Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

by Michael Moss

“stomach share,” or the amount of digestive space that any one company’s brand can grab from the competition.

salt, which was processed in dozens of ways to maximize the jolt that taste buds would feel with the very first bite;

fats, which delivered the biggest loads of calories and worked more subtly in inducing people to overeat;

sugar, whose raw power in exciting the brain made it perhaps the most formidable ingredient of all, dictating the formulations of products from on...

“The transition of food to being an industrial product really has been a fundamental problem,”

“First, the actual processing has stripped away the nutritional value of the food. Most of the grains have been converted to starches. We have sugar in concentrated form, and many of the fats have been concentrated and then, worst of all, hydrogenated, which creates trans-fatty acids with very adverse effects on health.”

“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.”

“bliss point,” or the precise amount of sugar or fat or salt that will send consumers over the moon.

the ideal snack to a mathematical equation of taste and convenience—“P = A1T + A2C + A3U – B1$ – B2H – B3Q,” with the P standing for Purchase and the allure of fat and salt easily overcoming the H, or the public’s health concerns.

Scientists at Nestlé are currently fiddling with the distribution and shape of fat globules to affect their absorption rate and, as it’s known in the industry, their “mouthfeel.”

scientists are altering the physical shape of salt, pulverizing it into a fine powder to hit the taste buds faster and harder, improving what the company calls its “flavor burst.”

The sweetest component of simple sugar, fructose, has been crystallized into an additive that...

Scientists have also created enhancers that amplify the sweetness of sugar to two hundred ...

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 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.

“moreishness,” in which the early moments of eating—as in appetizers—were shown to be valuable in the pursuit of pleasure by actually making you hungrier still.

We don’t even have to eat sugar to feel its allure. Pizza will do, or any other refined starch, which the body converts to sugar—starting right in the mouth, with an enzyme called amylase.

“The faster the starch becomes sugar, the quicker our brain gets the reward for it,”

It’s sort of like if you drink alcohol really fast, you get drunk really fast. When you break down sugar really fast your body gets flooded with sugar more than it can handle, whereas with a whole grain it is more gradual and you can digest it in a more orderly fashion.”

With regular soda, both sexes gained weight: an average of nearly a pound and a half in just three weeks. At that rate, a person would put on 26 pounds in a year.

Grocery products have lots of attributes that make them attractive, chief among them color, smell, packaging, and taste. In the craft called optimization, food engineers alter these variables ever so slightly in making dozens and dozens of new versions, each just a bit different from the next. These are not new products to sell. They are created with the sole intent of finding the most perfect variation, which is divined by putting all these experimental versions to the test.

“They liked flavorful foods like turkey tetrazzini, but only at first; they quickly grew tired of them. On the other hand, mundane foods like white bread would never get them too excited, but they could eat lots and lots of it without feeling they’d had enough.”

This contradiction would come to be known as “sensory-specific satiety.”

the tendency for big distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which responds by making you feel fu...

With the resulting data he created graphs that, he noticed, looked like an inverted U. They showed that our liking of food rose as the amount of sugar was increased, but only to a point; after that peak, adding more sugar was not only a waste, it diminished the allure of the food.

hunger is a poor driver of cravings.

We rarely get in the situation where our body and brain are depleted of nutrients and are actually in need of replenishment. Rather, he discovered, we are driven to eat by other forces in our lives.

Some of these are emotional needs, while others reflect the pillars of processed food: first and foremost taste, followed...

As disparate as these pillars may seem, one ingredient—su...

the powerful sensory force that food scientists call “mouthfeel.” This is the way a product interacts with the mouth,

the physician who had invented the cereal flake, John Harvey Kellogg, was quite a stickler on sweets, running his cereal company from a sanitarium where he banned sugar altogether.

With financial backing from Goldman Sachs, General Foods began to acquire a string of the most popular processed foods in America: Jell-O, Kool-Aid, Log Cabin Syrup, the whole retinue of Oscar Mayer processed meats, Entenmann’s baked sweets, Hellmann’s mayo, Maxwell House coffee, Birdseye frozen foods, and Minute Tapioca, the sweet pudding that gave rise to Minute Rice, the parboiled phenomenon.

By 1985, when General Foods was purchased by Philip Morris, it had grown from an $18 million startup to a $9 billion industry leader. It had 56,000 employees, a research budget of $113 million, and hefty market shares in powdered soft drinks, cereals, coffee, lunch meats, hot dogs, and bacon.

“Today, consumer expectations are so high and the pace at which new products are introduced is so fast that Mrs. Homemaker usually can’t say what it is she really wants—until after some enterprising company creates it and she finds it in a retail store,

He figured out that adding sugar to the chow would keep the bacteria away even in moist conditions, as sugar acted like a binder to make the water inaccessible to the bacteria.

The idea of using sugar to ward off bacteria is now embedded in the production of many processed foods,

“Americanitis”—or the bloated, gaseous stomachache caused by the ailment otherwise known as dyspepsia.

health concerns arose over one of their pillar ingredients—salt, sugar, or fat—the solution of choice for the food manufacturers was the simplest: Just swap out the problem component for another that wasn’t, at the moment, as high on the list of concerns.

the fat-laden breakfast plate of the nineteenth century, vilified for upsetting the national stomach, was largely replaced by the sugary cereal bowl of the twentieth century,

obesity, which he called a “disease of civilization.”

desire to eat is controlled by the amount of glucose in the blood and by the brain’s hypothalamus, both of which in turn are greatly influenced by sugar.

food manufacturers now spend nearly twice as much money on advertising their cereals as they do on the ingredients that go into them.

Small children were so gullible, it said, that they couldn’t help but view commercials as informational programming. Not only that, they were unable to comprehend “the influence which television advertising exerts over them”—

There were 3,832 ads for mostly sugary cereals, 1,627 for candy and gum, 841 for cookies and crackers, 582 for fruit drinks, and 184 for cakes, pies, and other desserts. The total number of ads for unsweetened foods, like meat, or fish, or vegetable juice, on the other hand? Four.

Kellogg memo that summed up the bottom line on children’s advertising quite succinctly: “Television advertising of ready-to-eat cereals to children,” the memo said, “increases children’s consumption of these products.”

“sensory-specific satiety,” or the power of one overwhelming flavor to trigger the feeling of fullness,

“Sixty percent of supermarket purchase decisions are completely unplanned,”