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

by Michael Moss

As a leader in producing both cigarettes and mega brands of processed food, the manufacturing giant Philip Morris was, one could argue, intimate with addiction. In 2000, its CEO was pressed to define the word, and while the context was smoking, the gem he came up with could apply to the company’s groceries just as well: “a repetitive behavior that some people find difficult to quit.” The word some in that definition is key. 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.

But one hallmark of addiction is the speed with which substances hit the brain, and this puts the term fast food in a new light. Measured in milliseconds, and the power to addict, nothing is faster than processed food in rousing the brain.

In their rise to power, the processed food companies have wielded salt, sugar, and fat not just in pursuing profits through the cheapest means of production. Theirs has been a concerted effort to reach the primeval zones of our brain where we act by instinct rather than rationalization.

But the most notable thing about Parrish’s smoking was how often he didn’t. He didn’t smoke at home. He didn’t smoke on weekends. Now and then, he would light up in a bar, but outside of the company’s offices, he felt no compulsion to smoke. Which seemed, at the time, to contradict the idea that cigarettes were addictive. He was not alone in this. Surveys found that one in five smokers had five or fewer cigarettes a day; some even skipped days altogether. 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 among experts, the appraisal of addiction was shifting. Medical, health, and research groups were all moving toward a much more inclusive characterization. It de-emphasized the chemicals themselves, so that the relative greater strength of, say, heroin to nicotine was less of an issue. The new definition focused instead on the wide variation in how people respond to drugs. For a substance to be considered addictive, it no longer had to wreck the lives of every user. It was enough that only some people got badly hooked. In

“Well, what’s your definition of addiction?” the CEO was asked. “My definition of addiction is a repetitive behavior that some people find difficult to quit.”

But by 1808, the American physician Benjamin Rush was promoting the view that habitual drunkenness was an affliction, with abstinence being the only cure.

In 1965, the head of pharmacology at the World Health Organization complained, “It has become impossible in practice, and is scientifically unsound, to maintain a single definition for all forms of drug addiction and/or habituation.” The organization eventually stopped using the term altogether, replacing it with the word dependency. The catalyst for this change was a better understanding of the narcotics and other drugs we came to use recreationally or abuse. They were not nearly as powerful as they were commonly portrayed. Or rather, not uniformly so. Cocaine, for instance, typically causes no physical discomfort when its usage is stopped. There may be intense psychic pain, including depression and severe cravings, but there is none of the body-wrenching havoc that withdrawal from barbiturates causes. Yet cocaine does create tolerance, propelling some users to take more and more for the same effect. Cannabis, in turn, does not cause significant amounts of tolerance, but in extreme cases stopping its use can trigger irritability and restlessness.

In 1964, a young psychiatrist named Fred Glaser joined the team for a two-year stint and came away startled by what he saw and heard. By and large, Glaser’s patients defied the government’s one-size-fits-all portrayal of drug abusers. Some were poor and undereducated, and their environment seemed to have as much to do with their use of heroin as did the drug. In his therapy sessions with patients, Glaser would ask what got them started, and one eighteen-year-old girl’s answer was so matter-of-fact in pointing out the inevitability of this that it astonished him. “Well, doctor,” she told him, “when you got to be my age, in my neighborhood—that was what you did.”

On the other hand, one in five beds was occupied by a banker, lawyer, minister, or other white-collar professional, and some of the patients were themselves doctors or nurses, having dipped into their own medical bags. They were drawn to heroin notwithstanding the risks that using the drug illegally posed to their career and family life. Regardless of their background, most didn’t start using drugs for fun. They tended to have some sort of problem or pain, physical or emotional, that the drug was meant to resolve. Moreover, the initial source of that drug often wasn’t a dope dealer sitting on a park bench, but a doctor prescribing medication. Glaser came to see his own profession as a root cause of the heroin epidemic—a view with just as much currency today.

Then there was the matter of getting clean. To be sure, nine in ten of the Narcotic Farm patients had severe trouble with this. As soon as they left the facility, they’d start using again, sometimes at a bar right outside the front gate. The rate of relapse was so severe and disappointing that it led to the facility’s closure in the late 1970s for failing its core mission as a treatment center. But, as in all other areas of addiction, there were glaring exceptions. Some patients were able to quit without much in the way of exertion or willpower. This came to be known as natural recovery. A striking example of this played out during and after the Vietnam War. Most members of the U.S. military who served in Vietnam had the opportunity to use heroin there, but even among those who had become addicted, six in ten stopped using the drug when they got back home, according to a 1980 analysis done by a scientist who had worked at the Narcotic Farm, suggesting that availability was as important as the drug itself in addiction.

“Addiction is a very complex behavior that’s not determined by any one thing,” Glaser told me. “It’s not determined by the drug. It’s not determined by the makeup of the individual. It’s not determined by the society in which they find themselves. It’s not determined by the economics of the situation. It’s a whole bunch of intersecting factors, in some cases more one than the other.”

Anthony summed up his work for a 2002 publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. This data represents averages, not any one person’s risk, but the numbers are still startling. 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.

In this, too, there’s a need for some clarification. How much trouble are we talking about? And how hard must it be to put on the brakes for us to be considered addicted? Having to say no to an extra helping of strawberry shortcake might not be any fun, yet, for many of us, it’s not all that difficult, either, and thus would hardly qualify as an addiction. But I’ve met people who can’t stop themselves after having just a taste of sugar. They rush to the store for more sweets and then trash their car with empty wrappers as they binge on the drive home, with a compulsion so strong that they are hardly even aware of what they’re doing. What kinds of disordered behavior fall between those two extremes? And where, on that spectrum, does our loss of control reach the threshold of being defined as addiction?

compilation of these surveys that was representative of the general population and found that 15 percent of the people met the criteria for being addicted. Moreover, most of these people fell onto the hard end of the spectrum, being severely addicted. At that rate, we’re getting into trouble with food to roughly the same degree as we’re getting into trouble with alcohol and some types of drugs. Throw in the broader disorder of overeating, as characterized by obesity, and food surpasses those drugs and alcohol as a substance with which we lose control.

neurological basis of addiction. In one notable experiment involving drugs, they demonstrated that speed mattered. The faster a substance got into the bloodstream and then the brain, the stronger its powers of seduction, which, as we’ll see later in this book, has huge implications for food and addiction.

But these drugs have reason to be so forceful in hitting the brain, Volkow said when I interviewed her at the drug abuse institute in Bethesda, Maryland. They need to get the brain really excited in order to override our concern that abusing drugs is too dangerous. If we obtain the drugs illegally, we run the risk of being arrested or getting a batch that is so strongly concentrated or contaminated it will kill us. In order to surmount these sizable risks, drugs have to maximize the initial cravings, and then follow that up with some exceptionally great feelings of pleasure as a reward, or we wouldn’t bother with them. By contrast, processed food is a shoo-in to get us to pounce. It’s inexpensive, fast, widely available, and generally safe, at least in terms of its immediate effect on our health and social well-being. We tend not to think about the long-term consequences. It doesn’t have to shock the brain to get us to eat. A well-placed murmur suffices. The other thing that food has going for it is the power of repetition.

With food being everywhere, and within easy reach, we’ll reach for it again whether or not we are actually hungry, having been conditioned by the repetitive nature of that act. Volkow, who loves chocolate, says it’s the vending machine that trips her up. If she’s happily busy with her work, she’ll walk on by. But throw in some stress, and the need for a little distraction, and she’ll grab a Hershey’s bar. “There’s a point where we’re all going to succumb to temptation,” she said.

The past four decades have seen soaring numbers of people put on so much weight that it compromises their health and well-being. Defined as thirty-five or more excess pounds for a person of average height, obesity began to surge in the late 1970s—climbing from 15 percent to 40 percent.

The U.S. surgeon general has estimated that obesity causes three hundred thousand premature deaths every year, with annual healthcare costs that now top $300 billion.

In pointing to the mind, not the stomach, their report highlights an important truth about food. For any of us who struggle with eating—whether that takes the shape of obesity, anorexia, type 2 diabetes, or just the unsettled feeling that the drive-thru or the microwave oven has become a bigger part of our lives than we want it to be—the digestive tract is but a piece of the puzzle. There is another powerful part of our anatomy that moves faster than lightning and compels us to eat, even when doing so might cause us harm. As one bariatric patient explained, by way of rebuke: “They didn’t operate on my brain.”

One of the contradictions of addiction is that addicts often end up liking a substance less and less, and yet they feel more and more desire to seek it out. The addiction becomes all about the desire, with the hunger forever left unsatisfied.

The processed food industry doesn’t speak in terms of boosting the dopamine in our heads, but it knows that the more excited we get, the more we will buy. That’s why its packages are adorned with neon-bright colors, and its labels exclaim “New!” and “Improved!” and “Limited Time Offer!”

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. For example, the expression “mindless eating” is off the mark. When we polish off a whole bag of chips while, say, working on a computer, and don’t even realize we’ve done that until we notice our hand is searching around a bag that is now empty, our go brain in fact has been working feverishly behind the scenes. It’s just the stop brain that’s been checked out, put to sleep by our preoccupation with the computer.

Speed is a key reason that tobacco is as likely to hook you as is heroin, because the risk of addiction is as much about the method of delivery as it is the substance being imbibed. Draw on a cigarette, and the smoke will carry the nicotine from your mouth to the blood in your lungs to your brain in ten seconds. That’s ten seconds from feeling the desire to smoke—thanks to dopamine—to feeling the full reward of that puff on the cigarette, thanks to your homemade opioids.

In her research at Brookhaven, Nora Volkow was one of the first to observe that the faster something reaches the brain, the greater the brain’s response. Science is still sorting out the precise reason for this reaction. One school of thought is that speed compels the brain to boost the intensity of the subsequent reward that we get,

is that speed changes the brain’s neurology in ways that might undermine our ability to stop and think before acting on a compulsion to use an addictive substance.

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

Most critically of all, there is speed in processed foods once they get into our hands. They unseal quickly, heat up in the microwave quickly, and, most important, excite the brain quickly when they reach the mouth. 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.

glycemic index, which seeks to measure how fast certain foods raise the level of sugar in the blood. Some of its rankings are counterintuitive. Adding some sugar to starchy food, for instance, actually lowers the starchy food’s speed in reaching the blood by holding the starch molecules together in a way that causes them to resist digestion.

Our likes and dislikes might start as early as the womb, through what our mothers eat. 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.

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.

There is another reason why processed food is so appealing to our information-hungry brain. We get excited not only by tasting food, but by feeling it, too, and one of the greatest sensations is a mix of textures called dynamic contrast. This is a recipe well known to good cooks. Made some gazpacho? Toss some croutons on top of the soup after you’ve ladled it into a bowl, and you’re creating a dynamic contrast between the liquid and the crunch. It increases the information sent to the brain and heightens the arousal.

By one estimate, 70 percent of Americans have experienced at least one trauma, such as a traffic accident, assault, or abuse, and about 8 percent aren’t able to get past that trauma. They reexperience the event through flashbacks and nightmares. They become hyper-aroused, have trouble sleeping, and get fits of anger. To deal with that, they attempt to numb themselves by avoiding places or people who remind them of it, and by using addictive substances. Sometimes it’s drugs or alcohol. But food can be numbing, too.

Those who had symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, were more likely to consume fast food and soda. They weren’t necessarily overweight, because they also skipped meals, smoked cigarettes, took diet pills, and did other unhealthy things in trying to keep from gaining weight, at rates that were higher than those women who did not have the stress disorder.

Addiction experts tend to fall into two camps in thinking about what attracts us, initially, to addictive substances. One view is that we are chasing pleasure. The other mode, which Koob subscribes to, is that we are seeking to remove something bad.

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.” When we experience trauma, research has found that endorphins rush through the brain, which reduces the emotional or physical pain. When this occurs repeatedly, as in remembering and reliving a past trauma, we come to expect the endorphins and miss them sorely when they retreat. 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.

“I think it’s really stinking hard for some people to eat well, while it’s really easy for other people, and that’s the thing that got me,” Stice told me. “It’s not fair. There are just profound differences in how we respond to sugar and fat and salt. And the reason is this interaction between our sensitivity to reward and our capacity to inhibit that.”

Just how the gut communicates with the brain remains a mystery. There are many tantalizing aspects to it. Researchers have just now discovered that the stomach has taste receptors that recognize sweetness, like those in the taste buds on our tongue; we don’t yet know why or how they might function. The stomach is also rife with microorganisms—one hundred million of them—sometimes known as microflora, that collectively weigh about as much as the human brain and seem to be participating in some way in shaping our health, including playing a role in how much we eat. Sclafani, for his part, is guessing that there may be as-yet-undiscovered hormones at play.

Used as an ingredient by the processed food industry, maltodextrin is derived from starch, typically corn or rice, that is cooked with acids or enzymes, or hydrolyzed. This creates a white powder with a unique chemistry. It makes salad dressings thicker, beer richer, and low-fat peanut butter feel like full fat. It even turns wet things into powders, as when it is mixed with vinegar to coat potato chips.

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. This is the three-meat, four-cheese frozen pizza with a soda on the side; the Oreo Mega Stuf cookies; the extra-large bag of French fries. Our stomach as it evolved to love calories really loves these and tells the brain so. At the same time, 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.

the fat we accumulate on our body works with the brain to get us not just to like food, but to want more and more. The rise of fat as a force to be reckoned with in food addiction has its roots in the most fundamental aspect of our evolution.

In a world where getting more food doesn’t involve foraging, but merely reaching for a menu or into our fridge, fat has learned some new tricks. It no longer merely defends itself from attack. Now it goes on the offensive. When you fall off the dieting wagon and your shriveled fat cells replenish themselves with a rush of triglycerides from the excess food, the fat cells send chemical signals to the nearby veins, causing them to sprout out toward the fat. This increases the blood supply, which helps produce new fat cells.

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.” So, we can’t know which chemicals are being used in the food we eat, though the brain sure does.

they’re looking for something far more potent than mimicry. They’re using the labs to take them into the most vulnerable part of our psyche, where we act by instinct and rote rather than rationalization.

Cheaper food means having to work less in order to pay for that food, and thus we are drawn by instinct to grocery receipts and restaurant bills that are smaller.

The store is called Aldi, a fast-growing German-based discount chain with 1,900 stores in the United States and a cult-like following that is willing to tolerate any inconvenience for one reason: Its prices are half those of traditional supermarkets, and 15 percent below even those of Walmart, the heretofore champion of discount groceries.

When it comes to deciding whether to toss an item into the cart, our first concern is for the price. This became even more evident in the recent emergence of online grocery sales, in which not even the face-to-face contact with our longtime grocer can compete with the allure of cheapness.

The stores need to sell their versions for less money, which requires manufacturing them for less, and this is where the flavor houses prove themselves to be most valuable to the food industry. Their job is to find ways to mimic the iconic brands’ flavor while using cheaper ingredients.

In 2019, the breakfast division at PepsiCo released a new variety of Cap’n Crunch that was cloying beyond my wildest childhood memories. They called it Cotton Candy Crunch, and it had seventeen grams of sugar in what is defined as a serving, or thirty-eight grams of the cereal, which meant the cereal was nearly half sugar. Candy bars are roughly half sugar, too. 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.