Salt Sugar Fat

by Michael Moss

  That may be, but in our tasting it became clear that salt played significant roles beyond enhancing. For starters, even the soups with lowered levels of salt still had hefty sodium loads. Campbell is most proud of a line called Healthy Request, which has 410 milligrams of sodium in each cup—nearly a third of a day’s maximum for Americans at highest risk, if they eat only a cup, which is half a can. But Healthy Request brings in barely 10 percent of the company’s soup sales, the company told me. The big sellers, like chicken noodle, range as high as 790 milligrams in each cup.

  Dowdie’s staff ladled out a version of their tomato soup, which they had made especially for me, doing no more than lowering the sodium from 710 milligrams to 480. Dowdie took a sip. “This is not something people could like and eat a lot of,” he said. “It’s missing something.” But then we tasted a version with the same sodium level—only this time, his staff had added some herbs and spices. Dowdie was more bullish on this one: “You taste a well-balanced tomato flavor, like something you’d make at home.”

  Campbell had figured out that the way to reduce salt in soup was not the Cargill route, adding potassium chloride, but rather the trick that my mother, for one, had used to make her soups taste good: adding fresh herbs and spices.

  Campbell declined to discuss what spicing it used and how much it cost, but Dowdie made it clear that there were financial constraints to the more-herbs-less-salt formula. Every time the company took the sodium down a notch, replacing it with fresh herbs, the production cost rose. Who was going to pay for this? Relative to the dirt-cheap price of salt, he said, “this is going to cost you more.”

  Finally, we tasted a vegetable beef soup in which the sodium had been lowered, without any adjustment in spicing. It didn’t just taste flat. The soup had some bad tastes, tastes that hovered somewhere between bitter and metallic. These undesirables—what the industry calls “off-notes”—were likely still present in the regular soup, but the salt—in one of its functions—covers them up.

  “The salt is masking these off-notes?” I asked Dowdie.

  “Yeah, absolutely,” he replied. Green beans can taste bitter without salt, he said, but in this case bitterness could be coming from the WOF—the warmed-over-flavor problem caused by oxidation of the reheated meat.

  A year after my visit, Campbell would encounter another stumbling block in its efforts to unhook itself from salt, one that has been perhaps even more of a burden to the food industry than WOF: Wall Street. Campbell was having a lousy year. The revenue was flat, the forecast weak, the stock price was down 5 percent, and stock analysts were complaining mightily about the company’s financial prospects. So on July 12, 2011, Campbell’s incoming CEO, Denise Morrison, announced a plan to spur sales. She assured investors that she knew what was needed, first and foremost, to drive consumption. It was the same thing Dowdie had said about earning the consumer’s trust: no salt, no flavor; no flavor, no buy.

  She said that the company would be adding more salt to some of its soups. Where the sodium had been lowered from 700 to 800 milligrams per serving, down to 480, the CEO said, it would now be raised back up to 650. “Sodium reduction is important,” Morrison told the analysts. “But we have to do other things, like taste.”

  The move involved only the thirty-one soups in its Select Harvest brand, but Wall Street appreciated that Campbell was now going in what it saw as the right direction. The company’s stock price closed up 1.3 percent that day. As one Standard & Poor’s analyst said, “We look for future results to benefit from an increased emphasis on bolstering sales with tasty soup products.”

  * Most salts are kosher in the sense of complying with the guidelines for food as written in the Torah. This salt’s designation as kosher was derived from its usefulness in making kosher meats; its unique crystalline structure is adept at soaking up the surface blood.

  † Cargill declined to say how much salt it produces, so this figure is an estimate gleaned from federal data and interviews with industry experts. Its closest rival is Morton Salt, best known for salt used at home.

  ‡ Some months later, Campbell did join the salt reduction initiative, with the same strategy of the other companies. It pledged to reduce the salt in some of its foods, including canned chili and hash, but not the biggest part of its portfolio, the soups.

  chapter fourteen

  “I Feel So Sorry for the Public”

  At a symposium for nutrition scientists in Los Angeles on February 15, 1985, a professor of pharmacology from Helsinki told the remarkable story of Finland’s effort to address its salt habit. In the late 1970s, the Finns were consuming huge amounts of sodium, eating on average more than two teaspoons of salt a day. As a result, the country had developed significant issues with high blood pressure, which in turn brought an epidemic of heart attacks and strokes—indeed, men in the eastern part of Finland had the highest rate of cardiovascular disease in the world. Research showed that this plague was not a quirk of genetics or the result of a sedentary lifestyle—it was a matter, simply put, of processed foods. So when Finnish authorities moved to address the problem, they went right after the manufacturers. Every grocery item that was heavy in salt would now have to be marked prominently with the warning “High Salt Content.” This, along with an ambitious public education campaign, would have a dramatic effect: By 2007, Finland’s per capita consumption of salt had dropped by a third, and this shift was accompanied by an 80 percent decline in the number of deaths from strokes and heart disease.*

  Heikki Karppanen’s presentation was met with enthusiastic applause, but one man in the crowd seemed particularly moved by the professor’s presentation that day. He had been sitting in the front row, and he rose up eagerly out of his seat to intercept Karppanen as he left the stage. Karppanen noticed him right away, struck by how much he stood out in the room full of academics. The professors dressed in a style charitably described as “frumpy classroom,” while the man walking toward him was all “slick boardroom.” He wore a suit that was expensively tailored, dark and crisp. His shoes were polished, his black hair neatly trimmed. He approached Karppanen and congratulated him on his work. He said that they shared an interest in salt, and he asked Karppanen to join him for dinner so they could delve more deeply into the subject.

  Given how the man had dressed, Karppanen wasn’t surprised when a stylish car arrived at his hotel to pick him up that evening for dinner. Nor was he surprised by their destination, an elegant restaurant on the Santa Monica Pier, with sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean. Their conversation, however, was not at all what Karppanen was expecting. His host did indeed have an interest in salt, but from quite a different vantage point: The man’s name was Robert I-San Lin, and from 1974 to 1982 he had worked for Frito-Lay. This was the $4-billion-a-year manufacturer of blockbuster brands like Lay’s, Doritos, Cheetos, and, of course, Fritos, the simple but lusciously fatty chips made with corn, corn oil, and salt.

  Lin didn’t just work for the company. He was its chief scientist, which meant that it was his job to figure out ways to keep consumers buying these snacks. This had put him at the center of some of the industry’s most intriguing scientific inquiries, adventures really, ranging from chips all the way to soft drinks. Frito-Lay (which was, and is, owned by PepsiCo) had engaged Lin’s expertise across the whole spectrum of salt, sugar, and fat. In their laboratories near Dallas, Texas, he had honed bliss points for all three of these keystone ingredients.

  When it came to his work with salt, however, Lin found himself increasingly at odds with the company over its strategy for dealing with the simmering health concerns that stemmed from America’s overconsumption of salt. He was thrust into corporate dealings that he viewed as deeply troubling.

  Karppanen had started off gently at dinner that evening by asking a few probing questions, testing Lin’s willingness to discuss the world of salt at Frito-Lay. But it didn’t take him long to see that Lin was more than willing to speak freely. In fact, he opened up like never before. Karppa
nen felt like a confessor of sorts, and Lin had a lot he wanted to say.

  Lin was working for Frito-Lay when consumer advocates in the United States had launched their first attack on salty foods. Alarmed by the links to high blood pressure and heart disease, they asked federal regulators in 1978 to reclassify salt as a “risky” food additive, which could have subjected it to severe controls. No company took this threat more seriously than Frito-Lay, Lin explained. This was due in part to the salty nature of the company’s snacks, but also to its strong (some would say Texan) corporate culture that tolerated no meddling—in the form of regulation—from the fools up in Washington, D.C. The company’s top officials took the push against salt personally. Lin found himself caught between corporate and public interests, struggling to reconcile what was best for the company with what was best for its customers. He sketched for Karppanen the barest outlines of a battle in which the company used “experts” to take potshots at studies linking salt to high blood pressure, raised alarms about the health risks of too little salt in one’s diet, and financed research into finding a cure for the harmful effects of sodium, which Lin viewed as a crass attempt to divert attention from salt. Salt meant the world to Frito-Lay—as much, if not more, than any other ingredient.

  Back in his hotel that night, Karppanen got out his personal diary and found that he couldn’t stop writing, jotting down many of the salient points of their conversation. “He was very much disturbed by the experience of what money can buy in the U.S.,” Karppanen wrote. “He said everything is for sale if you have enough money.”

  The diary entries he made that night remained tucked away—until the spring of 2010, when Karppanen retrieved them for me. By chance, I had run across a letter that Lin had sent to Karppanen three weeks after their dinner, buried in some files to which I had gained access. I was particularly intrigued by a memo that was attached to the letter, written when Lin was at Frito-Lay, that detailed some of the company’s concerted efforts in defending salt. I found Lin in southern California, in the university town of Irvine. There, in his lovely home off of a winding drive, Lin and I spent several days talking about salt and his years at Frito-Lay and going through the internal company memos, strategy papers, and handwritten notes he had kept.

  The details that emerged from this record underscored the concern that Lin had for consumers. While at Frito-Lay, Lin and other company scientists spoke openly about the country’s excessive consumption of sodium and the fact that, as Lin said to me on more than one occasion, “people get addicted to salt.”

  But the documents, along with others I would obtain, also pried open the door to another narrative, one that reflects the food industry’s uncanny—and highly consequential—ability to turn adversity into advantage. Cornered on salt, Frito-Lay would find other ways to boost the sales of its snacks. And it would wield these tricks, through the 1990s and beyond, at the precise moment when America’s dependence on processed food was peaking. High blood pressure was certainly one cause for concern, but more and more, as obesity overtook hypertension as a national health crisis, the danger in overeating the snacks that Frito-Lay so aggressively marketed lay not in their salt content but in their calories.

  Thirty-two years had passed since Robert Lin first tangled with Frito-Lay on the health aspect of its chips, but as we sat at his dining room table, sifting through his records, the feelings of regret still played on his face. In his view, three decades had been lost, time that he and a lot of other smart scientists could have spent searching for ways to ease the industry’s addiction to salt, sugar, and fat. “I was employed at a time I couldn’t do much about it,” he told me. “I feel so sorry for the public.”

  Like many of the people on the research and development side of the processed food industry, the Robert Lin who went to work for Frito-Lay began his career with a pure heart, as a scientist, intent on discovery and bettering mankind. He came to the United States in the late 1960s from Taiwan after winning a prestigious award to study abroad. His clan was a brainy, demanding one. His brother went to work as a nuclear physicist for the federal laboratories at Los Alamos. All four of his own children would obtain PhDs.

  Lin was not only bracingly intelligent as a young man; he was driven and self-confident. He defied his mentors in Taiwan, who had expected him to attend Oxford, or, at the least, an Ivy League school. Instead, Lin chose the University of California at Los Angeles for its medical school. There, and later at the California Institute of Technology, Lin dabbled in the latest brain research and worked on recombinant DNA. Eventually, he decided the field where he could make the most lasting contributions was not nuclear medicine or biophysics but nutrition. As he saw it, the food people ate was nothing less than a matter of (long) life or (early) death. “My thinking was that the human body is supported by its nutritional intake,” Lin told me. “If I could understand that better, I could make the body last longer.”

  But in short order, his passion for science gave way to the realities of the industry. He moved East to work for the life sciences unit of the GTE corporation and then joined a gold rush that was under way on the sweet side of processed foods. Washington had just banned the artificial sweetener called sodium cyclamate for having a toxicity risk, creating a void in the burgeoning market of products for diabetics. Lin joined a startup that was racing to turn an African berry into a sugar substitute. “When you chewed it, not much flavor came out,” he told me. “But the molecule we extracted from the berry, you could put that on your tongue and it would make even vinegar taste sweet.” A disagreement among the principals caused the berry venture to collapse, and Lin was forced to look for more stable employment. He flew to Dallas and interviewed with some executives who were enjoying a gold rush of their own, this one on the salty side of processed foods.

  The corporate culture at Frito-Lay was a shock to Lin. As chief scientist, he oversaw a division of 150 researchers and developers, each of whom was expected to dress and act like a senior executive. “Navy blue and charcoal gray,” Lin said. “Any man who dressed colorfully was not going to get promoted.” Lin, at times, was even told to make desk checks at five minutes past eight in the morning to enforce punctuality. The lab work, however, was wildly fun, a series of puzzles to solve. Lin got dragged out of bed one night when thousands of bottles of Pepsi loaded onto a ship and headed to Japan suddenly started popping their tops like champagne corks. A few weeks later, Lin and his team finally nailed the culprit: The trouble had been caused by the new grape pigment Pepsi was using to replace a synthetic dye called No. 6, which, like cyclamates, had been banned. The grape pigment was natural but had quirks of chemistry that obviously needed more careful managing in the factory. Another time, Lin was called upon to rescue the company’s potato chips. Frito-Lay had always been vigilant in keeping its chips incredibly fresh; the policy was, if they were not sold in a matter of days, they would be pulled from the shelves. This strict adherence to freshness was a company hallmark that set it apart from its rivals. But in cases where the chips stayed too long on the shelf, they didn’t just go stale; the people eating them would feel nauseous. The problem, Lin found, was light. The chips in those days were packed in see-through plastic bags, and the light they let in caused a chemical change in the chips. Lin solved this by switching to an opaque bag that now, of course, has been widely adopted by the industry.

  Lin’s influence ranged widely across PepsiCo and the Frito-Lay division and even spilled into the marketing side, where officials labored to learn all the reasons why people would, or would not, buy the company’s products. Health concerns were an obvious issue with salty or sugary snacks, but Lin put this matter in proper perspective. When a colleague developed a calculation for measuring the pros and cons of snacks, Lin honed it with all the proper mathematical framing. The reputation that snacks had for being bad for one’s health (H) was an issue that worked against the company, along with their cost ($), and failures in quality (Q), like breakage. But other factors worked in the
company’s favor, making it more likely consumers would decide to purchase (P). Its chips and other snacks tasted great (T). They were convenient (C) and utilitarian (U), ready to eat out of the hand or with meals. Lin added some mathematical weighting (A, B), and threw it all into an equation he called the “Model for Ideal Snack,” which explained—from a mathematical perspective—why Frito-Lay was making a killing in fatty and salty snacks. “Every time a consumer is making a decision to buy the snack, if Resistance is greater than Reward, there would simply be no Purchase,” Lin wrote in a memo to other Frito-Lay officials. “It would be better to express in the following way: P = A1T + A2C + A3U – B1$ – B2H – B3Q.”

  One of his more expensive investigations at Frito-Lay was the Monkey Project, aimed at refuting the critics who, in the late 1970s, were making a fuss about saturated fat. Frito-Lay maintained that shoppers could do worse than pick up a bag of its chips; bread and butter, for one example, might sound innocuous but in truth was loaded with salt and fat. So the company spent $1.5 million on an experiment that would prove Lay’s chips weren’t really that bad after all. Monkeys—130 of them—served as the guinea pigs. An animal research center was hired to run the experiment, with Lin overseeing the science. “We fed them a potato chip chow, three times as much as we felt people would eat in a day, and we did this for five years,” Lin said. Monkeys breed fast, so there were actually two generations involved in this trial. The findings, although never disclosed publicly, were comforting to Frito-Lay: The chips maybe weren’t great for one’s health, but they wouldn’t kill anyone, either. “We wanted to confirm whether saturated fat was really that bad,” Lin said. “We were asking, ‘How bad is the chip?’ We raised the monkeys for two generations and fed them this controlled diet of potato chip chow mixed with a supplement of vitamins and minerals, and one group had increasing amounts of saturated fat. After five years, the only conclusion was that the group with higher saturated fat had higher cholesterol. But birth defects? There were none. Some might have thought we were wasting time, but I thought it was responsible science. It gave everyone peace of mind.”