How The Food Giants Hooked Us is the wry subtitle of this
intriguing read about what we eat and how it is prepared.
Children too obese to play suffer from diabetes and the
early signs of hypertension and heart disease. Why do the
food giants add such quantities of harmful ingredients and
fool us into thinking a yoghurt with twice the sugar
content of a sweetened cereal is good for us?
SALT SUGAR FAT is the list of three main additives which
make food more alluring, or specific to children's tastes.
By the end of the 1990s with over half the adult American
population overweight and nearly a quarter obese,
healthcare costs were high and specific linked illnesses
such as cancers were on the rise. Middle-class adults
worked a second job to make ends meet and needed quick
food, with no time for exercise. Generals testified in
Washington that young people were too obese to recruit and
surgeons blamed a rise in maternal deaths on overly fat
mothers undergoing problematic caesareans. Yet in 1999 a
meeting of CEOs of major food companies was presented with
the alarming facts and totally refused to change policies.
Low-fat food often contains high levels of sugar instead,
disguised by names such as fructose and dextrose. Sugar,
fat and salt are cheap additives. Neurologists have found
that the brain lights up on receiving sugar just the way it
does for cocaine, so manufacturers are desperate to pour it
into everything from breakfast cereal to main courses. This
empty-calorie ingredient replaces tomatoes, fruits and
grains. Salt brings out the taste of food and fat improves
texture in the mouth, also adding bulk.
The tobacco industry is compared with the food industry; in
some cases they had the same parent company and were
undergoing the same threats - from people concerned about
marketing to children and ingredients listings. Consumers
and health boards are now conscious that these three food
ingredients can be harmful in quantity.
Michael Moss persuaded some major firms to make him
versions of his favourite products without the additives.
Kellogg's made him a saltless cracker which he now found
was like tasteless cardboard. Campbells made him soups with
a reduced fat, sugar and salt content; they were either
overly bland or metallic and bitter.
The text contains visits to molecular biologists and
biopsychologists, results of lab rat experiments and
comparisons with addictive drugs. We learn the science
behind the term 'mouth watering' and see that food
technicians experiment to add the three ingredients to food
in the most innovative ways. Diet soft drinks made with
saccharin make people prone to eat more. High-fructose corn
syrup added to sweeten soft drinks makes people eat more
and even when they don't they still gain weight.
This book covers some of the same ground as 'Fast Food
Nation' - the demand for quick, easy, tasty, cheap food;
the dubious methods used by industries to protect
themselves, such as paying private food health inspectors
to produce reports. Slaughterhouses refuse to supply meat
to food processors unless they are guaranteed it will not
be tested for e-coli bacteria until it has been mixed with
meat from other producers. Living in Europe I found that
astonishing. Here we put a huge value on traceability 'from
farm to fork' and at the order of the Irish Commissioner,
the whole of Europe is currently testing the DNA of
processed meat products - alarming finds have included pork
DNA in supposedly halal meat supplied to prisons and a
supermarket own-brand beef lasagne which was 100 percent
equine DNA; arrests have been made, meat producers closed
and major contracts cancelled.
The message of Michael Moss's SALT SUGAR FAT is that no
matter what we do about banning advertising to children of
unhealthy foods, or taxing sweet drinks, the manufacturers
are so dependent on their processes to make profits that
they are not going to stop. We need to protect ourselves
with correct nutritional advice and to make the right
choices.
From a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter at
The New York Times comes the explosive story of the
rise of the processed food industry and its link to the
emerging obesity epidemic. Michael Moss reveals how
companies use salt, sugar, and fat to addict us and, more
important, how we can fight back.
In the
spring of 1999 the heads of the world’s largest processed
food companies—from Coca-Cola to Nabisco—gathered at
Pillsbury headquarters in Minneapolis for a secret meeting.
On the agenda: the emerging epidemic of obesity, and what to
do about it.
Increasingly, the salt-, sugar-,
and fat-laden foods these companies produced were being
linked to obesity, and a concerned Kraft executive took the
stage to issue a warning: There would be a day of reckoning
unless changes were made. This executive then launched into
a damning PowerPoint presentation—114 slides in all—making
the case that processed food companies could not afford to
sit by, idle, as children grew sick and class-action lawyers
lurked. To deny the problem, he said, is to court
disaster.
When he was done, the most powerful
person in the room—the CEO of General Mills—stood up to
speak, clearly annoyed. And by the time he sat down, the
meeting was over.
Since that day, with the
industry in pursuit of its win-at-all-costs strategy, the
situation has only grown more dire. Every year, the
average American eats thirty-three pounds of cheese (triple
what we ate in 1970) and seventy pounds of sugar (about
twenty-two teaspoons a day). We ingest 8,500 milligrams of
salt a day, double the recommended amount, and almost none
of that comes from the shakers on our table. It comes from
processed food. It’s no wonder, then, that one in three
adults, and one in five kids, is clinically obese. It’s no
wonder that twenty-six million Americans have diabetes, the
processed food industry in the U.S. accounts for $1 trillion
a year in sales, and the total economic cost of this health
crisis is approaching $300 billion a year.
In
Salt Sugar Fat, Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative
reporter Michael Moss shows how we got here. Featuring
examples from some of the most recognizable (and profitable)
companies and brands of the last half century—including
Kraft, Coca-Cola, Lunchables, Kellogg, Nestlé, Oreos,
Cargill, Capri Sun, and many more—Moss’s explosive,
empowering narrative is grounded in meticulous, often
eye-opening research.
Moss takes us inside
the labs where food scientists use cutting-edge technology
to calculate the “bliss point” of sugary beverages or
enhance the “mouthfeel” of fat by manipulating its chemical
structure. He unearths marketing campaigns designed—in a
technique adapted from tobacco companies—to redirect
concerns about the health risks of their products: Dial back
on one ingredient, pump up the other two, and tout the new
line as “fat-free” or “low-salt.” He talks to concerned
executives who confess that they could never produce truly
healthy alternatives to their products even if serious
regulation became a reality. Simply put: The industry itself
would cease to exist without salt, sugar, and fat.
Just as millions of “heavy users”—as the companies refer to
their most ardent customers—are addicted to this seductive
trio, so too are the companies that peddle them. You will
never look at a nutrition label the same way again.
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