Potatoes Not Prozac

Natural Health, March, 1999 by Adina Davis

POTATOES NOT PROZAC By Kathleen DesMaisions, Ph.D.; Simon & Schuster, 1998; $23.

"Are you sugar sensitive?" asks the blurb on the jacket of Potatoes Not Prozac. Not me, I once thought. I'd rather have a bag of salty tortilla chips than a cookie any day. It was only when I began keeping a food journal as part of a weight-loss program that I learned that hidden sugars were my downfall. Any hint of stress sent me running for fast food, just for the packets of ketchup I smothered it in. The sugar gave me an emotional boost until the craving hit again, harder than before. So I came to Potatoes Not Prozac with a dim understanding that my out-of-control eating had something to do with sugar. I just wasn't sure what.

DesMaisions has discovered that the uncontrollable urge for sweets, traditionally attributed to emotional emptiness and cured with a little willpower, has for many a physiological base. She argues that sugar sensitivity is caused by an inherited faulty brain chemistry that fails to produce adequate amounts of serotonin and beta-endorphin, the chemicals responsible for keeping us on an emotionally even keel.

Rather than medical intervention, DesMaisions recommends a seven-step plan that reduces the craving for sugar by balancing the entire system--both body and mind. Her plan ranges from keeping a food journal to eating protein with every meal (particularly those proteins containing tryptophan, a precursor of serotonin) to making nutritious food choices; it emphasizes the dietary importance of complex carbohydrates, like potatoes. The effect of all this is to reduce the physiological need for sugar and, in the process, reduce the cravings and the guilt.

Potatoes Not Prozac restored meaning to the food choices I make every day. And while I still occasionally crave sugar, the craving is less intense and more controllable, I've lost 12 pounds, and my outlook is sunnier. Give me a potato any day.