The peril of palatability: a former FDA chief sounds the alarm about dangerously delicious food.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Diet - Book review

The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Diet, by David A. Kessler, Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale Books, 320 pages, $25.95

ACCORDING TO The Washington Post, David Kessler's research for The End of Overeating included late-night forays into the trash bins behind Chili's restaurants across California. From the chain's garbage he retrieved ingredient boxes with nutritional labels that revealed the secret of dishes such as Southwestern Eggrolls and Boneless Shanghai Wings. It turned out they "were bathed in salt, fat and sugars."

Kessler could have saved considerable time and trouble by paying a Chili's employee to write down this information for him. Or by visiting the Chili's website, which provides numbers for the calories, fat, saturated fat, carbohydrates, protein, fiber, and sodium in the company's food. Or simply by assuming that food promoted as a mouth-watering yet affordable indulgence probably has a lot of fat, salt, and sugar in it. But as The End of Overeating more than amply demonstrates, Kessler is the sort of crusader who spares no effort to uncover the obvious.

Kessler, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco's medical school, grabbed headlines as head of the Food and Drug Administration under Bill Clinton by taking on Big Tobacco. In this book he mounts an assault on Big Food, but the results are even feebler than his unsuccessful effort to regulate cigarettes without statutory authority. He combines banal observations, dressed up as scientific insights and revelations of corporate misdeeds, with presumptuous advice that over-generalizes from his own troubled relationship with food.

Kessler urges readers to eschew pasta, French fries, bacon cheeseburgers, candy, and other "hyperpalatable" foods that he and some people he interviewed for the book have trouble consuming in moderation. Kessler wants us to know he is powerless over chocolate-chip cookies and "those fried dumplings at the San Francisco airport." Using himself and several similarly voracious acquaintances as models, he argues that "conditioned hypereating" is largely responsible for the "obesity epidemic." He exhorts its victims to resist the machinations of the food industry, "the manipulator of the consumers' minds and desires" (in the words of a "high-level food industry executive").

Kessler fearlessly accuses major restaurant chains of a crime they brag about, relying on unnamed "insiders" to reveal that comestible pushers such...