The End of Craving
Recovering the Lost Wisdom of Eating Well
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3.8 • 8 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The international bestseller from award-winning writer Mark Schatzker that reveals how our dysfunctional relationship with food began—and how science is leading us back to healthier living and eating.
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 prediabetic, 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 unhealthier we become. Why?
Mark Schatzker has spent his career traveling the world in search of the answer. Now, in The End of Craving, he poses the profound question: What if the key to nutrition and good health lies not in resisting the primal urge to eat but in 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. Schatzker reveals 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 pleasure 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 “charts a roadmap not just for healthy eating, but for joyous eating, too” (Dan Barber, New York Times bestselling author of The Third Plate).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
