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

by Michael Moss

An analysis from the U.S. surgeon general, which Hirsch cited in his court papers, estimated that obesity alone caused three hundred thousand premature deaths each year.

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.

food, in some ways, can be even more addictive than alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs.

Measured in milliseconds, and the power to addict, nothing is faster than processed food in rousing the brain.

Addiction is also deeply enmeshed with memory, and the memories we create for food are typically stronger and longer lasting than any other substance.

None of the biology that binds us to food, not even the drive to overeat, used to matter. 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.

“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.”

The food manufacturers have more than sixty types of sugar that they’ve added to things that didn’t used to be sweet, thereby creating in us the expectation that everything should be cloying.

Junk food morphed into junk diets, and in an even bolder move, the processed food industry has filled the grocery store with diet foods that are hardly distinguishable from the regular products that got us into trouble in the first place.

The dopamine interacting with the neurons is what actually causes the change in our feelings and mood. When we see, smell, or merely think about chocolate cake, it’s the dopamine that makes us want a slice as much as the sugar and butter in the cake. This is a tool for our survival. We need to eat in order to live, and dopamine is there to motivate us to eat.

The ability of a substance to excite the brain and set in motion the behavior that leads us to act compulsively is in large part a matter of how fast the substance reaches the brain.

The phenomenal success of processed food is owed in large part to the speed that marks its every aspect.

The smoke from cigarettes takes ten seconds to stir the brain, but a touch of sugar on the tongue will do so in a little more than half a second, or six hundred milliseconds, to be precise. That’s nearly twenty times faster than cigarettes.

Glucose can start arriving in the blood within ten minutes of eating something, which is as fast as snorted cocaine.

It hasn’t gotten much attention, but new research suggests that the faster that food hits our bloodstream, the more sudden the eventual drop in our blood sugar will be, which in turn prods the brain into making more dopamine that calls upon us to look for more food.

when sugar gets combined with fat, the brain gets more aroused than it does by either of these two ingredients alone.

fat and sugar are rarely found together in nature. Even breast milk is, on average, just 3.5 percent fat and 7 percent sugar.

The typical processed snack food has close to 24 percent fat and 57 percent sugar.

a recent examination found that kids ages two to eleven are still watching three hours and nineteen minutes a day, and during that time they’ll see twenty-three ads for food that is high in sugar and fat.

This bears repeating: We smell with our mouth.

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 the world of the industry’s devising, our drive to seek out and relish variety has turned into trouble for us.

Indeed, when it comes to food, our overarching goal has been getting more fuel for the least amount of work.

But this system—with the stomach acting as both brake and accelerator on our appetite—was built for our ancestors. They’d chew some tubers, or meat, thanks to the stomach telling their brain that this was good. Then they’d eventually stop, short of busting their gut, thanks to the stomach telling the brain that they’d had enough. That happens to us, too, when we eat the same kinds of food as they did: whole grains, fibrous vegetables, things with lots of water in them.

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.

these products don’t have much in the way of the things that will physically stretch the stomach and prompt it to signal the brain to put on the brake: fiber and water. By the time the gut sends the signal for us to stop, it’s way too late.

“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.”

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 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.

Whereas the percentage of men ages 25 to 55 who worked outside the home stayed fairly steady at 90 percent, this rate for women shot up from about 37 percent in 1950 to more than 80 percent today.

as much as three-fourths of the items in the grocery store came to have added sweeteners.

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.

The supermarket went from having six thousand items in 1980 to twelve thousand items in 1990 to an average of thirty-three thousand items today.

Three-fourths of the groceries we buy, as measured in calories, are now processed, with most of this classified as highly processed food.

Chicken McNuggets, for instance, Sweet wrote in his decision, might seem like a healthier choice than a burger, given poultry’s lean reputation. But McNuggets had twice the fat per ounce as a burger.

Among the processed food companies, PepsiCo is not just the largest; its budget is that of a modest-sized republic.

Nestlé, which makes chocolate bars and Hot Pockets, developed a line of lower-calorie meals called Lean Cuisine

The difference between the diet versions of processed food and the full-fare thing can be surprisingly small. A Lean Pockets Pepperoni Pizza has 281 calories; that’s only 30 fewer than the Hot Pockets version at 310.

Astrup said protein might have gotten too much credit in the earlier research. 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 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 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.

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.

As Hager points out, people are vulnerable to the changing efficiency of their genes only if there is something to exploit that vulnerability, which, in the case of obesity, is the sudden supply of cheap, convenient, and yummy food.

the industry’s effort to help us contain our craving for sugar was fixed on inventing new chemicals that tasted sweet but had none of the harmful calories of sugar. In this pursuit, the food technologists came up with saccharine, aspartame, sucralose, and, most recently, stevia.

Paul Breslin, who is immersed in the biology of our taste as a professor of nutrition with Rutgers University and a researcher with the Monell Chemical Senses Center, points to our ancestry in this. “Our species is an ape, which is essentially a frugivore. They get 80 percent of their calories from fruit, which is essentially sugar. So, as apes, we are basically sugar freaks, and when you give people diet sweeteners, the body senses that there’s no sugar and it’s not happy with that.”

We still don’t know what happens when the brain gets a signal from the taste buds that we’re consuming lots of sugar, and then that sugar doesn’t arrive in our gut, because it wasn’t there to begin with, or at least not in the amounts that the taste buds thought it was.

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.

To obsess about food—even if the obsession is aimed at controlling what we eat—is just another spot on the spectrum of disordered eating.