Word of the Week: Hyperpalatable

Hyperpalatable: Loaded with fat, sugar, and salt so as to be irresistibly appealing. Hyperpalatable foods are a suspected culprit in overeating and the obesity epidemic. Coined from the prefix hyper-, "excessive" or "beyond"; and palatable, "pleasing to the sense of taste." Also spelled hyper-palatable.

David Kessler, MD, a San Francisco Bay Area pediatrician and lawyer and former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, discusses hyperpalatability in his recently published book, The End of Overeating.* In an interview published in June, he told Salon.com's Katherine Mieszkowsi that "a lot of people don't understand why it's so hard to resist food":

You make food hyper-palatable with fat, sugar and salt. It's very stimulating and it becomes the most salient stimuli [sic; I would have used the singular, stimulus] for many people. ... We're eating, in essence, adult baby food. Twenty years ago the average chews per bite was about 20, now it's two or three. The food goes down in a whoosh and it's very stimulating. It's layered and loaded with fat, sugar and salt. It's as if you have a roller coaster going on in your mouth. You get stimulated, it disappears instantly and you reach for more.

Kessler has acknowledged, in this interview and others, that he himself struggles with overeating. He also acknowledges that his theory of overeating doesn't apply to everyone.

Hat tip: Breakaway Cook (Eric Gower), via Twitter.

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* The End of Overeating proves that there's no foreseeable end to book titles that start with The End of. I wrote about End of titles last August.

Comments

[NextMoon]

Thanks for this post. I heard Dr. Kessler on NPR, and his theory rings true for me.

Re stimulus/i, I would have rephrased: "They [fat, sugar, salt] are very stimulating, and they become the most salient stimuli."