Is loving food the secret to eating less of it?

PETE WELLS
Losing weight and keeping it off are diabolically hard for many people. Nearly 2 in 5 Americans suffer from obesity. Around 1 in 8 are diabetic. In the United States, spending on GLP-1 agonists, a class of drugs used to treat both conditions, grew about fivefold from 2018 to 2023, when it topped $70 billion.
The standard explanation for this is that we are enjoying food so much that we’re consuming far more of it than our bodies need. The way scientists put this is that hedonic cues — pleasure — are winning out over internal homeostatic signals that should tell us when we’ve had enough.
Many studies on the hedonic hunger theory focus on the intense craving set off by the taste of highly processed foods, which has been termed ‘hyperpalatability’. Related research looks at the reinforcing effect of dopamine, sometimes called the feel-good neurotransmitter and, in the popular renderings, the pathway to pleasure. In this view of overeating, pleasure is killing us.
On an intuitive level, we may feel that this makes sense. When we gain weight, we say we’ve overindulged. Dieting is understood to be an exercise in self-denial.
But some physicians, dietitians and other observers ask whether we’ve got it all backward. Maybe all those health problems aren’t a result of enjoying food too much. What if the real problem is that we’re not enjoying it enough?
Dana Small, one of the world’s leading experts on the neuroscience of food decisions, learned 16 years ago that her own decisions had brought her to the brink of Type 2 diabetes.
Wanting to mend her ways while she was still merely prediabetic, Small went on a diet. The standard view of dieting might lead you to expect that her new regimen would be a plodding course of self-discipline and steamed broccoli.
She began teaching herself a healthier way to eat that was focused on foods that had a low glycemic index and were anti-inflammatory. A major consideration in the foods she finally chose, guided by everything she knew about the mechanisms of reward and reinforcement, was how much she enjoyed them: “The more pleasure, the better”, she said.
Since then, Small, a professor at McGill University, has published a series of papers suggesting that the scientific community is confused about the role of enjoyment in overeating and obesity.
“I believe that pleasure may help you eat less, rather than more”, she said.
Another piece of evidence that self-indulgent hedonism isn’t responsible for the obesity epidemic: “The vast majority” of people on GLP-1s seem to be able to take pleasure in food, even though they’re eating less of it, said Dr Louis J Aronne, a professor at the Comprehensive Weight Control Centre at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.
“We see people who have a change in what they enjoy”, Aronne said. While changes in eating behaviour and in weight vary greatly, some people on the drugs find it easier to choose vegetables, “rather than their life revolving around highly processed foods”,
She was talking about more than the price of fresh berries. Time and energy are in short supply at the end of a workday. Nutrition advice comes from all directions, rarely agrees and can be hard to apply in the supermarket. Arriving at the register with a cart full of items that you feel confident about seems to require a doctorate.
Meanwhile, billions of dollars are spent to convince consumers that fast food, sugary drinks and snacks are a quick route to joy. Children who have been blitzed since birth by cartoon mascots for cereal are likely to see apples and cauliflower as highly eccentric, if not somewhat revolting.
To make the case for these edible oddities, British food journalist Bee Wilson helped found the nonprofit group TastEd, which trains teachers in the United Kingdom to get students to sniff, poke, squeeze, ogle and even taste fresh fruits and vegetables.
“These kids have never been taught that broccoli or apples or lettuce is something they might enjoy”, Wilson said. “They have been told, ‘Eat five a day.’ But none of those are things that make someone, least of all a child, want to pick it up and eat it”.
One of the most influential defences of the idea that pleasure can sit at the centre of a well-ordered diet originated outside Western medicine.
In 1979, Jon Kabat-Zinn, a molecular biologist, persuaded University of Massachusetts Medical Centre to let him work with patients whose chronic pain and other symptoms were beyond the reach of traditional treatments. His new programme, mindfulness-based stress reduction, was drawn from his study of Buddhist meditation. Kabat-Zinn taught patients to tune into the flickering screen of consciousness, taking note of thoughts, feelings and sensations — from sorrow to joy, pain to pleasure — as they zipped past.
That method, applied to people with troubled relationships to food, grew into a practice known as mindful eating. — The New York Times