Fatnorexia

“Fear of fat has become a national sickness, an all-American eating disorder,” writes Ron Rosenbaum in The Wall Street Journal (3/16/13). “Preventing obesity is a laudable goal,” Ron writes,” but it has become the rationale for indiscriminate fat hunters.” Ron singles out Michael Moss, author of Salt Sugar Fat, which he describes as a “well-intentioned but scarifying new book.” The inflection point, for Ron, is Michael’s use of the phrase “sensory-specific satiety point,” or “the tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which responds by depressing your desire to have more.”

As Ron reads it, the implications point in precisely the opposite direction of Michael’s conclusions, which apparently are that food companies go “to great lengths to get you to overeat fatty fried junk by purposely avoiding ‘the sensory-specific satiety’ point that stops the craving.” Ron’s counterpoint is that the “foods that best hit that sweet spot and ‘overwhelm the brain’ with pleasure are high-quality fatty foods. They discourage us from overeating,” Ron writes. “A modest serving of short ribs or Peking duck will be both deeply pleasurable and self-limiting.”

Ron thinks that it’s become “too easy to conflate eating fatty food with eating industrial, oil-fried junk food or even with being or becoming a fat person … To the antifat crusaders, I say: Attack fatty foods all you want. I’m with you,” writes Ron, “But you can deny me my roasted marrow bones when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.” He predicts that once others understand what he does and “see that moderate portions of extreme pleasure don’t make them obese, fat will become the new health food.” He says he can even imagine a diet book called, “Eat Fat, Stay Slim.”