"They prefer bananas over berries; carrots over cucumbers. Well duh, isn't that just a preference for sweetness? No, they also prefer potatoes over peaches, and green beans over melon, just like monkeys prefer avocados over bananas. We appear to have an inborn drive to maximize calories per mouthful."

"All the foods the researchers tested naturally had less than 500 calories per pound (bananas topped the chart at about 400). Something funny happens when you start going over that. We lose our ability to differentiate. Over the natural range of calorie densities, we have an uncanny aptitude to pick out the subtle distinctions. However, once you start heading towards bacon, cheese, and chocolate territory, which can reach thousands of calories per pound, our perceptions become relatively numb to the differences."

The food industry exploits our innate biological vulnerabilities by stripping crops down into almost pure calories — straight sugar, oil (which is pretty much pure fat), and white flour (which is mostly refined starch). First, they have to remove the fiber, because it effectively has zero calories. Run brown rice through a mill to make white, and you lose about two-thirds of the fiber. Turn whole wheat flour into white, and lose 75 percent. Or, you can run crops through animals (to make meat, dairy, and eggs), and remove 100 percent of the fiber. What you're left with is CRAP (an acronym used by one of my favorite dieticians, Jeff Novick): Calorie-Rich And Processed (CRAP) foods."

"Calories are condensed in the same way plants are turned into addictive drugs like opiates and cocaine: concentration, crystallization, distillation, and extraction. They even appear to activate the same reward pathways in the brain. Put people with "food addiction" in an MRI scanner and show them a picture of a chocolate milkshake, and the areas that light up in their brains are the same as when cocaine addicts are shown a video of crack smoking."

"'Food' addiction is a misnomer. People don't suffer out-of-control eating behaviors to food in general. We don't tend to compulsively crave carrots. Milkshakes are packed with sugar and fat: two of the signals to our brain of calorie density. When people are asked to rate different foods in terms of cravings and loss of control, most incriminated was a load of CRAP — highly processed foods, like doughnuts, along with cheese and meat. Those least related to problematic eating behaviors? Fruits and vegetables. Calorie density may be the reason people don't get up in the middle of the night and binge on broccoli."