The Effortlessness of Overeating Part 1: Extreme Yumminess

Yummy food is everywhere. And with the proliferation of delivery services, you can now quickly get almost anything delivered right to your door with a couple of taps on your phone. The processed foods that surround us are deliberately designed to be as eye-catching, easy, enjoyable, and convenient as possible, with the express purpose of getting us to eat more. This modern food environment powerfully shapes our eating decisions, for better or (usually) worse.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting food to be easy, enjoyable, and convenient. Efficiency rocks my socks! Why work harder than you need to? Food processing innovations have freed up time to do awesome things like building a bunk bed in your room so you have more space for activities like karate, instead of doing sucky chores like in Little House on the Prairie.

It’s tricky though. Too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing.  Hyperpalatable food is ubiquitous. It’s become TOO easy, TOO enjoyable, and TOO convenient. And our health pays the price. We can now devour literally thousands of calories with almost no thought or effort. This is unprecedented in the history of humans. Our bodies are not designed to handle this glut of ultra-processed food, and the unsurprising result is the rise of chronic health issues like diabetes and heart disease.

Allow me to demonstrate.

Consider the humble jar of peanut butter. Very yummy and convenient (and arguably not as complicated or processed as many hyperpalatable foods you find at the grocery store).

How much time and effort does it take to spoon a bunch of peanut butter into your mouth? Impressively, the record goes to Todd DeFazio, who ate 18.5 ounces in 41.3 seconds. SECONDS!!! That is 3,075 calories and 259 grams of fat in under 1 minute. (Note: Your body doesn’t actually absorb all the calories in peanut butter. And it absorbs even fewer calories from intact peanuts. But I digress.)

Now I’m no champ like Todd, but I have crushed an entire jar of peanut butter over the course of two days. The ability to mindlessly spoon peanut butter into my mouth while searching the pantry for something else to eat is made possible by modern food processing (peanut butter has only been mass-produced for about 100 years).

Let’s compare what it looks like to chow down on peanut butter today, to what it would have looked like before modern technology.

Modern peanut butter manufacturing is objectively complex, requiring lots of people, coordination, and machines. But from our standpoint as the consumer, eating peanut butter is super-duper easy.

Here is the whole fancy technological process, as described by madehow.com:

“The first several steps in peanut butter manufacturing involve processing the main ingredient: the peanuts. After harvesting, the peanuts are cleaned, shelled, and graded for size. Next, they are dry roasted in large ovens, and then they are transferred to cooling machines, where suction fans draw cooling air over the peanuts.”

“After the peanuts are roasted and cooled, they undergo blanching—removal of the skins by heat or water. The heat method has the advantage of removing the bitter heart of the peanut. Next, the blanched peanuts are pulverized and ground with salt, dextrose, and hydrogenated oil stabilizer in a grinding machine. After cooling, the peanut butter is ready to be packaged.”

And after it is packaged, it still has to make its way through the supply chain, from manufacturer to distributor to grocery store, to shelf, to you, getting boxed and scanned and transported multiple times along the way.

We only participate in the last few steps of a peanut butter jar’s lifecycle. Here is the typical end-user process:

1. Walk to the pantry
2. Scoop into mouth
3. Put spoon in dishwasher

If we took away our fancy technology and processing powers, how easy would it be to get our peanut butter fix? (And no, I don’t mean the modern version of DIY bootstrapping it, where you order pre-shelled, already blanched and roasted peanuts from Amazon, pour them in your $300 Vitamix, and smugly blend them on high-speed for three minutes. I mean OLD SCHOOL.)

Step 1: Let’s start by assuming you aren’t planting and growing the peanuts yourself, because I’m not a psycho.

Step 2: And let’s also assume that you don’t have to pick the peanuts yourself, because when I was in kindergarten, we took a field trip to a farm to pick peanuts, and once was enough.

Step 3: Get the peanuts. To not totally cheat, let’s say you have to walk to the store.

Step 4: Buy the peanuts. Apparently, it takes 720 peanuts to make 16 ounces of peanut butter. At 2 peanuts a pop, you would need 360 peanut pods.

Step 5: Walk home.

Step 6: Shell the peanuts. THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY OF THEM. Have you eaten peanuts out of the shell before? It’s an awkward, messy, painstaking task.

For perspective, here is what 360 shelled peanuts looks like:

Step 7: Roast the peanuts. I’m not exactly sure how you would do that without a modern oven, but nuts roast fast, so I’m thinking you can do a few batches by holding a pan over a fire.

Step 8: Remove the skins. As you saw above, peanut butter manufacturers blanch them with air to do that, but you can just sort of rub them with a kitchen towel to do it yourself.

Step 9: Grind them up. WITHOUT a blender! Lots of smashing with a meat mallet or rolling pin.

Step 10: Scoop the whole mess into a jar.

Step 11: Eat. Scoop that peanutty goodness into your mouth.

Step 12: Clean up that big mess you made, you filthy animal.

How much peanut butter do you think you would eat if you had to make it this way? And after all that effort, how mindlessly would you wolf it down? You can bet those sweet cheeks that I would eat less peanut butter if I had to do even half of those steps.

Now compare that again to our modern, convenient scenario:

Without a question, the second timeline looks better to me. And modern peanut butter is cheap, yummy, and convenient to boot. The ultimate trifecta. But what’s the tradeoff for this magic?

The standard 16-ounce jar of peanut butter (with peanuts as the only ingredient) has 2,660 calories and 224 grams of fat, or 160 per ounce. Prior to food manufacturing you had very few opportunities to gorge yourself on calorie-dense food without first doing extensive preparations.

Before supermarkets, a few lucky ducks in Alaska got to feast on some whale blubber, clocking in at around 250 calories per ounce. We’ve been making oil, butter, and cheese for a long time (which obviously also require processing, but you could buy those easily), and at about 250, 200, and 115 calories per ounce respectively, those were your best opportunities to wolf down calorie-dense foods.

I know I just threw a lot of numbers at you, so here’s my point: overeating processed foods is ridiculously easy.

To put it in perspective, higher-calorie whole fruits and vegetables can have up to about 30 calories per ounce. In order to eat the same number of calories in a 16-ounce jar of peanut butter you would have to eat approximately: 23 medium sweet potatoes, or 53 cups of strawberries, or 88 cups of broccoli!

How long do you think it would take to eat that much broccoli?

Even eating champions struggle to quickly consume large portions of vegetables – the chewing slows you down too much. Gideon Oji, a competitive eater who won a raw kale eating championship, managed to eat 25.5 16-ounce bowls of kale in 8 minutes, totaling about 1,100 calories of kale. That’s 1/3 the calories that Todd the peanut butter champ consumed in less than 1/10th of the time. Assuming his jaw doesn’t give out from exhaustion, it would take a world champion speed eater AT LEAST 22 minutes to eat enough kale to equal the calories in a jar of peanut butter. Remember, Todd DeFazio ate 3,075 calories and 259 grams of fat in under 1 minute with peanut butter.

Whatever the speed you eat peanut butter at, if your kale and peanut butter eating speeds stays at a similar ratio, then however much peanut butter you eat in almost a minute would require about 22 minutes of constant kale eating.

The fiber in plants and structure of raw foods requires too much chewing to mindlessly wolf down, making it very hard to overeat them.

The foods that people struggle with overeating the most contain some combination of fat, salt, and sugar that have undergone some sort of processing that makes them WAY yummier than they would be on their own or in their natural states. And refined sugar was prohibitively expensive for most of human history, so struggling to control a sweet tooth was mostly a problem for royalty until the 1800s.

Here is an incredibly accurate and super scientific scale that demonstrates how food processing and salt/fat/sugar-combining increase the irresistibility of food:

So how does basic peanut butter compare to foods with that magic combo of ultra-processed and highly-palatable? Now one jar will only get you the equivalent of 5 cups of full-fat ice cream.

It’s not that difficult to eat a few cups of ice cream, because natural hunger cues only work with natural foods. But that’s only an issue if you are eating those foods frequently and mindlessly.

It’s so easy and normal to eat predominantly hyperpalatable processed foods these days that we don’t tend to give much thought to it. Stepping back to take stock of what we’re eating on a regular basis can be eye-opening. Learning to clearly differentiate between foods that are easy to overeat and those that are not is a key piece of the modern food environment puzzle.

For our experiment this week, we will explore the processed foods in our food environment and how they play a role (or not) in encouraging overeating.

And then next up, in part 2 of this series, we will shift our focus to the prevalence of processed food in our food environment and how that also contributes to inadvertent overeating.