Hooked
From the author of Salt Sugar Fat comes a “gripping” (The Wall Street Journal) exposé of how the processed food industry exploits our evolutionary instincts, the emotions we associate with food, and legal loopholes in their pursuit of profit over public health. “The processed food industry has managed to avoid being lumped in with Big Tobacco—which is why Michael Moss’s new book is so important.”—Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit Everyone knows how hard it can be to maintain a healthy diet. But what if some of the decisions we make about what to eat are beyond our control? Is it possible that food is addictive, like drugs or alcohol? And to what extent does the food industry know, or care, about these vulnerabilities? In Hooked, Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Michael Moss sets out to answer these questions—and to find the true peril in our food. Moss uses the latest research on addiction to uncover what the scientific and medical communities—as well as food manufacturers—already know: that food, in some cases, is even more addictive than alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs. Our bodies are hardwired for sweets, so food giants have developed fifty-six types of sugar to add to their products, creating in us the expectation that everything should be cloying; we’ve evolved to prefer fast, convenient meals, hence our modern-day preference for ready-to-eat foods.
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- The reason nothing has worked is because food companies, who pay out massively to regulators, rewire our basic desires to make us buy more of their sugary slop. And now, we have medical companies, who also pay out heavily, trying to cash in even more. I highly suggest reading “ Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us“ by Michael Moss, and “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite” by David A. Kessler, former head of the FDA.
- If you want it from an industrial perspective, I suggest checking out “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us“ by Michael Moss, and “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite” by David A. Kessler, former head of the FDA.
- The article is basis a precis of the book refereed to at the end of the article: "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss [1]. It's well worth reading.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Sugar_Fat:_How_the_Food_G...
- This is a very bad news. According to one obesity expert I follow, the best variable that explains growth in obesity epidemic is processed food consumption.
Everyone that struggles with weight can tell you, this foods are just to addictive.
For a good overview of how food industry makes it more addictive read a book Hooked by Michael Moss
- > I wonder if there's a relationship to the obesity epidemic
You don't have to wonder. Read the inside story of that epidemic in this beautifully researched history by Michael Moss:
Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giats Hooked Us by Michael Moss
- From the article:
>“[Sugars] represent the single leading source of increased bad calories that are being promoted in our communities and pushed on communities of color,” Monning said during the floor debate, citing a “national epidemic” of diabetes.
>Senate Bill 347, which goes to the Assembly next, would require labels on drinks with added caloric sweeteners that contain 75 calories or more per 12 fluid ounces.
>The label on container would say: “STATE OF CALIFORNIA SAFETY WARNING: Drinking beverages with added sugar(s) may contribute to obesity, type 2 diabetes, and tooth decay.”
I find the article surprisingly void of substance, just like the refined sugars it was supposed to report on.
Health warnings will achieve absolutely nothing, seeing how the problem lies in understanding how refined sugars impact the body and shape the sense of hunger to power the modern processed food market. In short, people who understand are powerless; people who have the power to do something are clueless; people who understand and have the power are in charge of food companies, making money hand over fist, at the expense of health of the entire nation.
Dr. Robert Lustig explains the danger of distilled and concentrated sugars, fructose in particular, in his "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" lecture [0]. The lecture is packed with chemical formulas but is extremely informative.
Fructose is a poison that disintegrates the liver. In nature, fructose is found in combination with other sugars and nutrients that lessen the impact; in processed foods, fructose is shoveled in to mask manufacturing defects and make the food more "marketable" i.e. addictive.
"Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss [1] goes into greater detail how scientists tweak foods such as cereal to make it as addictive as possible, using whatever chemicals aren't outright banned. The very last chapter of that book features Michael's interview with a IIRC Nestle CEO who says, paraphrased, "We envision the future where there's no other food than the goop we produce, and stomachs of people can't handle anything else because that's what they've been eating since childhood."
FDA helped out the processed food industry by making the definition of sugar [2] the following:
“Sugars shall be defined as the sum of all free mono- and disaccharides (such as glucose, fructose, lactose, and sucrose)"
Notice the trick? By involving fructose with all the other regular sugars, FDA absolved the processed food companies of the need to put sugar intake limits on packaging, which is why sugar is the only category lacking RDV.
"Reward-based stress eating" study [3] states that "treatment with Naloxone, an unspecific opioid antagonist, powerfully suppressed intake of highly palatable food". Sugary food is literally addictive, and yet it's peddled to children exactly to turn them into addicts that gorge until they die.
Slapping a warning label on products does absolutely nothing except appease the average consumer, who sees Something Is Being Done (tm). Unless fructose is controlled like alcohol (Dr. Lustig compares the damage of ethanol and fructose), the diabetes epidemic will become the norm. Fructose is already in nearly every processed product due to HFCS, high fructose corn syrup, gotten from government-subsidized corn.
Trying to reduce the amount of fructose in processed items makes them unpalatable; trying to remove it altogether makes the food taste like cardboard to the average consumer. Attempts to make mainstream processed food healthy will undoubtedly bankrupt large swaths of companies and crash the US economy.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15797397-salt-sugar-fat
[2] Code of Federal Regulations Title 21 subsection 101.9(c)(6)(ii)
[3] https://www.medicinasistemica.it/doc/biblioteca/Stress,%20ea...
