Salt Sugar Fat

    Every year, the average American eats thirty-three pounds of cheese and seventy pounds of sugar. Every day, we ingest 8,500 milligrams of salt, double the recommended amount, almost none of which comes from the shakers on our table. It comes from processed food, an industry that hauls in $1 trillion in annual sales. In Salt Sugar Fat, Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Michael Moss shows how we ended up here. Featuring examples from Kraft, Coca-Cola, Lunchables, Frito-Lay, Nestlé, Oreos, Capri Sun, and many more, Moss’s explosive, empowering narrative is grounded in meticulous, eye-opening research. He takes us into labs where scientists calculate the “bliss point” of sugary beverages, unearths marketing techniques taken straight from tobacco company playbooks, and talks to concerned insiders who make startling confessions. Just as millions of “heavy users” are addicted to salt, sugar, and fat, so too are the companies that peddle them. You will never look at a nutrition label the same way again.

Quotes and thoughts while reading:

Again, I only have the kindle copy of this, so I will be using location numbers.

"As a culture, we've become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing. And we could make a claim that the toll taken on the public health by a poor diet rivals that taken by tobacco." (loc 160)

"The average American now consumes as much as thirty-three pounds of cheese a year... They've discovered that the brain lights up for sugar the same way it does for cocaine... in 1985 R. J. Reynolds bought Nabisco... and a few years later the world's largest cigarette maker, Philip Morris, became the world's largest food company by acquiring the two largest food manufacturers, General Foods and Kraft." (loc 314)

There was an interesting study where if you gave rats fatty food, no matter how fatty it was, their natural systems would tell them to stop at a certain point. When they added sugar into the fatty mix this biological stop sign was just blown past. They craved the sugar, and would just continue to eat and eat, putting on massive amounts of weight that they did not put on when the mixture was just high in fat.

"And yet, for more than three decades, federal officials in Washington have exempted sugar from the recommended maximum limits that they set for the other two pillars of processed foods, salt and fat. Nor are manufacturers required to disclose how much sugar they add to their products: The amounts they cite include the sugar that occurs naturally in food" (loc 676). Now, this has to have changed, or be incorrect in some way. There is further research needed.

"Howard Moskowitz... trained in Mathematics and experimental psychology, [he] runs a consulting firm in New York where he has established a long track record of triumphs in consumer goods..." (loc 734). The tactics he uses are honestly fascinating, and should be read into by everyone. When you look at the grocery stores, the amount of varied brands and flavors, and things to choose from can be attributed mostly to Howard. He fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks about making you happy.

"Typically, the dough that forms the cereal is first extruded from oat flour and cornstarch and then shot by a cannon-like machine into a room sized bin where a sudden drop in pressure causes the heated mixture in the dough to turn into steam, which cooks and puffs the dough into cereal." (loc 1147) Absolutely amazing!

"Convenience is the great additive which must be designed, built in, combined, blended, interwoven, injected, inserted, or otherwise added to or incorporated in products or services if they are to satisfy today's demanding public. It is the new and controlling denominator of consumer acceptance or demand." (loc 1250) Man, maybe this is why people want the simple way out of things, because it is what we have been fed for the past 40 years. Guh.

"we have... better things to do with our time than mixing, blending, sorting, trimming, measuring, cooking, serving, and all the other actions that have gone into the routine of living." (loc 1260)

I think it is fascinating to consider the role the Home Ec played in teaching people to make food at home, to avoid processed foods, and how it is actually cheaper to do this. I wish this was a focus again, and I am hopeful that in the future it will be a focus again.

"The problem, as growing numbers of nutritionists see it, is not the calories in soda, though calories are ultimately what causes us to gain weight. Rather, it's their form: Research suggests that our bodies are less aware of excessive intake when the calories are liquid." (loc 1857)

There is an interesting basis of targeting that Coke and the food companies take on. They target their heaviest users(not weight heavy, but units of consumption) to market to them and cause them to consume more, or at least to maintain their levels. The rationale follows that if you lose one heavy user, it will take many many "low velocity" users to make up for that loss. So you get targeted ads at the very people who probably need to drink less of the product. It seems rather vicious.

"Like Kool-Aid and Tang, Capri Sun was sweetened mainly by high-fructose corn syrup, but it also now contained juice concentrate, which allowed the drink's label to boast, for the first time, 'Natural fruit drink. No artificial ingredients'. This was a huge selling point for moms who, as a result, felt more comfortable adding the drink to their kids' school lunches and snacks." (loc 2432) Damn, what a sneaky, pull the wool over your eyes type of deal. Juice concentrate has no nutritional benefit over sugar, none what-so-ever. Just a fancy name, to trick people into conjuring up an image of fruits and healthy eating.

"Some of Capri Sun's flavors, in fact, were higher in sugar than soda. Wild Cherry, for instance, had 28 grams of sugar - more than six teaspoons - in each 6.76-ounce pouch. Coke, in its larger 12-ounce can, has 39 grams - 28 percent less per ounce." (loc 2442)

"If sugar is the methamphetamine of processed food ingredients, with its high-speed, blunt assault on our brains, then fat is the opiate, a smooth operator whose effects are less obvious but no less powerful." (loc 2578)

On loc 3214 they talk about the Oscar Mayer talent search. Oh man, we sure were roped into that one.

I kept getting this sense, that the government should be here to protect its citizens, but it seems like they continue to protect the big lobbying groups, and not the mass of people who are being hurt by the practices in play. If it is so hard for the food industry to make processed food that is low in sugar and fat, then maybe we shouldn't have processed food. Isn't the health and well-being of our citizens more important than the paychecks for industry fat-cats?

We should definitely list the nutrition facts for the entire package, not serving size, because really who follows that. People sit down with a bag of chips, which might have 15 servings, but eat the entire things in one go. Per unit measurement is hard for the consumer to read and understand quickly, which is precisely what the food industry wants, but the government should step in to protect its citizens.
"Serious technical constraints limit the ability to dramatically reduce sodium concentrations while maintaining consumer acceptability that is essential to sustain such products in the marketplace," Kellogg implored. (loc 4697) Then honestly, get that shit out of the marketplace, and come up with something better.

"In 2009, Cargill hired celebrity chef Alton Brown as its spokesperson for Diamond Crystal, and in the videos he made for the company, he enthuses profusely about sprinkling this salt on all manner of foods, even chocolate cookies, fruit, and ice cream." (loc 4751) Gah, I feel so betrayed! Alton, how could you? Were you always on the Cargill paycheck, even when you were on Good Eats! praising the goodness of kosher salt? Were you just a shill?

"Finally, we tasted a vegetable beef soup in which the sodium had been lowered, without any adjustment in spicing. It didn't taste just 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." (loc 4972)

"'It's called vanishing caloric density,' Witherly said. 'If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there's no calories in it, and like popcorn, you can just keep eating it forever.' The only thing more spectacular than Cheetos, he said, was another Frito-Lay creation - the Doritos 3D, a puffy spherical version of the flat chip: 'The added dimensions increases the surprise factor when you take a bite,' he said. And surprise is a very good thing for increasing consumption." (loc 5292) Oh man, I remember loving Doritos 3D! And it seems, for reasons unbeknownst to me.

"'We're hooked on inexpensive food, just like we're hooked on cheap energy,' said James Behnke, the former Pillsbury executive. 'The real questions is this price sensitivity and, unfortunately, the growing disparity of income between the haves and have-nots. It costs more money to eat fresher, healthier foods. And so, there is a huge economic issue involved in the obesity problem. It falls most heavily on those who have the fewest resources and probably the least understanding or knowledge of what they are doing.'"(loc 5598)