Salt Sugar Fat

Michael Moss

12 annotations Jan 2024 data

Prologue

  • "The transition of food to being an industrial product really has been a fundamental problem," Willett said. "First, the actual processing has stripped away the nutritional value of the food. Most of the grains have been converted to starches. We have sugar in concentrated form, and many of the fats have been concentrated and then, worst of all, hydrogenated, which creates trans-fatty acids with very adverse effects on health."
  • The lengths to which food companies will go in order to shield their operations from public view were already apparent to me from my own recent reporting odyssey, which had started in early 2009 in southwest Georgia, where an outbreak of salmonella in a decrepit peanut factory left eight people dead and an estimated nineteen thousand in forty-three states sick. It took a long, winding hunt for me to track down the secret inspection report that revealed one of the root causes: Food manufacturers like Kellogg had relied on a private inspector, paid by the factory, to vouch for the safety of the peanuts. The report the inspector wrote in visiting the factory shortly before the outbreak cited none of the obvious warning signs, like the rats and the leaky roof.
  • The meat industry, with the blessing of the federal government, was avoiding steps that could make their products safer for consumers. The E. coli starts in the slaughterhouses, where feces tainted with the pathogen can contaminate the meat when the hides of cows are pulled off. Yet many of the biggest slaughterhouses would sell their meat only to hamburger makers like Cargill if they agreed not to test their meat for E. coli until it was mixed together with shipments from other slaughterhouses. This insulated the slaughterhouses from costly recalls when the pathogen was found in ground beef, but it also prevented government officials and the public from tracing the E. coli back to its source. When it comes to pathogens in the meat industry, ignorance is financial bliss.
  • Both fat and salt are at the heart of Frito-Lay's operations in Plano, Texas, and some of the company's favorite methods for manipulating these two ingredients were relayed to me by a former chief scientist there named Robert I-San Lin
  • Scientists at Nestlé are currently fiddling with the distribution and shape of fat globules to affect their absorption rate and, as it's known in the industry, their "mouthfeel." At Cargill, the world's leading supplier of salt, scientists are altering the physical shape of salt, pulverizing it into a fine powder to hit the taste buds faster and harder, improving what the company calls its "flavor burst." Sugar is being altered in myriad ways as well. The sweetest component of simple sugar, fructose, has been crystallized into an additive that boosts the allure of foods.
  • Any improvement to the nutritional profile of a product can in no way diminish its allure, and this has led to one of the industry's most devious moves: lowering one bad boy ingredient like fat while quietly adding more sugar to keep people hooked.
  • When consumers tried to improve their health by shifting to skim milk, Congress set up a scheme for the powerful dairy industry through which it has quietly turned all that unwanted, surplus fat into huge sales of cheese—not cheese to be eaten before or after dinner as a delicacy, but cheese that is slipped into our food as an alluring but unnecessary extra ingredient. The toll, thirty years later: The average American now consumes as much as thirty-three pounds of cheese a year.
  • Sugar not only sweetens, it replaces more costly ingredients—like tomatoes in ketchup—to add bulk and texture. For little added expense, a variety of fats can be slipped into food formulas to stimulate overeating and improve mouthfeel. And salt, barely more expensive than water, has miraculous powers to boost the appeal of processed food.

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  • Sugar not only makes the taste of food and drink irresistible. The industry has learned that it can also be used to pull off a string of manufacturing miracles, from donuts that fry up bigger to bread that won't go stale to cereal that is toasty-brown and fluffy
  • In Florida, researchers have conditioned rats to expect an electrical shock when they eat cheesecake, and still they lunge for it.
  • We don't even have to eat sugar to feel its allure. Pizza will do, or any other refined starch, which the body converts to sugar—starting right in the mouth, with an enzyme called amylase. "The faster the starch becomes sugar, the quicker our brain gets the reward for it," Reed said. "We like the highly refined things because they bring us immediate pleasure, associated with high sugar, but obviously there are consequences. It's sort of like if you drink alcohol really fast, you get drunk really fast. When you break down sugar really fast your body gets flooded with sugar more than it can handle, whereas with a whole grain it is more gradual and you can digest it in a more orderly fashion."
  • To be really enticing, these products had to be loaded with sugar and fat. Only these two ingredients, along with salt, seemed to have the power to excite the brain about eating.