Salt Sugar Fat

“More than half of American adults were now considered overweight, with nearly one-quarter of the population–40 million adults–carrying so many extra pounds that they were clinically defined as obese. Among children, the rates had more than doubled since 1980, the year when the fat line on the charts began angling up, and the number of kids considered obese had shot past 12 million.”

Here, Moss discusses the sudden onset of the obesity epidemic. Moss blames the food industry for the severe health problems that began in 1980. He claims that food companies market manipulatively, including to children, in order to sell more of their harmful ingredients.

“The reality was that behind the scenes, having resolved to ignore obesity, the CEOs and their companies picked up right where they had left off, using, in some cases, more salt, more sugar, and more fat to edge out the competition.”

In a secret meeting of food executives, Kraft vice-president Michael Mudd raises the notion of food companies making their recipes healthier. However, most manufacturers place profit over health. Moss accuses the food companies of repeatedly choosing profit over health.

“In the end, that is what this book is all about. It will show how the makers of processed foods have chosen, time and again, to double down on their efforts to dominate the American diet, gambling that consumers won’t figure them out.”

Moss claims that the food industry deviously manipulates consumers in order to sell more processed food. The manipulation includes marketing tactics, as well as food engineering and political manipulation.

“Tatyana’s bliss point for the pudding was 24 percent sugar, twice the level of sweetness that most adults can handle in pudding. As far as children go, she was on the lower side; some go as high as 36 percent.”

Food scientists measure the amount of sugar that makes people happiest. The manufacturers translate this knowledge into products that sell better. In doing so, and especially with food for kids, they wind up making products with copious amounts of sugar in them.

“The biggest hits–be they Coca-Cola or Doritos or Kraft’s Velveeta Cheesy Skillets dinner kits–owe their success to formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct overriding single flavor that says to the brain: Enough already!”

Researchers such as Howard Moskowitz find what makes food appealing to people. A new flavor excites at first but the body can grow tired of it. The job, for those like Moskowitz, is to get consumers to keep eating, no matter what.

“Food, clothing, and shelter were still important, he told the crowd. But now there was a fourth essential element of life that could be ‘expressed in a single word–convenience–spelled out with a capital “C.”’”

Charles Mortimer delivers a speech in which he notes that convenience has become a pillar of the food industry. This social change resulted in greater consumption of unhealthy ingredients, with Americans valuing food that was fast as much if not more than food that was healthy. 

“But even Betty Crocker wasn’t enough to totally undermine the teachings of Betty Dickson. To do that, the processed food industry had to come up with another, more insidious strategy. Like the Hoover-era FBI pursuing its enemies list, the industry infiltrated the association of home economics teachers.”

Moss accuses the food industry of subverting traditional homemakers. The author consistently claims that food manufacturers act deviously to gain sales. While American society was trending toward faster, more convenient meals, the food industry, Moss contends, also worked proactively to do away with the notion of slower food.

“In any given cereal aisle, two hundred cereal brands–and their spinoffs–compete for the shopper’s attention, so food manufacturers now spend nearly twice as much money on advertising their cereals as they do on the ingredients that go into them.”

Moss claims marketing as a fourth ingredient, in addition to salt, sugar, and fat. Sugary cereal manufacturers market heavily to children. With twice as much money spent on marketing as production, it’s fair to say the bottom line for some players in the food industry is profit, not health.

“Kellogg’s campaign, to be sure, was not in the same league as the ads run by old rival, C. W. Post, a century earlier, in which he was accused of insinuating that his cereal, Grape-Nuts, would cure appendicitis. But with Kellogg spending $1 billion a year on advertising that can deeply influence America’s shopping habits, the commission was incensed.”

Cereal manufacturers advertised heavily to promote their products. They made health claims that involved manipulating scientific findings. Moss repeatedly compares the food market to war. Food companies battle for customers.

“The goal became much larger than merely beating the rival brands; Coca-Cola strove to outsell every other thing people drank, including milk and water.” 

In the 1980s and 1990s, soda companies Coca-Cola and PepsiCo battled for market share. Through increasing marketing budgets, the companies expanded rapidly. In this period, obesity began to surge.

“To nutritionists, these stores are to obesity what drug dens were to the crack epidemic.” 

Convenience stores stock soda and snacks, containing salt, sugar, and fat. These stores make unhealthy foods available to youth, who often start their day buying unhealthy food from these stores. 

“It was barely half a tablespoon of juice, a mere 5 percent of the total formula, company records reveal, but the Kool-Aid managers already knew that even a hint of fruit was worth a zillion times its weight in marketing gold.” 

After tobacco company Philip Morris acquired Kraft and General Foods, it marketed food products heavily. Sugar costs less than fruit, yet fruit appeals to mothers. So the company added just enough fruit to market to mothers, even though they were still putting out a product that was largely sugar and water.

“One former Kraft executive who started out with General Foods described the latter as Ancient Greece, studied and cultured and not especially keen on warfare. By contrast, he viewed Kraft as the imperial Roman army on a brutal march to conquer the world.” 

After the Philip Morris merger, different corporate cultures collided. Moss generally describes the food industry as at war. Some companies are more ruthless than others. In the end, it was Kraft’s ideology that won out. 

“If sugar is the methamphetamine of processed food ingredients, with its high-speed, blunt assault on our brains, then fat is the opiate, a smooth operator whose effects are less obvious but no less powerful.”

Moss regularly compares foods to drugs. Here he introduces fat by differentiating it from sugar and comparing to opiates.

“This cheese, along with surplus butter and dried milk, accumulated into a stack that weighed 1.9 billion pounds, and it cost taxpayers $4 billion a year. With more truckloads arriving daily, this milkfat mountain was growing faster than the national debt. The storage fees alone were running upwards of $1 million a day. It grew so large, in fact, that the government began secreting it away in caverns and a vast, abandoned limestone mine near Kansas City.”

Moss accuses the dairy industry and the government of conspiring to get Americans to eat more dairy fat. Here, large amounts of excess milk and fat are made into uneaten cheese, which is then stores at the taxpayers’ expense. 

“Fat was becoming synonymous with cholesterol, clogged arteries, heart attacks, and strokes. And as a result, between 1980 and 1990, red meat consumption fell more than 10 percent.”

As sugar consumption climbed, fat consumption dropped. Fat had long had a reputation as bad for health. This worsened more recently with public concern about trans fats. Largely, though, public health didn’t approve because sugar consumption increased.

“USDA records show that seven of the panel’s thirteen members were nominated by the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association.” 

Moss accuses the federal government, particularly the Department of Agriculture, of conspiring with the beef and dairy industries. The USDA both regulates and promotes these foods, producing a potential conflict of interest.

“Starting in the late 1990s, a small group of senior Kraft officials had been watching America’s massive weight gain with growing alarm. They didn’t buy the industry’s view that consumers were to blame for the obesity crisis by being slothful or lacking in willpower.”

Kraft consults an advisory panel. One of its members claims that Kraft deviously markets unhealthy food. The company surprisingly pays attention to its negative effects and begins making changes to some of its products. This shows that while profits may remain the bottom line, there remains humanism in this industry. 

“In large amounts, sodium pulls fluids from the body’s tissues and into the blood, which raises the blood volume and compels the heart to pump more forcefully.” 

Moss introduces salt. It is the only mineral among the three key ingredients. Salt has been implicated in a range of diseases, and can be dangerous when over-consumed—something Americans do often.  

“Same salty taste, but no heart attacks or strokes. Intrigued, I began to question my unscientific efforts to compare the pillars of processed foods to drugs of abuse.”

Moss visits a large salt research laboratory. Scientists develop new varieties of salt, which taste like table salt yet have better health effects. This causes Moss to reassess his thinking.

“By 2007, Finland’s per capita consumption of salt had dropped by a third, and this shift was accompanied by an 80 percent decline in the number of deaths from strokes and heart disease.” 

Finnish people consumed more salt than anyone else. A public health campaign to reduce salt corresponds with disease rates. Moss writes that these may be connected, although the evidence does not conclusively show this.

“The reputation that snacks had for being bad for one’s health (H) was an issue that worked against the company, along with their cost ($), and failures in quality (Q), like breakage. But other factors worked in the company’s favor, making it more likely consumers would decide to purchase (P). Its chips and other snacks tasted great (T). They were convenient (C) and utilitarian (U), ready to eat out of the hand or with meals. Lin added some mathematical weighting (A, B), and threw it all into an equation he called the “Model for Ideal Snack,” which explained—from a mathematical perspective—why Frito-Lay was making a killing in fatty and salty snacks.” 

Moss speaks with a former chief scientist from Frito-Lay, who had developed a formula for the ideal snack. Moss often describes processed foods as engineered to addict. The engineering takes place through careful calculations that put profit ahead of public health. 

“It had taken me three and a half years of prying into the food industry’s operations to come to terms with the full range of institutional forces that compel even the best companies to churn out foods that undermine a healthy diet. Most critical, of course, is the deep dependence the industry has on salt, sugar, and fat.” 

After investigating food companies, Moss finally realizes that food companies depend on the three key ingredients. Therefore, even the better-intentioned companies produce a vast amount of unhealthy foods. Throughout much of the book, the institutional forces have a secondary role to the direct manipulation that Moss describes.