Last winter

Last winter was very cold. It lasted a long time. In April, people were complaining about how much weight they'd gained cooped up and indulging in comfort food. 12, I said.

Really it was 17 pounds, from September 2013 to April 2014.

I crawled inside a bag of doritos and ate my way through.

Processed foods are addicting in their saturation of sugars, salts and fats.

They are purposely made so by the food industry, says former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler in his 2007 book, The End of Overeating. The food industry protests, "That's what people want."

But between us, the food industry that enjoys great profits and we who consume, we're building a nation of people with obesity and avoidable disease.

The food industry gets the profits and we who eat get the diabetes and heart disease.

I recently read another David Kessler book without realizing that it was for teens.

Joe Heim wrote a pre-Halloween article for the Washington Post Magazine Oct. 26 on The Future of Candy – “Sweet Truth, Everything That’s Bad for You Has Been Restricted, Vilified or Outlawed. What Does This Mean for Candy?”

He mentioned  Dr. Kessler’s book Your Food Is Fooling You: How Your Brain Is Highjacked by Sugar, Fat, and Salt but didn’t call it a young adult book.

I got the 2013 book and didn’t notice the cover banner calling it the “Young Reader’s Edition of the New York Times bestseller The End of Overeating.”

Dense, eh? Not really. The information presented to adults and young adults and teens isn't all that different.

Some young reviewers on Amazon noted that the book is a bit repetitive. What Kessler does is include the full circle of his arguments. For example:

Food Fundamentals

1. Overeating doesn’t happen because we are weak. It doesn’t come from a lack of willpower. Overeating is primarily caused by the way sugar, fat, and salt work on our brains.

2. Foods loaded with sugar, fat, and salt are designed to get us hooked. They act on our brains the same way addictive drugs do.

3. Foods loaded with sugar, fat , and salt help create thoughts and urges that make us overeat and become overweight and obese. This leads to serious diseases like diabetes.

4. Foods loaded with sugar, fat, and salt do not satisfy hunger.

They make us eat when we are not hungry. We can never really satisfy the urges for these foods.

5. We do not need to overeat. We may feel we want to eat, but that is not the same as needing to eat.

6. We are surrounded by powerful food cues that stimulate us to eat. Some of these cues are the ads and marketing campaigns of the food industry.

7. Overeating is a habit, a habit formed over time. Every time we go through the cycle of overeating, we make the habit stronger. We become conditioned overeaters.

8. We can retrain our brains to form new eating habits

Kessler's earlier book, The End of Overeating, was eye-opening to me. His adaptation of it for teens, Your Food Is Fooling You, is giving me guidance for devising my own plan to good health through healthy eating.

Thanks, Dr. K!