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

by Michael Moss

They’ve lobbied decision makers, meddled in our elections, and secreted their political money through intermediaries, and they’ll reach for this bag of tricks whenever they feel pressed. For the most part, however, the $1.5 trillion processed food industry rose to power through its relentless pursuit and manipulation of our instinctual desires.

On top of that, the typical breakfast cereal is made of corn and oats so heavily processed that our body converts this to sugar, too, and really fast. Thus, it’s not unreasonable to think of cereal as sugar in the whole.

Researchers who are studying our eating behavior with an eye toward breaking our compulsive habits say it happened sometime in the early 1980s, and seemingly overnight. Where once we refrained from spoiling our appetite for meals, it became socially acceptable to eat anything, anywhere, anytime. And when this transpired, we began snacking like never before.

This meant that new items could be designed to hit our emotions on several fronts at once, with variety acting as a unifying agent for higher sales. You can see this shift in strategy quite plainly on the front of the labels on processed food. Where before they went after just one of our emotions with just one catchphrase, the boxes and bags of our favorite brands in the grocery store began sporting a double wallop to the part of the brain that spurs us to act fast: “New Flavor!” and “Lower Price!”

Research has shown that when we get distracted while eating—as in watching TV or using our phones—we’ll eat more than we will eat when we’re focused on our food. It seems from this research that when we turn our attention away from the food to something as gripping as an electronic device, the brain, during that distraction, forgets that we were eating. When we come back to the food, we look at it as if it has changed. The food appears to us as something new. And this, in turn, affects our ability to defend against overeating.

It turns out that variety—or in this case, the way distraction mimics variety—disrupts our ability to put the brake on eating. Turning our attention to the TV or checking our phones while we eat can have the effect of turning back our inner clock on satiety, which delays the moment when we will feel full, and so we eat more.

Three years later, in 2017, we had some real-life numbers on the power of distraction. A survey by Ohio State University found that a third of Ohioans regularly watched TV during family meals, and those who did were far more likely to be obese. We eat what we remember, but as the food companies know, we eat more when we can be made to forget.

The technologists at Kraft, like those at other companies, spent their careers pursuing kids, teens, adults—anyone who might eat their products. They didn’t see this as nefarious. Their job was to maximize the appeal of their goods. In the labs, that meant working to hit the optimum bliss point for sweetness, the mouthfeel for fat, and the flavor burst of salt, as this chemistry was known in the industry. They engineered colors, textures, and smells to enhance the allure. They were joined on the marketing side by people with a deep appreciation for the role of psychology in purchase decisions. Kraft, after all, was a company, not a charity.

The sworn but clearly duplicitous testimony by a tobacco executive that people did not die from smoking. This was the stuff of class action lawyers’ dreams, where a single lawsuit could alter the fate of a powerful industry.

“Nonetheless, because both public health problems share the common elements of false consciousness (‘smoking/obesity is simply the result of the consumers’ free choices’) and a powerful industry whose interests are best served if consumers smoke/overeat, obesity control advocates continue to have much to learn from the decades-long struggle of the tobacco control movement to overcome those obstacles.”

It was called the Commonsense Consumption Act, and, like the federal legislation the association had sought, it barred anyone from bringing a lawsuit that sought to win personal injury damages on the claim that the food they ate caused them to lose control of their eating. The aim was to kill off any such litigation before it could reach the stage where the court, on behalf of a plaintiff, would order a company to turn over internal records. No cases, no evidence.

“But I think you have to look into the future here. The marketing practices by these big corporations are getting increasingly sophisticated, and the types of additives that go into the foods are going to be changing and evolving, and when you put something like this bill in the statutes, it takes away one consideration that the corporations put into the mix when they develop these products and think of the consequences of what they present.” In other words, without the risk of getting sued, the companies could push as hard as they wanted to crank up the allure of their products.

Starting in 2015, she scoured the food research literature, found 166 studies that had been supported by the industry, and discovered that they almost always worked out great for the companies. Whether the investigation was on soda, breakfast cereal, pork, or nuts, the findings were consistent: Only twelve—less than 10 percent—could be interpreted as being contrary to the funder’s interests.

Yach had been at the World Health Organization, where he waged a bruising campaign against the tobacco manufacturers and was hired by PepsiCo in 2007 to help lead its turn toward health. But he told me about an incident that foreshadowed his eventual departure from the company. Shortly after taking the job, he met with the outgoing chairman, Steve Reinemund, who stressed that the company’s mainline products that weren’t so healthy would nonetheless remain its prized source of revenue.

In this scenario, the soda would be so powerful that it would be tricking you into thinking you were burning at least some of its calories, which you weren’t. And this might explain why, as soda drinking started to climb in the 1980s, the rate of obesity followed, in a strikingly parallel curve on the charts. If we got hooked on soda that fooled our metabolism in this way, we would have given up more than our free will; we would have handed the processed food industry a key to overrun our biology.

Moreover, while these lower-calorie drinks were supposedly better for us, Small’s work suggested that their unnatural sweetness (from the added non-calorie sweeteners) was so confusing and mismatched with our biology that they might cause us to put on more body fat or develop conditions like type 2 diabetes.

But the science of nutrition is so fluid and uncertain that the strongest ideas out there today—even those written by experts—about what’s best to eat are just ideas. They’re untested by time, or the rigor of double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials. They might be right, or they might not. And if they do work, they won’t work for everyone.

A recent survey by the Mintel Group, a market researcher, found that with two in three Americans dieting today, three in four of these dieters say they believe they can attain their ideal body weight—if they just apply enough willpower and make sacrifices. That faith is terrific news for the dieting trade, Mintel said. “This puts marketers of diet products and services in a good position because dieters already believe that weight loss is possible,” said its report. Meaning, we’re really gullible.

Moreover, the number of people attending the Weight Watchers classes had grown dramatically to twenty-seven million, and they formed a ready-made customer base for the Foodways meals. Were Heinz to buy both the lower-calorie food and the programs of Weight Watchers, it would own the full spectrum of our eating habits.

Playing these angles all at once would be shrewder than if Philip Morris had cornered the market on nicotine patches. Or if Smirnoff bought Alcoholics Anonymous. But if anyone had concerns along those lines, they didn’t make them known.

The problem wasn’t Weight Watchers. The problem was processed food, and all that the manufacturers did to cause us to relinquish control of our eating habits. And the problem was us or, rather, the Ardipithecus ramidus in us. Her decision to stand and walk upright four million years ago changed the biology of our ancestors in ways that made it extremely difficult to recoup our healthy eating habits once we’d lost control.

For the vast majority of people, dieting just doesn’t work. It fails because of our physiology; the body plays a game of sabotage by lowering its metabolism or otherwise undercutting our efforts. It fails because life intervenes, with layoffs or new babies or sick parents. It fails because no amount of willpower can be sustained forever. And it fails because when that willpower is working for the dieter, the price that’s being paid is really high. Successful dieting ruins your relationship to eating, Mann said—unless you enjoy seeing all food as your enemy.

There was no apparent pattern to this. Thus, the genius in placing diet foods next to the regular ones. As we get inspired to start a new diet, and then get discouraged and quit, we can move back and forth between the products with just the slightest move of our hand.

As we’ve learned, our metabolism and body fat and hormones all work against our efforts to lose weight. So, when our dieting is aimed at losing weight, the answer would seem to be not as much as we’d like to think. Our biology doesn’t have to do much to erase the benefit of eating thirteen fewer calories.

Which brings us back to Michelle Obama. Her plea to the processed food manufacturers that they reformulate their products to reduce the harm they were doing to our health gave the companies an idea. They went from selling diet versions of their products to reformulating the main products themselves.

We’d gone from worrying about single issues like fat or calories to being wholly apprehensive about food that came in a package. Even the labels, whose information used to reassure us, now rang alarms—from the big print on the front where fun words like “The Cheesiest,” had turned ominous, to the fine print on the back where additives like acesulfame-K and titanium dioxide sounded downright diabolical.

Where before, the industry sought to deny our concerns in court and in the lab, and to delay our consciousness through the ruse of dieting, it would now play out the ruse of pretending to admit defeat. Like Philip Morris before it, the processed food industry would concede addiction and turn at least some of its focus toward easing our concern by making its addictive products less problematic.

As it turns out, they’re both right and both wrong. For people wanting to avoid overeating, either method can work pretty well. But within a year, their effectiveness tends to fade. At least that’s what the DiOGenes researchers saw when they looked at the research done on the low-fat and low-carb approaches.

The findings were encouraging. The participants with the higher protein and lower glycemic index did best. Unlike the other groupings, they were able to avoid regaining pounds and even continued to lose weight.

If one didn’t pay attention to the glycemic factor, which was hard to understand anyway (groceries aren’t labeled by how fast they enter the bloodstream), the results could be read as confirming what was already fast becoming the hottest new trend in processed food. Simply by adding some protein, a product could be made to seem better.

When people who are genetically predisposed to gaining weight were put on a diet of extra protein, it flopped: The protein didn’t help them control their cravings at all. Some of them even gained more weight.

He noticed that protein derived from plants seemed better than meat in causing the feeling of satiation. These plants—beans, nuts, and legumes—also have lots of fiber, he says, and so fiber might turn out to be the thing that was actually helping people regain control of their eating.

They’ve been hedging their bets on protein by also boosting their products with fiber. Fiber, like protein, conveys strength and fullness. There’s only one catch, for us: The companies have been adding twenty-six types of fibers to their products, from all manner of sources, presumably based on the lowest cost, and most of these won’t make us feel fuller or eat any less. The industry’s own research showed this. In an attempt to deal with this ruse, the FDA in 2018 said it would start requiring companies to come up with some research showing their particular fiber actually works before they’re allowed to list it as fiber in their product’s nutrition facts.

One pair of hormones—GLP-1 and PYY, for short—functions as the off switch when it comes to food. When either of these two chemicals flashes through the brain, they become part of the brain’s stop mechanism by triggering the neurology that makes us feel satiated.

But wait, hadn’t Florian said he could eat all he wanted and still not gain weight? That implied he was wolfing down sizable meals. The hormones put a more literal spin on his words. Maybe all he wanted wasn’t very much, thanks to GLP-1 and PYY.

When people who can’t stop themselves from gaining weight sit down to eat, their endocrine system responds in the exact opposite way. Their fullness hormones dry up and vanish. That leaves them eating and eating but never feeling full. Not only do they continue to want food more than the thin people, they also want food more than the average person whose hormones flow within the normal range. Without hormones to curb their cravings, something like Cheetos could drive them mad with desire, which leaves them extremely vulnerable to processed foods.

But even as scientists identified more genes that seemed to have some sort of a connection to addiction, a problem presented itself. The move toward overeating, as a society, happened suddenly, starting in the early 1980s. For our genes to have been responsible for that, there would have had to have been an alteration in those people who succumbed to obesity, and genes simply couldn’t change that fast. The transformation of our DNA is the stuff of evolution, which takes place over many generations.

In other words, the genes themselves don’t change quickly. But through the influence of the phenomenon known as epigenetics, the same genes can become more or less decipherable, and thus better or worse at doing their particular jobs. Time wasn’t a problem in this aspect of our DNA. Epigenetics can happen within one generation. And there is a world of things that can create an epigenetic effect on our genes, including the kinds and amount of food that our parents ate.

Campbell’s, in its own bid to win back our faith in processed food, invested $32 million in 2016 in just such a venture, a start-up called Habit that produces an eating plan based on a person’s vitals.

Neither vegetables nor whole grains nor cooking is central to this Nestlé venture. The participants in Japan are paying $600 a year for nutrient-fortified teas that are dispensed in capsules. Hitomi Kasuda, a forty-seven-year-old freelance writer and new user, said she looked forward to submitting her DNA to Nestlé for testing. “There’s probably a lot of things I don’t realize about my health that I can discover in a blood and genetics test,” she said. For now, she said, the Nestlé nutrient teas that she’s consuming four times a week have had at least one tangible benefit. They’ve made her feel better about not eating enough vegetables.

“If we can take the sugar in a soft drink, which is what, forty grams or so, and bring that down to five grams, and yet appreciate that as if it had forty grams, that would be a huge thing, revolutionary. It would literally translate into saving millions of lives.” Not to mention billions of dollars in processed food that’s being lost by the companies because fewer of us want their spaghetti sauce, their frozen meals, or their cereal, either—given how much sugar goes into their groceries and fast-food restaurant fare.

Cargill, Nestlé, Unilever, and the chemical firms that created new flavors for the processed food industry were busy filing patents or otherwise working on the neurology of our taste buds to enhance the sensations of taste, and not just for sugar. Products were coming onto the market that used this same concept to boost the brain’s perception of salt, so that less salt could be used in processed food, and research was under way to likewise trick our neurology into thinking we were getting more fat and its luscious mouthfeel than we were.

Thus far, these products have avoided federal scrutiny because they involve such minute quantities that they haven’t raised any red flags for toxicity, which is the Food and Drug Administration’s main concern: that we don’t get cancer from them.

Senomyx, in seeking permission to market its sweet taste enhancers, said it anticipated them being used at levels from one part per billion in baked goods, to two parts in soups and sauces, to five parts in snacks. Importantly, from a marketing standpoint, the FDA would also allow the food manufacturers to use these taste enhancers in their products without letting us know. They can be lumped together with other chemicals as “natural and artificial flavors” on the ingredient listing.

As primed as the sugar boosters are to start flooding our food supply, I couldn’t find any research on how we’ll respond biologically to them. Will the brain shrug? Or will it get mad, feel cheated, and fight back in some way?

Research by Susan Swithers, a professor of neuroscience and behavior at Purdue University, was raising the possibility that drinks and foods in which non-caloric sweeteners have been mixed with sugars might pose a special problem for us, in that we haven’t had enough time, on an evolutionary time scale, to develop a way to accurately sense or otherwise deal with the mismatch between the perception of calories and those that actually arrive in our gut. That could leave our metabolism a mess.

They added the most popular non-calorie sweetener, sucralose, to the food that their flies ate, a mixture of sugar and yeast. And the flies went bonkers. They couldn’t sleep. Moreover, they seemed to feel like they were starving, which caused them to eat more. It might make us feel less concerned about our addiction to processed food to hear what happened next. Despite eating more, the flies didn’t gain weight. But the explanation for this is equally disconcerting. They didn’t gain weight, the researchers surmise, because of another change to their behavior. The poor flies couldn’t sit still. They flew around and around, for days on end, their little wings going like hummingbirds, burning up all of the extra energy they got from eating more. The flies had become hyperactive, until the sucralose dosing was stopped, when the flies regained control of their behavior.

But if that added sweetener made eating better, as the industry says it is now trying to do, this test would suggest that things might be better only for the company making the additive. Or even worse, that we might go a little haywire, too, and feel starved like the flies, in which case the biggest beneficiary would be the makers of processed food.

Wrestling free of an addiction requires us to give up something that came to define our lives, and then fend off forever the myriad temptations that try to reel us back in. This only gets harder with eating, where enticement is the calculated business of those who make and sell processed food. They have nearly boundless resources in knowing our vulnerabilities.

We can make our own spaghetti sauce and snack on pistachios still in their shells. The time that we lose in this is time that gets put to work keeping our cravings in check. When we pay more attention to what we eat, the brake in our brain gets a better grip on our compulsions.