The scientists were interested in the activation of the striatum, an area rich in dopamine neurons and involved in the processing of hedonic rewards. (When your striatum is excited, life is good.) Sure enough, obese people tended to have reduced activation in the striatum after sipping the ice cream treat, which led to increased consumption. In other words, they kept on consuming the milkshake in a manic search for satisfaction.

A second study found that, over time, people with a polymorphism that leads to reduced dopamine receptors in the striatum also tended to put on weight, suggesting that obesity is, at least in part, triggered by a shortage of neural pleasure. Of course, this contradicts the popular (and deeply unfair) cultural stereotype of obesity, which assumes that people who are overweight are gluttons, unable to resist temptation. In fact, they are the opposite of gluttons: The reason they eat too much is because they don’t enjoy their food enough. They keep on sipping the milkshake precisely because it isn’t pleasurable.

Maybe this is why Americans need ever larger portion sizes: Because we didn’t make the milkshake ourselves, because that dinner only required a few minutes of work, we need to consume more calories to get the same baseline of satisfaction.

I’m interested in delicious awesome fried dumplings, the location of which I am happy to share, the next time I see you.

Regardless, Pollan’s book brought up many questions and thoughts. He speaks of the age of Nutritionism, a time period we are currently experiencing where reductionist science has taken food and divided it up into macro and micro-nutrients (e.g. Carbs, proteins, fats being macro and vitamins and minerals representing the micro) in order to figure out how certain things work. This boom in Nutritionism has perhaps complicated things more than not. I’m not putting down reductionist science but in this case it tends to make a bigger problem rather than a smaller one. What the studies that they do can’t measure is how different nutrients might react along with others. Different combination’s produce different results. We all know too much sugar isn’t a good thing and that it spikes insulin, but if eaten with or after eating fat, the absorption process is slowed. The division of all of these nutrients has produced “food” products that advertise a certain health claim. “Nutritionism is, in a sense, the official ideology of the Western diet” (Pollan 11). Our food has become divided and industrialized in order to fit and supposedly match the fast track of “progress” that we think we are on.