Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions

by Michael Moss

The larger sizes hardly cost any more than the small. Once she did the math, she ditched the Happy Meal for the Number Two: a pair of burgers for nearly the price of one. The same logic worked for the sodas and fries; getting the giant size only made sense.

By middle school, McDonald’s had become the first meal of Bradley’s day. She’d skip breakfast and lunch, but more than make up for it when school let out. She’d work the whole menu board, adding the biggest fries, the biggest shake, and a couple of pies to the twin burgers, and she’d double it all, intending—yet sometimes failing—to give the second meal to a friend or her youngest brother.

She sensed that there was something going on inside her body to deepen her appetite, but she couldn’t nail down just what that might be. She felt passionate about food, but in a tawdry kind of way: an “affair,” as she called it.

Bradley’s relationship to food was compelling, too, for how it changed over time. Where, as a young girl, eating could be pure joy—“I’d do a little shake when I ate”—a darkness had set in by the time she entered high school. She noticed how often she ate when she felt troubled.

A few years earlier, in 1997, Banzhaf had helped engineer the legal assault that brought the tobacco industry to its knees. Rather than relying on individuals to sue the cigarette manufacturers for damaging their health, the new strategy involved states bringing lawsuits against the manufacturers for wrecking the budgets of the health agencies that had to care for all the sick smokers. This was a stroke of genius that framed the issue in dollars and cents instead of individual moral judgments, and in 1998, the tobacco companies caved.

The idea came straight from the tobacco-case playbook. It argued that people who ate at McDonald’s, like those who smoked cigarettes, were hampered in their decision making. They didn’t have full control in evaluating the risks—in saying no to another bite or sip—because there was more to the product than met the eye.

Hirsch’s claim on behalf of Bradley and the other children alleged that McDonald’s sold products that weren’t just high in salt, sugar, fat, and cholesterol. They were also “physically or psychologically addictive and/or addictive in nature.”

Most of us are finding ourselves unsettled by food in one way or another; we’re feeling not quite in control of our eating, or we’re taxed by the effort it takes to exert that control; we’re anxious that our appetites are doing us more harm than good, or we sense a disconnect between what we think we want and what our bodies need; we’re feeling the loss of the beauty, resonance, and rituals of food as it was, before we fell so hard for the convenience and other allures of the highly processed.

Over the past four decades, salt, sugar, and fat had enabled the industries to engineer products that were immensely alluring. Brilliant marketing campaigns pushed the emotional buttons that convinced us to eat when we weren’t even hungry. Yet the book tried to end on a hopeful note. Knowing all that the companies did to prop up their unwholesome products, I argued, was oddly empowering. We could use that insight to make better choices because, ultimately, we were the ones deciding what to buy and how much to eat.

For a substance to be considered addictive, we don’t all have to fall hard for it. There are casual users of heroin, and there are people who can stop at a handful of potato chips. Addiction is a spectrum, with the rest of us landing somewhere between being mildly affected and fully ensnared.

Indeed, for the first four million years of our existence, it was our addiction to food that enabled us to thrive as a species. It’s only now, for the past forty years, that being hooked on food is causing us so much harm. What happened? The food is what happened. Or, as one of the evolutionary biologists who are probing this aspect of our eating habits put it, “It’s not so much that food is addictive, but rather that we by nature are drawn to eating, and the companies changed the food.”

In this same vein, food manufacturers have scrambled to control the science that might shed crucial light on the addictiveness of their products, going so far as to halt the research of one celebrated scientist when her results turned damning.

This phenomenon helped form the bulwark of Philip Morris’s defense against efforts to hold the company accountable for smoking-related deaths. As dangerous as cigarettes might be to one’s health, how could they be called addictive if millions of people used them so casually?

But the company had another compelling reason to embrace addiction. It was positioning itself to make money from the public’s turn against its product. Philip Morris already had plans to develop alternatives to cigarettes, like the smokeless electronic cigarette. In the end, its product failed to catch on like Juul, the e-cigarette introduced by PAX Labs in 2015 that just three years later hit $1 billion in sales.

For heroin, 23 percent of the people who tried it went on to become dependent on the drug. Cocaine came in at a 17 percent risk for addiction. Alcohol was logged at 15 percent, stimulants like amphetamine 11 percent, cannabis 9 percent, and near the bottom were psychedelics like LSD, at a 5 percent risk of getting hooked. The riskiest substance for addiction? Tobacco, which hit 32 percent. Advocates of legalizing drugs might disagree, but this higher rate of dependency for tobacco may be the result of cigarettes—like food—being so much easier to obtain and use than illicit drugs.

But as Gearhardt points out, we can gain large sums of weight quite incrementally, by eating a mere extra couple of hundred calories a day, or by overindulging only during the year-end holidays, so that our behavior is hardly at issue.

Women came in misusing drugs while pregnant, despite being told their child would be born with the tremors, diarrhea, and vomiting of an addict. Asking them why they did that was futile. They wouldn’t know, and if they did, they wouldn’t be inclined to share that insight.

The images produced by these food trials were startling in another respect: They were hardly distinguishable from those of the brain on cocaine. The same key parts of the brain lit up in vivid reds and yellows. It didn’t seem to matter whether the person was getting a stimulant or a cheeseburger. In both cases, the brain sensed that something good was happening, and reacted with the same response: Please give me more.

It acts like a regulator, gathering updates on matters like the body’s temperature, blood pressure, and calories consumed, and it makes the necessary adjustments to keep the body on a steady keel. In doing so, it guides the behaviors that are most essential to our survival: the four Fs—fighting, fleeing, fornicating, and feeding.

To articulate the state of being that dopamine puts us in, Wise settled for the words “pleasure, euphoria, yumminess,” which led to dopamine being associated with the feeling of joy. Some dubbed it “the pleasure juice,” and this view of dopamine as our reward for doing things the brain wants us to do has stuck in our common language.

Why would we eat an Oreo if we didn’t like its taste? But before there can be liking, something must cause us to act. Before you go into the bag to pull a cookie out, and bite into the chocolate wafer and creamy filling, something must cause you to initially reach for and grab that Oreo. The emotion that propels this act is desire. And the brain chemical behind this emotion? Dopamine.

When the go brain gets the advantage, as through a surge in dopamine, it can have us acting on an impulse before the stop brain even wakes up to the situation. At the same time, the stop brain is vulnerable to innumerable influences that can keep it from stirring, irrespective of how powerful the go brain is. The stop brain needs information, for instance, in order to sense that there might be trouble, and so anything that keeps us from collecting that information will put the stop brain to sleep.

Our perception matters as much as the object itself, and our perception is the prize in the constant tug-of-war between our go and stop brains. Depending on which part has the upper hand, the brain can turn something we love into something we hate. It can turn hunger into aversion. Lust into fear.

trigeminal nerve and turns that into a signal it whisks to the brain. Through this nerve, or the taste buds, the effect is the same: The signal alerts and excites the brain to be ready and eager to eat. Six hundred milliseconds from the first lick of the ice cream to the very strong impulse to lick more.

Many of us would like to have the kind of food memories that Wolfert had before her affliction: of traipsing through Morocco in search of the best zegzaw (a type of baby broccoli) or sitting down to a dried fava and meat confit in the Rif Mountains. But thanks to our food culture and upbringing, the strongest food memories for most of us tend to be of junk.

Psychology refers to this as arousal, or how excited the brain gets by incoming information. And when it comes to food? There’s nothing quite like sugar to arouse the brain. If you hand a child an eight-ounce glass of water, a sugar bowl, and a spoon, and tell them to make the water perfectly sweet for themselves, they will add an average of eleven heaping teaspoons of sugar into the glass. That syrupy concoction is sweeter than soda—nearly twice the sweetness that adults prefer—and their liking of it is deeply rooted in our biology.

As we grow, we often end up spurning the healthiest things to eat. Our first inclination is to shirk from acerbic (like broccoli), bitter (spinach), or sour (yogurt) notes when we’re young, given that those tastes in nature signal toxins or spoilage. And it’s only through repetition—deepening those memory channels—that we’ll come to tolerate these flavors.

Research has found that when sugar gets combined with fat, the brain gets more aroused than it does by either of these two ingredients alone. I’d heard this first from technologists who design new products and formulas for processed food companies, who knew that the brain gets most aroused by the foods that promise the greatest reward.

Slowing down and chewing our food leisurely allows the hippocampus to absorb the information from that eating experience and to learn.

By contrast, when we do things by rote, or by habit, as in eating a candy bar while staring at a computer, this mode of eating shows up in a part of the brain called the striatum, Latin for striped, because it has bands of white and gray matter.

only those snacks that had sugar and fat had enough arousal in them to fire up the striatum, where habit memory lives. It’s here, in this part of the brain, where restraint and free will disappear, indicating that sugar and fat, together, are extremely difficult to exert control over. When our behavior gets repetitive, this pair is the hardest to quit.

“Addicted individuals are not happy,” he says. “They are flipping miserable.” We eat what we remember, but also, we eat to forget. In time, however, the repetitive nature of addiction can morph these two pursuits—seeking pleasure and seeking relief—into a dismal loop that’s really hard to break. The brain, you’ll remember, has its own numbing device: endorphins, the hormone responsible for the feeling known as “runner’s high.”

Because addictive substances also cause endorphins to flood the brain, researchers suggest that those among us who are struggling with trauma or other forms of mental illness might be turning to alcohol or food to replace those hormones and experience anew the comforting feeling they generate. We eat to forget, then we eat for relief.

Their tools included the electroencephalogram, or EEG, which physicians use to analyze the brain’s electrical patterns in diagnosing head injuries, seizures, and other problems. But the advertising researchers were using this device to pinpoint the moment when our emotions make us vulnerable to persuasion and branding. They’d also repurposed the fMRI brain scanner to unlock the secrets of cravings and compulsive behavior, but for the advantage of advertisers, not addiction research.

The key to creating strong memories in consumers in a commercial or marketing campaign was to show the brand or the product being sold at the precise moment when our emotions are running high. The timing was everything,

But after watching the ad, the memory of the actual juice was supplanted by the memory of the ad. One of the students exulted: “I thought it tasted real sweet. It quenched my thirst. Refreshing. It would be a nice eye-opener in the morning. It made me want more.”

The scans changed for those who’d become overweight. They continued to like the milkshake about as much as they previously had, and in some cases, even a bit less. But during the anticipation phase, when they were just shown pictures of the shake, the scans revealed that they wanted the milkshake more than they previously had, and more than those who hadn’t gained weight. The weight they put on related to an increase in their desire, and thus made it harder for them to apply the brake that the other subjects used to avoid overeating.

Whatever the initial reason for going bipedal, the descendants of Ardi who took the human track continued to evolve in ways that had profound effects on their body and habits, including their relationship with food. A Ukrainian American geneticist and biologist, Theodosius Dobzhansky, coined the saying, in 1973, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”

Foraging aggressively, moving from berries to roots to meat and back to fruit, better ensured that they got what they needed in the way of vitamins and minerals to thrive. And the best way to encourage that kind of restlessness was for them to get bored with eating the same old thing. We’ve inherited this boredom trait, referred to by food scientists as sensory specific satiety. It’s a trip signal in our brain, through which we get the feeling of being full when we have too much of one taste or smell or flavor.

In human behavior, this came to be known as the smorgasbord effect. Ardi’s move to walk upright, and the compelling world of smell and variety that opened up for us, makes it difficult for us to say no when we’re presented with food that’s even just slightly different from what we just ate.

The big break to this tedium came with fire. Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard University, believes that cooking began as early as two million years ago, about the time when a descendant of Ardi’s named Homo erectus appeared on the scene. Cooking made fruits, tubers, and meat more digestible, which cut down on the energy hominids had to spend getting fuel.

When it came to getting more fuel at less cost, our ancestors also learned to privilege high-calorie foods like nuts over low-calorie foods like leaves. To do this, the human body developed the ability to tell how many calories a food has, which in turn guides how much we like it, want it, and eat of it.

The foods they bid the most for were the highest-calorie options, and scans confirmed that foods with more calories created a greater response in the reward pathways of their brains.

Take two identical glasses, one filled with plain water and the other with water and maltodextrin, and then ask people which they like better. It seems absurd. Both taste like water. But after they’ve drunk from the glasses, and the stomach has enough time to evaluate them, most of time they will choose the glass with the maltodextrin as the one they like better.

But increasingly, the nutritionists who help set the agenda on public health have begun referring to the calorie loads in processed food—what they call energy density—as the aspect we should be most wary of.

stop, it’s way too late. In those minutes before the stomach can throw on the brake, we’ve already consumed more fuel than our body can use at the moment. And, of course, what we don’t use from that fuel doesn’t get thrown out. We store it as body fat.

“It’s not so much that food is addictive, but rather that we by nature are drawn to eating, and the companies have changed the food.”

At the behest of the processed food industry, the flavor houses also make scents that mimic the char on meat for a tastier veggie burger, scents that stay dormant in a box until water is added, and scents that mask the undesirable smells that can arise in the making of processed foods. These potions are the unsung champions of modern-day food that comes packaged and able to sit on a shelf for months at a time without going bad, and they are, by design, quite secretive.

In deference to the food manufacturers, federal regulators for the most part don’t require the chemical compounds used in pumpkin spice or any other flavoring to be listed among the ingredients on product labels. Rather, they’re clumped together under the vague category “natural and artificial flavors.”

The volatiles from these compounds strike the olfactory bulb with the singular goal of arousing our appetite. Vanillin, the synthetic version of natural vanilla, is arguably the most seductive of these. The food manufacturers add vanillin to more than eighteen thousand products, including things that are loved by people who don’t even think they love the flavor of vanilla, like chocolate ice cream (the most popular flavor of ice cream, after—you guessed it—plain vanilla).