Our guest on Food with Mark Bittman today is David A. Kessler, MD, former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration—and a major force in public health. Dr. Kessler rose to national prominence in the 1990s for taking on Big Tobacco in a way no previous FDA commissioner had done, pushing the FDA to regulate cigarettes for the first time.
Later, in his bestselling book, The End of Overeating, Dr. Kessler coined one of my favorite terms about the food system, the term “food carnival” to describe the way processed foods are engineered to keep us coming back for more. His new book, Diet, Drugs, and Dopamine: The New Science of Achieving a Healthy Weight (read an excerpt here) dives deeper into that idea, exploring how our brains are wired for craving, and how modern life—from ultraprocessed food to social media—exploits those circuits, and how the new drugs, the GLP-1s, are definitely worth considering, or at least talking about.
This is a sharp, urgent look at why self control alone isn’t enough, and what it really takes to change behavior in an age of constant temptation.
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