Book Review: The End Of Cravings by Mark Schatzker
Introduction
I think this book is up there for the best books I have ever read on food and nutrition. I have actually read all three of Mark’s books, and I have to say I am a fan. He’s able to take a subject that could be a bit boring, and make it super interesting and full of stories. He’s about to take scientific research, pubmed, and turn it into a story that’s super fascinating. I highly recommend this book!
6 Takeaways
If calories and protein are equated, your ratio of carbs and fats does not matter in terms of weight loss- for performance and health it matters, but for weight loss alone it does not matter
Some common things that people who lose weight and are able to keep it off do include eating breakfast, weighing in a few days a week, exercising on a regular basis, and eating mostly whole foods
In the 1970s dopamine was discovered, you can think of dopamine as “wanting” this is what causes cravings, and desire. However, dopamine works with something else called “liking”. Liking is enjoying, liking is the pay off. Put another way, what the author says. Think of wanting as a dinner, it’s the moment before you dig into the food, you want it, but the liking is the pleasure you get from actually eating it. Liking is actually not dopamine, it is run by different neurotransmitters in the brain. Although these might sound like the same thing, they are not. I love cookies- there have been so many times I have seen a cookie, thought that it looks amazing, and really wanted that cookie, that’s the wanting/dopamine talking. Then I proceeded to eat the cookie and be super disappointed in how it actually tastes- that’s the liking (or lack thereof). They do talk to each other, the more you like something, the more you want something, it turns into an endless loop.
Cravings are the “wanting” not the “liking”. To Quote mark… “As with addictive drugs, the food problem isn’t fueled by an overindulgence in pleasure, it is fueled by the desire to obtain that pleasure”
I learned about a professor at yale named Dana Small, who has done some amazing research. In summary, she found that when the sweetness of drinks did not match the calorie (sucralose was added to make the drink sweeter). The theory is called nutritive mismatch. Again to quote the author
“The maltodextrin would splash into their stomachs, where enzymes would convert it into sugar, and the sugar would be absorbed into the blood, but then, oddly, it wouldn’t get burned. Like a film of gasoline floating atop seatwater, the sugar just circulated in the blood. When the drinks were “matched” on the other hand– when the level of sweetness correctly indicated the carloci payload– the calories were burned as expected”
This is super interesting, and it makes me wonder how this applies to mixed meals
I hate to keep quoting the book but..
“When sweetness and calories match, it all hums along: calories are burned, the brain registers it, and the brain remembers. But when there was an unexpected variance between what the tongue sensed and what the stomach received, the entire metabolic process seemed to shut down ‘ it’s like the system just threw up its hands’ Small says, ‘and didn't know what to do’”
Conclussion:
Honestly this whole book was a takeaway for me haha. I think it was extremely well written and I learned a lot. Although I don’t think Marks’ hypothesis have been necessarily proven in the scientific world just yet, for example nutritive mismatch, I believe he is right and in like 10-20 years (science moves slow) this will be the scientific consensus.
Link to Amazon link for the book: The End Of Cravings by Mark Schatzker
