Salt Sugar Fat

by Michael Moss

  Nestlé, which has picked up on fat research where General Foods left off, has good reason to want to deepen its understanding of fat. Back when it was founded in the mid-1800s, the company had one product to worry about: milk chocolate. But today, Nestlé is a $100 billion global giant with a portfolio of processed foods and drinks that rely on fat, from Häagen-Dazs ice cream to Kit Kat bars to DiGiorno frozen pizzas, which have up to 8 grams of saturated fat in a single serving—half of the recommended daily maximum for adults.*

  The indispensability of fat to Nestlé’s balance sheets becomes all the more evident to the company whenever it tries to cut back. In the early 1980s, one of its food scientists, Steve Witherly, was trying to save the company money by lessening the amount of cheese in a sauce. He used substituting chemicals designed to impart a cheese-like tang, but the fat in cheese, he realized, provided more than just flavor. It gave the sauce its silky, rich texture, the mouthfeel that people wanted—and that was something no chemical could replicate. “We were always trying to make it cheaper,” he told me, “but people could always detect if we started messing around with the cheese. It’s the texture of cheese sauce people go crazy for. That gooey, sticky mouthfeel, kind of like a peanut buttery mouthfeel that really made people want to be on my taste panels. Something about the cheese made people go nuts.”

  At Nestlé’s research and development center near Geneva, Switzerland, the scientists include a German-trained biophysicist named Johannes Le Coutre who is currently using some of the same brain-mapping science that academic centers like Oxford employ. His tools include electroencephalography, or EEG, in which a net of electrodes is affixed to the head to explore how the brain responds to various stimuli. In 2008, he wired up fifteen adults to an EEG machine and showed them pictures of foods that were either low or high in fat. At first, he wanted to see if their brains would recognize the difference, and they did. But then he made another noteworthy discovery. He timed the signals given off by the food pictures, and found that they raced to the brain in a mere 200 milliseconds. The brain was identifying fat with incredible speed. In his quest to learn more, Le Coutre rounded up fifty of his colleagues in industry and academia and asked them to help produce an “all known facts” compendium on fat. Published in 2010 with 609 pages, the resulting book, Fat Detection: Taste, Texture, and Post Ingestive Effects, serves as a roadmap for companies looking to harness the power of fat in their food and drink. “Why is fat so tasty?” Le Coutre asks in the introduction. “Why do we crave it, and what is the impact of dietary fat on health and disease?”

  To answer the part about craving, the book turned to an American scientist who had made an intriguing discovery about sugary chocolate chip cookies—that the compulsion to overindulge these and other sweets could be suppressed by the same drug that doctors use to block and counter the effects of heroin. This was one of the earliest pieces of evidence that obesity had parallels to drug addiction, but this scientist, Adam Drewnowski, has been making equally important discoveries about the role that fat alone plays in driving people to eat.

  Drewnowski’s work has been pioneering in several areas of nutrition science, including the links between the epidemic of obesity and processed foods. A professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington at Seattle, he directs the school’s Center for Obesity Research. In recent years, he has focused on the economics of eating, studying the factors that make processed foods more attractive than fresh fruits and vegetables, and the decisions people make in choosing what to put on the table. “I want to know where people compromise,” he said. “You have to take into account the cost, but there are other constraints. When you have kids, the question becomes, What can I buy that won’t cost much, that the kids will eat, and that won’t take long to prepare? Beans and eggs have good nutritional value at low cost, but you have to cook them. Most veggies are going to be more expensive, though not potatoes and carrots. For them, the question becomes, How many dishes can you cook with potatoes and carrots before you say, ‘Kentucky Fried is not so bad after all’? My other question is, At what point is not wanting to feel hungry going to outweigh the nutritional value of the product? Such as tomatoes, at two dollars a pound. They are nutritious but won’t keep me satisfied. And here is a pizza. It’s not nutritious, but I know I will be full at the end. This all gets much starker in looking at a big bag of potato chips versus veggies.”

  Drewnowski started asking questions about fat in 1982. He had a degree in biochemistry from Oxford, and he was hunting for something to focus on as a doctoral student in mathematical psychology at the prestigious Rockefeller University in New York City. The field of nutrition, in which he was interested, was a close-knit world where everyone kept tabs on each other’s work. He knew that his peers had already trammeled the ground on sugar: He followed the progress that Howard Moskowitz had made in pinpointing the bliss point for sweet taste, and he had read the scientific papers that Szczesniak at General Foods had written on the texture of fat, and he had seen the rating system she devised that many food scientists used. In fat, however, he saw an area of research that remained largely uncharted. No one had yet tried to measure with any precision just how alluring it really was. To the contrary, he noticed that scientists who were studying food cravings were making a mistake that could be obscuring the power of fat. They wrongly identified things like candy bars as sugary foods, when in fact they were also loaded with fat. “I came to the realization that most of the ‘sugary foods’ in our diets were not just pure sugar,” he told me. “They were really linked up with fat.”

  Drewnowski devised an experiment. Sixteen undergraduates, eleven women and five men, were given twenty different mixtures of milk, cream, and sugar. He then asked them how much they liked each combination; to sort out their answers, he used his math skills and an early-model computer. (His partner on the 1983 study, M. R. C. Greenwood, went on to have her own illustrious career that included a stint in the White House as associate director for science.) Two significant findings emerged from the data. Drewnowski knew about the bliss point for sugar, how our liking for sugary concentrations goes only so far; after a point—known as the break point—adding more sugar only lessens the appeal.

  “But there was no bliss point, or break point, for fat,” Drewnowski told me. The sixteen people in his experiment never once cried uncle in working their way through the increasingly fatty mixtures. The fat, no matter how rich the food, was so pleasing to their brains that they never gave the signal to stop eating. Their bodies wanted more and more fat. “The more fat there was, the better,” he said. “If there was a break point, it was somewhere beyond heavy cream.”

  The second finding concerned the relationship the fat had with sugar. He found that the heaviest cream tasted even better to his subjects when he added a little sugar. There was something about this combination that created a powerful interplay. They boosted one another to levels of allure that neither could reach alone.

  Given the vast numbers of products on grocery shelves that are loaded with sugar and fat, Drewnowski assumes that the processed food industry was already aware of this synergy, if only in broad, practical terms. Still, being an inquisitive type, he had yet more questions to ask and answer. Was the brain just being the body’s servant in extreme gluttony, seeing fat as the best way to store energy for emergencies down the road? Or was there something else going on between the sugar and fat? A few years later, Drewnowski had fifty college students taste and rate fifteen different formulations of cake frosting in which the sugar and fat content was varied. The tasters were able to taste and quantify the sugar content of each sample quite accurately, but not the fat content; the participants in his study found it difficult to detect its presence with any precision at all. On top of that, when sugar was added to the fattier formulations, the students mistakenly thought the fat had been reduced. In effect, the fat had gone into hiding. This meant the food manufacturers could use fat as an allure in their products without ever having to
worry about a backlash from people’s brains, which they do with abandon. Many soups, cookies, potato chips, cakes, pies, and frozen meals deliver half or more of their calories through fat, and yet consumers won’t identify these as fatty foods, which is great for sales. For some extra insurance on this, all the manufacturers have to do is add a little sugar.

  Drewnowski published his study, “Invisible Fats,” in 1990, and it showed that fat was a double-edged sword when wielded by the processed food industry. In certain circumstances and with certain foods, manufacturers might be able to reduce the fat content without causing a significant drop in the product’s allure. (Depending on the product, adding more sugar might be needed to maintain the allure.) On the other hand, these same manufacturers could crank up the fat content as high as they wanted, and unless people studied the nutrition label carefully, the fat would get eaten in bliss without setting off any alarms in the body’s system that help regulate our weight by telling us we are eating too much.

  “A dish or a drink could be very high in fat and people wouldn’t be aware of it,” Drewnowski said. “So it can cut both ways. Good if you’re reducing fat, and not so good if the diet is already heavy in fat and people aren’t aware of it. Fat is trickier than sugar. My point, back when I did my studies, was that in these mixtures of sugar and fat you find in so many products, most of the calories come from fat. I had this disagreement years ago with researchers who were working on the hypothesis that obesity is caused by carbohydrates, which is what sugar is. They were using things like Snickers bars and chocolate M&Ms and thinking, ‘A-ha, sweet foods, carbohydrates.’ And my point was, yes, they are sweet, and there is sugar in them. But they are not carbohydrate foods—60 to 70 to 80 percent of their calories was coming from fat. The fat was invisible, even to the investigators themselves.”

  * In 2010, the USDA’s panel of experts who set dietary guidelines issued a new standard calling for saturated fat not to exceed 7 percent of total calories, about 15.6 grams in a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet. The average intake is about 11 percent to 12 percent.

  chapter eight

  “Liquid Gold”

  Dean Southworth was enjoying a quiet retirement in Florida after thirty-eight years as a food scientist for Kraft. He and his wife, Betty, were living in a modest house in the palm-lined island town of Fort Myers Beach, smack between the inlet that runs to Estero Bay, with its luscious sunrises, and the Gulf of Mexico, with its magnificent sunsets. Southworth, finally, had the time to take in both. During his years at Kraft, he had spent long days trying to develop new products, trying to stay ahead of the competition. Now, he did things like take long walks and help run the local Kiwanis Club. He hadn’t abandoned his previous life completely, though. Whenever he got the urge, which was quite often, he would enjoy the fruits of one of his finest inventions: the spread known as Cheez Whiz.

  Southworth had been part of the team that created Cheez Whiz in the early 1950s. The mission had been to come up with a speedy alternative to the cheese sauce used in making Welsh rarebit, a popular but laborious dish that required a half-hour or more of cooking before it could be poured over toast. It took them a year and a half of sustained effort to get the flavor right, but when they did, they succeeded in creating one of the first mega-hits in convenience foods. Southworth and his wife, Betty, became lifelong fans and made it part of their daily routine. “We used it on toast, muffins, baked potatoes,” he told me. “It was a nice spreadable, with a nice flavor. And it went well at night with crackers and a little martini. It went down very, very nicely, if you wanted to be civilized.”

  So it was with considerable alarm that he turned to his wife one evening in 2001, having just sampled a jar of Cheez Whiz he’d picked up at the local Winn-Dixie supermarket. “I said, ‘Holy God, it tastes like axle grease.’ I looked at the label and I said, ‘What the hell did they do?’ I called up Kraft, using the 800 number for consumer complaints, and I told them, ‘You are putting out a goddamn axle grease!’ ”

  Cheez Whiz was already something of a horror to nutritionists. A single serving, which Kraft defined as just two level tablespoons, delivered nearly a third of a day’s recommended maximum of saturated fat as well as a third of the maximum sodium recommended for a majority of American adults. Sit down with a drink in front of the TV and start heaping it onto salty, buttery crackers, and both daily limits would quickly be blown.

  As for its taste, Southworth conceded that the spread had never been in the same league as a fine English Stilton. But it hadn’t pretended, even wanted to be. In the laboratories at Kraft, in fact, Cheez Whiz had been designed to have the mildest flavor possible for the broadest public appeal. Upon its release on July 1, 1953, the advertising emphasized its expediency, not its taste: “Cheese treats QUICK. Spoon it, heat it, spread it.”

  Nonetheless, in his kitchen that day, Southworth knew that something had changed. Staring at the label, parsing the list of ingredients, he eventually found the culprit, though not without some effort. There were twenty-seven items listed in all, starting with the watery by-product of milk called whey, taking him through canola oil, corn syrup, and an additive called milk protein concentrate, which manufacturers had begun importing from other countries as a cost-cutting alternative to the higher-priced powdered milk produced by American dairies. One crucial ingredient was missing, however. From its earliest days, Cheez Whiz always contained real cheese. Real cheese gave it class and legitimacy, Southworth said, not to mention flavor. Now, he discovered, not only was cheese no longer prominently listed as an ingredient, it wasn’t listed at all.

  Not surprisingly, Kraft kept this change to itself. I couldn’t find any public discussion of it even nine years later, when Southworth related his story to me. So during a visit to Kraft’s headquarters in 2011, I asked if he was right, if Kraft in fact had taken the cheese out of Cheez Whiz. Actually, a spokeswoman told me, there was still some cheese left in the formula, just not as much as there used to be. When I asked how much, she declined to say. It no longer appeared on the label, she added, because Kraft—in attempting to simplify its long lists of ingredients—had switched from citing components, like cheese, to listing their parts, like milk. “We made adjustments in dairy sourcing that resulted in less cheese being used,” she told me. “However, with any reformulation, we work hard to ensure that the product continues to deliver the taste that our consumers expect.”

  Southworth was more blunt in his assessment of what happened to his creation. “I imagine it’s a marketing and profit thing,” he said. “If you don’t have to use cheese, which has to be kept in storage for a certain length of time in order to become usable, flavor-wise and texture-wise, then you’ve eliminated the cost of storage, and there is more to the profit center.”

  Southworth’s grievance was surely heartfelt; he even phoned his food-scientist friends who still worked at Kraft to complain. But Cheez Whiz had other, deeper troubles beyond its sixty-year-old formula being fiddled with, beyond it being cheese or not cheese. The spreadable dip that transformed American snacking and cocktail parties when it first came out had already become something of a dinosaur, overrun by Kraft’s own indefatigable efforts to unleash a slew of newer, snazzier cheese-related products. Granted, many of these items—Easy Cheese, Velveeta, American Singles, Philadelphia Cooking Creme, and a group of blends called Philadelphia Shredded Cheese, which combine real cheese with cream cheese—defy definition. Federal regulators have resorted to terms like cheese food, cheese product, and pasteurized processed American to describe what the industry itself loosely calls cheese. Taken together, however, the effort by Kraft and its smaller competitors to recast and expand the traditional provision known as cheese has achieved stunning results.

  Americans now eat as much as 33 pounds or more of cheese and pseudo-cheese products a year, triple the amount we consumed in the early 1970s. During that same time, beverage makers managed only to double the per capita consumption of carbonated soft drinks to 50 gallons a year;
in fact, in recent years they have seen a dropoff, as consumers switched to other sugary drinks. America’s intake of cheese, by contrast, continues to swell, increasing 3 pounds per person per year since 2001.*

  The nutritional math, when it comes to cheese, is staggering too. Depending on the specific product, 33 pounds of cheese delivers as many as 60,000 calories, which is enough energy, on its own, to sustain an adult for a month. Those 33 pounds also have has many as 3,100 grams of saturated fat, or more than half a year’s recommended maximum intake. Cheese has become the single largest source of saturated fat in the American diet, though it is hardly the only culprit. Day in and day out, Americans on average are exceeding the recommended maximum of fat by more than 50 percent.

  The soaring amounts of cheese we eat is no accident. It is the direct result of concerted efforts by the processed food industry, which has labored long and hard to transform the very essence of cheese and its role in our diet. Some of this effort is focused on changing its physical nature, converting cheese into a form that is durable as well as quick and cheap to produce. The key to this makeover is the product called processed cheese, which Kraft pioneered nearly a century ago and which fueled its rise to the position of America’s largest manufacturer of cheese, with annual global sales of $7 billion.

  By itself, however, the industrialization of cheese does not explain the surge in consumption. To triple America’s intake in forty years, the food industry has also worked vigorously to change the way cheese is eaten. It is no longer a rare treat to be savored with guests, before a meal. In the hands of food manufacturers, cheese has become an ingredient, something we add to other food. And not just any ingredient, either. Cheese is now being slipped into packaged foods that are found in almost every aisle of the grocery store, from the frozen pizzas that now boast “triple cheese,” to peanut-butter-and-cheese crackers, to packaged dinner entrees that tout their contents with names like “extreme cheese explosion,” to the breakfast sandwiches stocked in the meat cooler. Moreover, to boost the usage at home, the dairy aisle has been loaded with cheese made more and more convenient for use in recipes. Where there used to be a few blocks of cheddar and Swiss and some packs of sliced cheese on the shelf, there are now vast hanging displays of cheese—shredded cheese, cubed cheese, blended cheese, string cheese, crumbled cheese, spreadable cheese, bagged cheese, cheese mixed with cream cheese.