Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

Have been reading this book by a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter at The New York Times named Michael Moss. The food industry takes the cheapest ingredients, and through meticulous food science blends with salt, sugar, and fat, and then does extensive taste testing of different formulations in their target markets to determine the "bliss point" (the point at which the product is the most irresistible). This art was fine tuned on kids and breakfast cereals, which are not cereal at all, but “breakfast dessert” no better than candy. But we’re not just talking about breakfast cereal, there at 60,000 items in an average grocery store. How many of them are all natural? From tomato sauce to salad dressing, the vast majority are being altered to suck us in. The food industry understands taste, mouth feel, and the various ways to use sugar, salt, and fat can be made to overcome the bitter, nasty taste of preservatives and other ingredients to produce optimal appeal. They know how to make that appeal overcome a sense of being full so we eat more. And then use marketing to drive the product home. I learned that Coke has found marketing to new customers in the US not nearly as profitable as targeting their existing customers to get them to drink more. The description of the psychology of food is really interesting. If you give a person a glass of Coke (without telling them the brand) and ask them to rate the taste, the result is good. But tell them it is Coke and the enjoyment factor goes through the roof. The advertising actually improves the taste – 100% reproducible. So if a competing product tastes identical or even better, people will like the taste of the Coke better. Is this an accident? Oh, and Coke recently reformulated a little to reduce the amount of “secret formula” in the Coke to add more corn syrup, still maintaining the “bliss point”, saving $$$$s. Brilliant! Someone earned a huge bonus. I wasn’t when I started, but am now firmly convinced that many of the obese didn’t fall into obesity, they were deliberately pushed. I definitely think a read of this book would help bolster any dieter's willpower to see the effort the food industry goes to to help them fail.

And why? If the public demanded fresh organic broccoli, free range chicken, and whole grain cereal – wouldn’t the food industry just move over to supplying these foods instead. No. These foods are much more expensive to produce, much shorter shelf life, and people won’t eat them in endless quantity. How much would they have to charge for a bunch of broccoli to make the same profit they make on a can of Coke? The food industry survives on the high profit margins only supplied by selling the cheapest food at a premium price.

I searched and found an inactive thread on this book in another sub-forum. People seem to think that the consumer demand provides the incentive for companies to produce these foods. No one if forcing people to eat these foods, right? I agree to a point. But the food industry advertises the sugariest arguably worst for you foods to young kids. And they are constantly tinkering with the recipes of the products. Ketchup – they learned that by taking out some of the tomato and adding sugar the amount of consumption goes up and the cost goes down. I am not saying that strong willed MFPers can’t use will-power and nutrition knowledge to battle this, but don’t fool yourselves – as a population we are being driven to obesity – on purpose – by a food industry intent on making the cheapest most appealing products, using advertising to make them sound healthy, and advertising them to those least capable of resisting.

What if the food industry actually created “addictive sugar” – a sugar molecule that was physically addictive? Would that be ok to market to kids? Haven’t they come pretty close already?