A former commissioner of the FDA who wondered why he couldn't keep weight off talked to food designers and discovered the carefully manipulated reason. Now David Kessler has written a book that demonstrates how the food industry deliberately designs foods to make us want more, more often.

For centuries we've been the same weight, consuming and burning roughly the same number of calories. But in the 1980s, the processed food business made a key discovery. Fat + sugar + salt gave food a specific "bliss" quotient that eaters responded to. When we consume stuff either loaded or coated with a carefully judged balance of these three, we eat fast, we aren't satisfied for long, and we want more.

Take Kentucky Fried Chicken. A confidential source told Kessler that orginally the company had made its product from a whole chicken. Then it realized that if it could expose a greater surface of chicken to sugar, fat and salt, it would have more impact on the neurons responding to these elements and make us want more. Thus the creation of Popcorn Chicken, chopped from cheaper meat into far smaller pieces, which resulted in "an optimized fat pickup system," giving us more of that combination of flour, salt, MSG, maltodextrin, sugar, corn syrup and spice we crave, at a price cheap to them and cheap to us.

The food is eaten so quickly it overrides the body's ability to warn us that we're feeling full.But food that's easily consumed doesn't satisfy and just leaves us wanting more. It's also food that doesn't take much chewing. Americans used to chew food 25 times before swallowing. Now it's 10. And the food designers have taken that into consideration, too. According to Kessler's sources, "The key is to create foods with just enough chew - but not too much. When you're eating these things, you've had 500, 600, 800, 900 calories before you know it."

I shan't go on to talk about Burger King, McDonald's, or my personal weakness, Kettle Chips' food seduction techniques. Just buy the book, The End of Overeating by David Kessler, published by Penguin.

Posted on Wednesday 17th March 2010 in Blog