by Michael Moss
As powerful as they are, salt, sugar, and fat are just part of the industry’s blueprint for shaping America’s eating habits. Marketing is a full partner to the ingredients. Lunchables, for one, are a marketing powerhouse, specifically designed to exploit the guilt of working moms and the desire of kids for a little empowerment. These ready-to-eat meals typically include pieces of meat, cheese, crackers, and candy, allowing kids to assemble them in whatever combination they desire. Food marketers wield pinpoint psychological targeting, and they didn’t disappoint on the Lunchables ads: The ads stressed that lunch was a time for them, not their parents.
The marketing side of processed food, it became clear in the research for this book, is also where the industry’s hold on federal regulators is most evident. Federal officials do more than shield company records from public view. The biggest government watchdogs show no teeth when it comes to controlling the industry’s excesses in promoting sugary, high-calorie fare, not only on TV but also in the full range of social media now used by the food industry in its pursuit of kids. Moreover, the government has grown so cozy with food manufacturers that some of the biggest industry coups would not have been possible without Washington’s help. When consumers tried to improve their health by shifting to skim milk, Congress set up a scheme for the powerful dairy industry through which it has quietly turned all that unwanted, surplus fat into huge sales of cheese—not cheese to be eaten before or after dinner as a delicacy, but cheese that is slipped into our food as an alluring but unnecessary extra ingredient. The toll, thirty years later: The average American now consumes as much as thirty-three pounds of cheese a year.
The industry’s pursuit of allure is extremely sophisticated, and it leaves nothing to chance. Some of the largest companies are now using brain scans to study how we react neurologically to certain foods, especially to sugar. They’ve discovered that the brain lights up for sugar the same way it does for cocaine, and this knowledge is useful, not only in formulating foods. The world’s biggest ice cream maker, Unilever, for instance, parlayed its brain research into a brilliant marketing campaign that sells the eating of ice cream as a “scientifically proven” way to make ourselves happy.
The manufacturers of processed food have also benefited profoundly from a corner of the consumer goods market where shrewdness in marketing has no equal: the tobacco industry. This relationship began in 1985, when R. J. Reynolds bought Nabisco, and reached epic levels a few years later when the world’s largest cigarette maker, Philip Morris, became the largest food company by acquiring the two largest food manufacturers, General Foods and Kraft. A trove of confidential tobacco industry records—81 million pages and growing—opened to public viewing by the states’ legal settlement with the industry reveals that top officials at Philip Morris were guiding the food giants through their most critical moments, from rescuing products when sales foundered to devising a strategy for dealing with the public’s mounting health concerns. In fact, the same year that the CEOs met to consider obesity, Philip Morris was undergoing its own strategic shift in how it discussed and handled the health aspects of nicotine. Bludgeoned by media attacks and the public’s growing concern about smoking, the company privately warned and prepared its food executives to deal with similar bloody battles over the heart of their operations: namely, the salt, sugar, and fat.
“The tobacco wars are coming to everyone’s neighborhood,” one Philip Morris strategy paper warned back in the 1999. “For beer, we have evidence of rising anti-alcohol sentiment in the U.S. And for food, it is clear that the biotech issue, already so ripe in Europe, is spreading internationally. There are also the continuing issues of food safety and the health effects of certain food elements such as fat, salt and sugar.”
To win these wars, the strategy paper continued, the company would have to explore and study its vulnerabilities and even open dialogues with its critics. “This means we have to engage. No more bunkers.”
More and more, consumers have come to focus on these same three ingredients, whether out of concern for obesity and heart disease or simply a desire to eat food that is less processed and more real. There has been a commensurate push from elected officials too, from the White House to City Hall in New York, where salt, sugar, fat, and calories in processed foods have come under heightened criticism. The response from food manufacturers has been to give health-conscious consumers more of a choice by turning out better-for-you versions of their mainline products. The further they go down this path, however, the harder they bump up against two stark realities of their industry.
First, the food companies themselves are hooked on salt, sugar, and fat. Their relentless drive to achieve the greatest allure for the lowest possible cost has drawn them, inexorably, to these three ingredients time and time again. Sugar not only sweetens, it replaces more costly ingredients—like tomatoes in ketchup—to add bulk and texture. For little added expense, a variety of fats can be slipped into food formulas to stimulate overeating and improve mouthfeel. And salt, barely more expensive than water, has miraculous powers to boost the appeal of processed food.
The industry’s dependence on these ingredients became starkly evident when three of the biggest food manufacturers let me in to observe their efforts to cut back on salt. Kellogg, for one, made me a saltless version of their mega-selling Cheez-Its, which normally I can keep eating forever. Without any salt, however, the crackers lost their magic. They felt like straw, chewed like cardboard, and had zero taste. The same thing happened with the soups and meats and breads that other manufacturers, including Campbell, attempted to make for me. Take more than a little salt, or sugar, or fat out of processed food, these experiments showed, and there is nothing left. Or, even worse, what is left are the inexorable consequences of food processing, repulsive tastes that are bitter, metallic, and astringent. The industry has boxed itself in.
The second obstacle the industry faces in exacting any real reforms is the relentless competition for space on the grocery shelf. When PepsiCo in 2010 launched a campaign to promote its line of better-for-you products, the first drop in sales prompted Wall Street to demand that the company return to promoting its core drinks and snacks: those with the most salt, sugar, and fat. At Coca-Cola, meanwhile, PepsiCo’s move was immediately seized upon as an opportunity to gain ground by pumping more money and effort into doing the one thing they do best—selling soda.
“We are doubling down on soft drinks,” Coke’s executives boasted to Jeffrey Dunn, a former president of Coca-Cola North America and Latin America who left the company after trying, and failing, to instill some health consciousness at Coke. Dunn, who would share some of the soda industry’s most closely held secrets with me, said that Coke’s reaction was understandable, given the fierce competition, but indefensible in the context of surging obesity rates. “To me, that is like damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. If they choose that path, they have to be accountable for the social costs of what they are doing.”
In the end, that is what this book is about. It will show how the makers of processed foods have chosen, time and again, to double down on their efforts to dominate the American diet, gambling that consumers won’t figure them out. It will show how they push ahead, despite their own misgivings. And it will hold them accountable for the social costs that keep climbing even as some of their own say, “Enough already.”
Inevitably, the manufacturers of processed food argue that they have allowed us to become the people we want to be, fast and busy, no longer slaves to the stove. But in their hands, the salt, sugar, and fat they have used to propel this social transformation are not nutrients as much as weapons—weapons they deploy, certainly, to defeat their competitors but also to keep us coming back for more.
chapter one
“Exploiting the Biology of the Child”
The first thing to know about sugar is this: Our bodies are hard-wired for sweets.
Forget what we learned in school from that old diagram called the tongue map, the on
e that says our five main tastes are detected by five distinct parts of the tongue. That the back has a big zone for blasts of bitter, the sides grab the sour and the salty, and the tip of the tongue has that one single spot for sweet. The tongue map is wrong. As researchers would discover in the 1970s, its creators misinterpreted the work of a German graduate student that was published in 1901; his experiments showed only that we might taste a little more sweetness on the tip of the tongue. In truth, the entire mouth goes crazy for sugar, including the upper reaches known as the palate. There are special receptors for sweetness in every one of the mouth’s ten thousand taste buds, and they are all hooked up, one way or another, to the parts of the brain known as the pleasure zones, where we get rewarded for stoking our bodies with energy. But our zeal doesn’t stop there. Scientists are now finding taste receptors that light up for sugar all the way down our esophagus to our stomach and pancreas, and they appear to be intricately tied to our appetites.
The second thing to know about sugar: Food manufacturers are well aware of the tongue map folly, along with a whole lot more about why we crave sweets. They have on staff cadres of scientists who specialize in the senses, and the companies use their knowledge to put sugar to work for them in countless ways. Sugar not only makes the taste of food and drink irresistible. The industry has learned that it can also be used to pull off a string of manufacturing miracles, from donuts that fry up bigger to bread that won’t go stale to cereal that is toasty-brown and fluffy. All of this has made sugar a go-to ingredient in processed foods. On average, we consume 71 pounds of caloric sweeteners each year. That’s 22 teaspoons of sugar, per person, per day. The amount is almost equally split three ways, with the sugar derived from sugar cane, sugar beets, and the group of corn sweeteners that includes high-fructose corn syrup (with a little honey and syrup thrown into the mix).
That we love, and crave, sugar is hardly news. Whole books have been devoted to its romp through history, in which people overcame geography, strife, and overwhelming technical hurdles to feed their insatiable habit. The highlights start with Christopher Columbus, who brought sugar cane along on his second voyage to the New World, where it was planted in Spanish Santo Domingo, was eventually worked into granulated sugar by enslaved Africans, and, starting in 1516, was shipped back to Europe to meet the continent’s surging appetite for the stuff. The next notable development came in 1807 when a British naval blockade of France cut off easy access to sugar cane crops, and entrepreneurs, racing to meet demand, figured out how to extract sugar from beets, which could be grown easily in temperate Europe. Cane and beets remained the two main sources of sugar until the 1970s, when rising prices spurred the invention of high-fructose corn syrup, which had two attributes that were attractive to the soda industry. One, it was cheap, effectively subsidized by the federal price supports for corn; and two, it was liquid, which meant that it could be pumped directly into food and drink. Over the next thirty years, our consumption of sugar-sweetened soda more than doubled to 40 gallons a year per person, and while this has tapered off since then, hitting 32 gallons in 2011, there has been a commensurate surge in other sweet drinks, like teas, sports ades, vitamin waters, and energy drinks. Their yearly consumption has nearly doubled in the past decade to 14 gallons a person.
Far less well known than the history of sugar, however, is the intense research that scientists have conducted into its allure, the biology and psychology of why we find it so irresistible.
For the longest time, the people who spent their careers studying nutrition could only guess at the extent to which people are attracted to sugar. They had a sense, but no proof, that sugar was so powerful it could compel us to eat more than we should and thus do harm to our health. That all changed in the late 1960s, when some lab rats in upstate New York got ahold of Froot Loops, the supersweet cereal made by Kellogg. The rats were fed the cereal by a graduate student named Anthony Sclafani who, at first, was just being nice to the animals in his care. But when Sclafani noticed how fast they gobbled it up, he decided to concoct a test to measure their zeal. Rats hate open spaces; even in cages, they tend to stick to the shadowy corners and sides. So Sclafani put a little of the cereal in the brightly lit, open center of their cages—normally an area to be avoided—to see what would happen. Sure enough, the rats overcame their instinctual fears and ran out in the open to gorge.
Their predilection for sweets became scientifically significant a few years later when Sclafani—who’d become an assistant professor of psychology at Brooklyn College—was trying to fatten some rats for a study. Their standard Purina Dog Chow wasn’t doing the trick, even when Sclafani added lots of fats to the mix. The rats wouldn’t eat enough to gain significant weight. So Sclafani, remembering the Froot Loops experiment, sent a graduate student out to a supermarket on Flatbush Avenue to buy some cookies and candies and other sugar-laden products. And the rats went bananas, they couldn’t resist. They were particularly fond of sweetened condensed milk and chocolate bars. They ate so much over the course of a few weeks that they grew obese.
“Everyone who owns pet rats knows if you give them a cookie they will like that, but no one experimentally had given them all they want,” Sclafani told me when I met him at his lab in Brooklyn, where he continues to use rodents in studying the psychology and brain mechanisms that underlie the desire for high-fat and high-sugar foods. When he did just that, when he gave his rats all they wanted, he saw their appetite for sugar in a new light. They loved it, and this craving completely overrode the biological brakes that should have been saying: Stop.
The details of Sclafani’s experiment went into a 1976 paper that is revered by researchers as one of the first experimental proofs of food cravings. Since its publication, a whole body of research has been undertaken to link sugar to compulsive overeating. In Florida, researchers have conditioned rats to expect an electrical shock when they eat cheesecake, and still they lunge for it. Scientists at Princeton found that rats taken off a sugary diet will exhibit signs of withdrawal, such as chattering teeth. Still, these studies involve only rodents, which in the world of science are known to have a limited ability to predict human physiology and behavior.
What about people and Froot Loops?
For some answers to this question, and for most of the foundational science on how and why we are so attracted to sugar, the food industry has turned to a place called the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. It is located a few blocks west of the Amtrak station, in a bland five-story brick building easily overlooked in the architectural wasteland of the district known as University City—except for “Eddy,” the giant sculpture that stands guarding the entrance. Eddy is a ten-foot-high fragment of a face, and he perfectly captures the obsessions of those inside: He is all nose and mouth.
Getting buzzed through the center’s front door is like stepping into a clubhouse for PhDs. The scientists here hang out in the corridors to swap notions that lead to wild discoveries, like how cats are unable to taste sweets, or how the cough that results from sipping a high-quality olive oil is caused by an anti-inflammatory agent, which may prove to be yet another reason for nutritionists to love this oil so much. The researchers at Monell bustle to and from conference rooms and equipment-filled labs and peer through one-way mirrors at the children and adults who eat and drink their way through the center’s many ongoing experiments. Over the last forty years, more than three hundred physiologists, chemists, neuroscientists, biologists, and geneticists have cycled through Monell to help decipher the mechanisms of taste and smell along with the complex psychology that underlies our love for food. They are among the world’s foremost authorities on taste. In 2001, they identified the actual protein molecule, T1R3, that sits in the taste bud and detects sugar. More recently they have been tracking the sugar sensors that are spread throughout the digestive system, and they now suspect that these sensors are playing a variety of key roles in our metabolism. They have even solved one of the more enduring mysteries in food cravi
ngs: the marijuana-induced state known as “the munchies.” This came about in 2009 when Robert Margolskee, a molecular biologist and associate director of the center, joined other scientists in discovering that the sweet taste receptors on the tongue get aroused by endocannabinoids—substances that are produced in the brain to increase our appetite. They are chemical sisters to THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, which may explain why smoking marijuana can trigger hunger pangs. “Our taste cells are turning out to be smarter than we thought, and more involved in regulating our appetites,” Margolskee told me.
The stickiest subject at Monell, however, is not sugar. It’s money. Taxpayers fund about half of the center’s $17.5 million annual budget through federal grants, but much of the rest of its operation comes from the food industry, including the big manufacturers, as well as several tobacco companies. A large golden plaque in the lobby pays homage to PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Kraft, Nestlé, Philip Morris, among others. It’s an odd arrangement, for sure, one that evokes past efforts by the tobacco industry to buy “research” that put cigarettes in a favorable light. At Monell, the industry funding buys companies a privileged access to the center and its labs. They get exclusive first looks at the center’s research, often as early as three years before the information goes public, and are also able to engage some of Monell’s scientists to conduct special studies for their particular needs. But Monell prides itself on the integrity and independence of its scientists. Some of their work, in fact, is funded with monies from the lawsuits that states brought against the tobacco manufacturers.
