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":
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.
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."
Posted by: NextMoon | July 13, 2009 at 08:32 AM