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

by Michael Moss

All they had to do was to change up their products in some small way to make them a little different, or even just seem different, and we would stay hungry longer. They gave this new stratagem on their part a name: variety. Variety is the potato chip that they turned into ten flavors. It’s the two hundred kinds of breakfast cereal found in the larger supermarkets. It’s Banana Peanut Butter Chip Häagen-Dazs ice cream, jostling for space in the freezer next to Brown Butter Bourbon Truffle. Investors saw what this did to our appetite, and applauded. Goldman Sachs in a 1995 report on how cereal sales had reached $8 billion cited the “constant flow of new products that added variety and stimulated consumption.”

Their own work revealed that variety was high among the factors that caused us to lose control. “There’s now a lot of research showing that the greater variety there is in the foods around us, the more we will eat, and that we seem to be exquisitely sensitive to this in a way that usually ends up working against us,” Michael Lowe, a professor of psychology at Drexel University, told me.

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.

Walmart, which didn’t add groceries to its merchandise until 1987, now has the largest slice of this pie, with 28 percent of supermarket sales, followed by Kroger with 11 percent.

And even when we think we are eating at home like we used to, with traditional groceries, we don’t cook like we used to. Before World War II, we mostly prepared what were, by and large, whole foods: grains, vegetables, meats. That changed with our turn toward convenience and snacking, so that today, the food manufacturers thoroughly dominate what, and how, we eat.

Our worrier in chief at that time, Ralph Nader, made the cover of Time magazine with a string of hot dogs in 1969 when he turned his consumer activism toward food, focusing initially on processed meat.

Starting back in the 1930s, the government worried that many of us were malnourished from eating too little, and hunger remains a problem today. But increasingly, the concern has turned to the many more of us who are malnourished from eating too much of the wrong things. We’re getting enough calories, but they’re devoid of the nutrients and fiber we need to be healthy, and thus the host of conditions from type 2 diabetes to gout to cardiovascular disease that are tied to poor eating habits. Or we’re getting too many calories altogether: With obesity pushing past 40 percent, gambling on processed food was no longer a roll of the dice; it was more like the flip of a coin.

throughout the grocery store, what the FDA agrees to call a serving is substantially smaller than what many of us will actually eat. For this candy-sweet cereal, one serving is listed as one and one-quarter cups.

Derived from a process that infuses oil with hydrogen to solidify it, the hardened oil was used in countless products to fix a variety of flaws that crop up in the design of processed foods, from texture to cohesion to the time they could sit on the grocery store shelf without going stale. Trans fat was added to cookies and crackers, cakes and biscuits, popcorn and doughnuts, breakfast sandwiches, frozen pizza, and fried fast food. “I was filled with anger,” Joseph said. “I remember going to Safeway, near where I lived, and looking for anything that didn’t have trans fats.”

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. They also contained a long list of ingredients that were endemic to highly processed food, and Judge Sweet posted the entire lineup in his decision: mono- and di- and tri-glycerides; pyrophosphates and dimethylpolysiloxane, TBHQ and partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, along with bleached flour and modified corn starch.

say you’re asserting in your case that the industry caused you to lose control of your eating by gaining weight. Sure, the calories you ate mattered, but so did the calories you should have burned off, but didn’t, the defense attorney will say. How can you blame the food companies for obesity when the number of children who walk to school fell from 20 percent in 1997 to 12 percent in 2001? Or when the national pastime, watching TV, is so sharply correlated to weight gain?

What exactly is the definition of a food addict? In one survey of fifty self-described chocoholics, some said they are compelled to eat three bars a day, others just one. So, which is it? One bar or three? you’ll be asked if you’re that plaintiff, the writers said. In court, that’s called sowing doubt, which the food industry has developed into an art. Or let’s talk about the chemistry of addiction, the defense attorney might say in court. Just what part of, say, chocolate, if that’s your addiction, would you finger as being the evil chemical that causes your craving? (“The compounds in cocoa do not meet these conditions,” the guide says.)

Among the processed food companies, PepsiCo is not just the largest; its budget is that of a modest-sized republic. It has so many products selling so well that it flies its own flag—a globe encircled with colored stripes—next to the Stars and Stripes at its headquarters north of New York City. Were it a country, PepsiCo’s worldwide sales of $98 billion in 2007 would have placed it fifty-sixth, after Peru. Thus, when that same year PepsiCo decided to do some very special research, it had the resources to recruit the best scientist it could get.

“It’s not so much that people can become addicted to food. It’s that the food has changed, and it’s now mismatched to us.” She’d call this the Mismatch Index.

Sobriety works for alcohol and tobacco and drugs, albeit unevenly and with much distress; to avoid falling for those substances again one must forever fend off their siren songs, as well as the pain of withdrawal and the other complications of addiction. Which isn’t easy. As we now know, the memory channels run deep for things we’re addicted to. But abstention is even more problematic for food, in that we can’t just stop eating, even if we could muster the necessary self-restraint.

Largely, however, the diets that spring up by the dozens each year advise selective abstention. They advocate staying away from certain things or concentrating on others. Of late, we’ve gotten the Master Cleanse or Lemonade Diet, which aims for a loss of twenty pounds in ten days by swapping solid food for a drink made of lemon juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper, taken sometimes with a laxative.

When food suddenly becomes scarce—as it does when we’re dieting—it’s not just our body that undergoes change. The deprivation messes with our heads. The physiologist Ancel Keys hit upon this in an experiment he did on starvation. He mostly gets credit—or blame, depending on one’s current dieting strategy—for his work in the 1950s in which he hypothesized that saturated fat causes heart disease and should be avoided. He also popularized the Mediterranean Diet by documenting how people who ate fresh fruits and vegetables and olive oil—which was standard fare in Mediterranean countries—had fewer heart attacks.

And yet, knowing all that, we remain incredibly optimistic in dieting. 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.

all the way back to 1896 when its founder, Henry J. Heinz, came up with its iconic slogan: “57 Varieties.” Observers were baffled by the math, since the company already had more than sixty products, including its iconic ketchup. But as Heinz later explained, he was inspired by a shoe store in New York City that boasted of twenty-one styles; he wanted a big number like that—but with a seven in it because of the “psychological influence of that figure and its enduring significance to people of all ages.”

Heinz also made fast food faster still, by turning our kitchens into drive-in restaurants. Its Ore-Ida division had invented the frozen potato marvel called Tater Tots and followed those up with a dazzling variety of French fries to prepare at home, from Golden Crinkles to Bold & Crispy Zesties. In the course of a decade, we went from cooking potatoes fresh to mostly pulling them from our freezer and heating them up, which, as the company’s advertising said, allowed us to have fast food at home, “without the wait at the drive-thru window!”

To be sure, Weight Watchers was no fat-melting cream: It had the admiration of members and medical experts alike. Steve Comess, the cake-loving kid whose estranged parents upended his eating habits, joined Weight Watchers and says he found tremendous value in its group discussions. He also praised the guidance provided by the people trained by Weight Watchers to lead these sessions. They helped him to realize that his disordered eating was a shared experience, and in that recognition alone there was substantial empowerment. Indeed, Weight Watchers embodied the very best of our understanding of what is required to change behavior. The meetings it offered were designed to inspire and coach. It used a system of points to keep track of the food being eaten, which simplified the calculus of calorie-counting and % Daily Value–watching from those info-laden nutrition labels, and was strategic in the way it rewarded the participants for choosing healthy items and dinged them for the bad. It also required the members to monitor themselves, which helped them stay on course by making them accountable for their actions.

Traci Mann, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, has spent years studying how people try to lose weight and has come to a grim conclusion: 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.

for the participants, the loss was shockingly slight. Weight Watchers produced an average loss in body weight of just over 5 percent. The news got even worse over time. Much of the weight loss was fleeting. At the end of two years, the participants had put on enough new weight that their average net loss was barely 3 percent. By these numbers, a 200-pound woman in Weight Watchers could expect to get down to 189, and then bounce back to 194.

Weight Watchers launched a program called Beyond the Scale in 2016. Calories still mattered in this new iteration of its program, as did losing weight. But as the slogan implied, the company was now trying to think more holistically. It assigned points to food that supported cardiovascular health. It presented exercise as not just a calorie burner but also a mood booster and self-esteem builder. A third component of the new program was dubbed fulfillment, which Foster defined in a webinar as “finding and fueling your inner strength: skills and connections to tune in, unlock inner strength, and build resilience.”

Globally, more than 1.9 billion people have become either overweight or fully obese, and many can be counted on to try some sort of weight-loss scheme.

The Royal Crown Company introduced the first diet soft drink in 1958. It was called Diet Rite, and the company showed some remarkable foresight by aiming the marketing at kids as well as adults.

The dairy aisle was a bit trickier for the food company chemists. Low-fat milk was easy to produce, and we took to that fast. By contrast, low-fat cheese was quite hard to pull off since so much of what we valued in cheese—the texture and taste—came from its fat.

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.

At the end of the nineties, we moved from being worried about fat to being worried about sugar again, and then we paid more attention to calories no matter their source, fat or sugar or starch. (One factor in this shift was a 1998 report from a consumer advocacy group, the Centers for Science in the Public Interest, titled “Liquid Candy: How Soft Drinks Are Harming America’s Health,” which drew media attention to how much soda we were drinking.)

enough of us had become concerned about processed food to put a significant dent in sales. 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.

Warren Buffett, the investor, had bet much of his money and personal diet on Coke. “I’m one-quarter Coca-Cola,” he told a reporter that same year. “If I eat 2,700 calories a day, a quarter of that is Coca-Cola. I drink at least five 12-ounce servings.”

They devised a new tactic to test, in which the subjects could stop trying to subtract either carbs or fat from their diet and focus instead on adding something. This additive was protein, which was already getting lots of buzz in nutrition science as something that seemed to help us avoid eating too much. Protein was said to help negate the cravings stirred up by cookies or potato chips by making us feel fuller, faster.

academic researchers took their findings and produced a book with richly illustrated recipes that completely snubbed processed food. The book, The Nordic Way, with its company-funded research, avoids nearly everything made by Big Food, as the Campbell’s CEO had called her industry. Breakfast is steel-cut oats or homemade granola. Lunch? Coleslaw with lemon, honey, feta, and chicken. The afternoon snack: a handful of nuts. Dinner can be an omelet or fish filet with a salad of beets. The most highly processed thing in its pages is a thick Icelandic yogurt called skyr.

if we get wowed—and wooed—enough by what we see on the front of the package, we’ll overlook the bad news on the back. There’s a long list of up-and-coming additives seeking to pull this off—beta-carotene, found in carrots and pumpkin (to neutralize the free radicals that damage cells); lycopene, from tomatoes, for prostate help; beta-glucan, from oat bran and rye (to lower the risk for some types of cancer). The science on these is still sketchy, however.

disease caused by poor nutrition could stem from bad genes. He characterized this as genetotrophic disease, in which a person’s DNA could thwart the uptake of necessary nutrients; among the diseases that could spring from genes in this way was alcoholism, he wrote for the journal Nutrition Reviews. He cited research involving animals in which the amount of alcohol consumed soared when they lacked certain nutrients, and all but stopped when the nutrients were restored. That became relevant to genetics when it became clear that our ability to absorb nutrients could be hindered by our DNA.

Researchers were finding out that metabolisms vary greatly. Some people burn up lots of the food that they eat. Others much less. This isn’t a matter of exercise, necessarily. For reasons still wholly unknown to science, the sums of energy we burn just sitting around can vary wildly from person to person, and can change over time, as well.

In 1990, Ernest Noble, a biochemist and clinical psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that the people who inherited a certain allele, or variant form of a certain gene, were more likely to get addicted to things. This gene, known as DRD2, functions like a gatekeeper. It enables dopamine to reach the brain’s reward center, which, like hormones, can motivate us to act. But the allele opens the spigot a little wider, and too much motivation spells trouble when it comes to compulsive behavior. Noble first connected the gene and its allele to alcoholism. He then found them in people who used cocaine, in those addicted to cigarettes, and among people who lost control of food to the point of becoming obese.

But nothing is simple in food and nutrition, Hager, the Nestlé geneticist, told me. He thinks of diets like medicine. They work only for some people, some of the time. I asked him for his view on what caused so many people to start overeating back in the eighties. “The simple answer is that obesity is energy in, versus energy out,” he said. “If you get more energy in than you expend, you gain weight, and so obesity is a consequence of a sedentary lifestyle, and the very, very easy availability of cheap food.”

This lack of enthusiasm for the fake sweeteners explains why, even today, knowing all we do about the harmful effects of too much sugar, each of us on average is still eating seventy-three pounds a year. Sweet is a habit we just can’t break.

a few years ago. In Salt Sugar Fat, I pointed out how the tongue map we learned in school had been misinterpreted to show that we tasted sweet only on the tip of our tongue, and how, in reality, we sense sugar everywhere on the tongue. But sugar’s ability to alert and excite the brain and drive us to want and like food now appears to be far greater. In recent years, researchers have learned that the cells on our tongue absorb sugar themselves, drawing it right through their cell walls, which raises the specter that they are part of the mechanism that informs the brain of the fuel in our food. You’ll recall that we evolved to crave calories as much as we crave the sweetness in sugar, and our tongue now appears to be the first tool we have in driving us toward calories.

The no-calorie sweeteners that millions of us are consuming now in our drinks and our food are also still poorly understood. The companies that make these sweeteners staunchly defend their products. They point to the studies that found no toxicity, and to studies that found people lose weight using them. Sucralose, for one, is being produced and used by us as a sugar substitute in more than four thousand products and in such mammoth quantities that since its invention more than forty years ago, nineteen million tons of sugar could have been taken out of the human diet, saving us seventy-seven trillion calories, says Tate and Lyle, which manufactures sucralose under the brand name Splenda.

Telling the brain that we’re going to get sugar in our gut, which then never arrives, might cause our metabolism to go haywire.

Here’s what they did: 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.

pretty basic: Quit, avoid relapse. And yet, of course, it’s not so easy. 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.

He’s working on technology that can help us develop a stronger memory for the things we now struggle to eat more of, like vegetables; in his smartphone game, we can dig deeper memory channels by choosing carrots over fries, again and again. But merely asking a different question when we sidle up to the pastry bar at Starbucks can help to change how we value food. “When we say, ‘Okay, which scone looks better today, this one or that one?’ we’re totally activating the reward circuitry of the brain and turning off the brake, which is when we decide to eat that scone,” he says. “But if instead we think about how that scone is going to clog up our arteries and increase our odds of a stroke or just make us look shitty in a bikini, it turns down the reward circuitry and turns up the brake.”

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. And food is just part of what the Greeks understood to be the key to good health. Exercise is valuable, too. Not to lose weight, which is very difficult, but by releasing endorphins in our brain, which can lead to the kind of harmony that stabilizes our eating. The

But notwithstanding the caution about diets, we can make abstention work if we try to fix just one of our bad habits at a time. My personal favorite as a first step is to stop drinking anything with calories. It just seems so logical that we’re not yet equipped by evolution to handle even fruit juice as well as we are solid food.

they’ve learned that addictions share some things. Not all of us are affected to the same degree. Our vulnerability can change over time and with our moods. The environment matters greatly. So, too, some strategies can be shared among our addictions for dealing with the constant temptation to relapse.

This fruit was the fig. It’s jammy and sweet. It’s got lots of fuel to excite the brain, too, with seventy-five calories each. And it delivers a sense of authenticity and ancient cultures, stirring and satisfying in us the “desire for something true and unique,” according to the flavor company that recently declared fig to be the hottest new processed food additive, the new pumpkin spice. Fig flavor is starting to find its way into breakfast cereal, energy drinks, chewing gum, and—wrapped with bacon and prosciutto—onto frozen pizzas. And like those before it, the key to its commercial success will be not just the power it has to get us to want to eat, but rather to get us to eat more and more. When we change what we eat, and the companies change what they make to address that, we have to be ready to see through that.