THE END OF CRAVING

A conversation-starting new book from Mark Schatzker, journalist and author of The Dorito Effect, that reveals how our dysfunctional relationship with food began - and how science is leading us back to better living and eating.

It is the question that will not go away: "How do I eat what's good for me?" Studies have been conducted, innumerable diets have been tested, and billions of dollars have been spent attempting to understand the simple act of consuming food. So, why aren't we getting healthier? Why does the dysfunctional relationship between eating and overeating, pleasure and penalty, continue to keep us from living well? What if the key to unlocking a new path to nutrition and health lies lies not in overcoming our destructive urges, but understanding them?

In The End of Craving, science writer Mark Schatzker explores these key questions and the future of eating by focusing on the way our brain's powerful and intelligent instinct to eat has been turned against itself. Blending conventional wisdom, historical research, and cutting-edge science, he takes the reader on a journey from the mountains of Italy to the Old South and inside brain scanning laboratories, revealing new and fascinating information that will change the way we see eating, craving, and bodyweight, such as:

- The brain controls bodyweight as keenly and effectively as it does body temperature, blood oxygen levels and heart rate, tracking the energy we consume and burn with greater precision than even scientists are capable of achieving.
- We are not programmed to crave endless calories. We are programmed to crave what we need.
- Supposedly unhealthy nutrients like fat and sugar have not changed. What has is our ability to sense them, due to technologies like artificial sweeteners, artificial fats, synthetic starches and flavorings.
- This "mismatch" between the way food tastes and the nutrients it delivers has created an unnatural and heightened desire to eat.
- By "fortifying" our food with certain vitamins, as we do with livestock, we have supercharged the caloric potential of what we eat and have unwittingly enabled obesity.

Groundbreaking, entertaining, and informative, The End of Craving reveals a new and radical truth: our natural urges are not primitive. Nor are they harmful. Only by restoring the relationship between the flavor of food and the nutrition it provides can we hope to change our systems of eating and overall health, leading to long and happy lives.

Mark Schatzker is an award-winning writer based in Toronto. He is a writer-in-residence at the Modern Diet and Physiology Research Center at Yale University, and a frequent contributor to The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Condé Nast Traveler, and Bloomberg Pursuits. He is the author of The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth about Food and Flavor and Steak: One Man's Search for the World's Tastiest Piece of Beef.