed on the old road. They could have fortified their flour but did not. They could have loaded their ice cream with alginate and other stabilizers and fats, but instead gelato shops boast their gelato is made in the artisanal, time-tested manner. It would be so easy to lower the counts on calorie bombs such as tortellini or mortadella with Simplesse and Avicel, but Italy sticks to tradition with pride.

Lard is another thing that’s changed since the old days. So many people have switched to olive oil you can hardly find lard anymore. I asked Rita why. “Because no one works the fields anymore,” she said. “The appetite changes as the work changes.” She sounded like Michel Cabanac. The appetite in tune with bodily need. But Rita’s point was bigger than that. The whole world thinks Italians still eat a “traditional” diet, which simply is not true. They eat more meat, more cheese, more olive oil, less lard, less wine, and less pasta (but still a lot of pasta). Yet, somehow, the nation’s collective weight hadn’t ballooned.