Why Can’tcha Eat Just One?

Have you ever wondered why you can’t eat just one chip or cookie? Do you struggle with extra pounds even though you’ve reduced your daily calories by choosing low fat, plenty of grains, and dutifully doing your cardio?

In Beating the Food Giants, Paul Stitt notes that, “many nasty tricks are used by food giants to make you overeat. Adding lots of fat, sugar, and salt are obvious ones. They know that if they add enough fat, sugar, and salt Americans will eat almost anything.”(1) He worked for years as a food scientist at Quaker and knows firsthand how these companies add or subtract key nutrients with the explicit intent of getting you to gorge on their food. What do they know that you don’t? There’s something in your head within the hypothalamus called the appestat. This little organ monitors your blood for nutrients and is responsible for “telling” you what you want to eat.

Eat a chip and you taste salt. Once the chip hits your blood stream, the appestat wonders “Where are the nutrients?” Your brain hounds you to continue munching, hoping you’ll eventually eat something containing the nutrients present in unprocessed sea salt. Mounds of calorie dense junk go down but you aren’t full and search for more of what you just ate.

Refined sugar, grains, salt, artificial sweeteners, MSG, and HFCS numb the appestat. Only when we eat the correct balance of nutrients do we experience satiety. Without the right kind of fats and proteins and by consuming too many grains we set ourselves up for cravings and bingeing. Philip J. Goscienski, M.D. states “Your appestat is a control mechanism that has been fine tuned for hundreds of generations (and) can keep your weight stable within a pound or two from the end of your adolescent years into old age—if you let it.”(2)

Food companies know exactly what these additives do, liberally spiking their “food” with it and spending millions to convince us how good it is. They work hard to be sure nobody can eat just one. Try eating one Oreo. It’s no accident you can’t! Americans oblige, spending millions, literally starving their way to obesity—the epicenter of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and cancer.