Salt Sugar Fat: Part One

This post is a summary of the book "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss. 

The book was read and summarized for the reading app "bookbhook.com" in December of 2016. 

Part One: SUGAR

Exploiting the Biology of the Child

Children developed a taste for salt at 4 or 5 months, their liking for sweet at birth. They prefer higher levels of both. It’s a reflection of their basic biology. There are 3 aspects of sugar that make it attractive to children. One, the sweet taste is their signal for foods that are rich in energy, and since kids are growing so fast, their bodies want foods that give quick fuel. Two, we didn’t evolve in an environment that had sweet foods. So we feel excited when we eat sugar. Three, it makes them feel good. It’s an analgesic. It reduces crying in a baby.

This is why much of the grocery store food is sweet. They are exploiting the biology of the child, teaching the child the level of sweetness the food should be.  Sugar is linked to the brain’s pleasure zones. Our brains discharge signals of pleasure as a reward for choosing the tastiest foods. We don’t even have to eat sugar to feel its allure. Any refined starch that the body converts to sugar will do. The faster the starch becomes sugar, the quicker our brain gets the reward for it. We like the refined things because they bring us immediate pleasure associated with sugar.

Food manufacturers know that sugar makes food irresistible. They determine the “bliss point” for sugar- the precise amount of sweetness that made food enjoyable. They use it to perfect their product formulas. It’s also used to pull off manufacturing miracles; from donuts that fry up bigger to bread that won’t go stale to cereal that is fluffy. Limit sugar and you are left with cookies, crackers and breads that come out shrunken, pale, or flat.

Some of this craving for sugar is the result of the massive amounts of sugar added to processed foods. It is a learned behavior. The sweeter the industry made its food, the sweeter the kids liked their foods to be. Companies will sell a lot more if they can determine the precise bliss point for sugar in each of the items. Sugar’s value to food companies is high.

How do you get People to Crave?

Search for just the right amount of certain ingredients to generate the greatest appeal among consumers. Engineer sugar and create the biggest crave. The defining facet of consumer craving: the bliss point.

Grocery products have lots of attributes that make them attractive, chief among them are color, smell, packaging and taste. Through optimization, food engineers alter these variables slightly and make new versions with the aim to find the most perfect variation.  Sensory-specific satiety is the tendency for big distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain which responds by making you feel full really fast. It became a guiding principle for the processed food industry. They pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct overriding single flavor that says to the brain: Enough already!

They worked on how to maximize the power of sugar in foods. The liking of food rose as the amount of sugar was increased but only to a point; after that peak, adding more sugar was not only a waste, it diminished the allure of the food. Many of the Prego sauces-whether cheesy, chunky or light- have one feature in common: The largest ingredient after tomatoes is sugar.

They tried to determine the factors that drove people not merely to like their food but to eagerly snatch it up. They sought to identify exactly what it is about foods that take us to this level of desire. Hunger is a poor driver of cravings. We are driven to eat by other forces in our lives. Some of these are emotional needs while others reflect the pillars of processed food: taste, aroma, appearance and texture. One ingredient-sugar-can do it all.

Convenience with a Capital C

The phrase “convenience foods” galvanized the industry. Food manufacturers were pushing the frozen, fast, and boxed all time-saving innovations. There is a battle between convenience food that wasn’t so healthy and healthy food that wasn’t so convenient. This struggle for the nation’s diet played out in the sugary products that Americans were eating for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

America’s population was surging and the industry saw its role as nothing less than nurturing  the masses by delivering  food that was safe, easy to prepare and  affordable. Serving the modern customer became an art, with convenience the super-additive that was changing the whole face of competitive business. Customer expectations were so high and the pace at which new products were introduced so fast that the homemaker can’t say what is it she really wants – until after some company creates it and she finds it in a retail store. These foods had to be easy t buy, store, open, prepare and eat. This drive for convenience had become a mantra.

Convenience is the great additive. There is convenience of form. The dog food patties as soft as hamburgers but so durable that they could sit on the shelf until needed. There is convenience of time. The grocery stores stay open in the evenings to accommodate increasing numbers of women who worked outside the home. There is convenience of packaging. Beer in bottles that was now disposable.

Americans were willing to pay well for this additive to the products they purchase, to use their greater wealth to buy fuller lives and better things to do with their time than mix, blend, sort, trim, measure, cook, serve. Time-saving gadgets arrived in the store that helped the homemaker trade her new wealth for some extra time away from the kitchen; ready-to-bake biscuits, special detergents, plastic lids on cans of milk for easier pouring.

38% of American women were leaving the home to work. As food manufacturers saw it, these women needed help. They couldn’t cook meals from scratch. Evenings became rushed. The processed food companies saw it as their mission to change the nature of home economics. The remarkable rise of ‘convenience’ or processed foods heralded by slogans ‘instant’ ‘ready to cook’ and ‘heat and serve’ set off a revolution in eating habits.

Is it Cereal or Candy?

The overconsumption of salt and sugar was the primary contributor to the nation’s health woes. Kellogg in 1896 came out with flaked cereal, from boiled wheat and called it Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. It marked the birth of sweetened breakfast. The public’s enthusiasm for cereal was growing. Within a decade, 51% of women worked outside. These women had more money than time. Dinner was a struggle and breakfast stressful. Convenience was crucial to starting the day and food companies controlled the breakfast table. By 1970, Kellogg, Post and General Mills crammed the grocery store. The Big Three controlled the cereal aisle.

This changed in 1975. Sugar became a matter of distress. One cereal, Sugar Orange Crisps, packed a sugar load of 70.8%. Mayer, a nutrition professor, saw sugar as a dangerous additive in food, linking to diabetes. He penned an article titled ‘Is it Cereal or Candy?’ and said some candy bars had more protein than many cereals. He called them sugar-coated vitamin pills. He wanted cereals containing over 50% sugar to be labelled cereal confections and be sold in the candy section. Kellogg changed its product name from Sugar Frosted Flakes to Frosted Flakes. Other manufacturers also dropped the word sugar. The deemphasizing of sugar went deeper than the name on the box. The Federal Trade Commission asked for a total ban on all advertising to children for any product, food or otherwise.

Instead of having the food technician experiment with tastes and textures, the marketing guys hunted for ideas that suited the advertising needs first and worried about pleasing the palate of consumers second. The driver for this reversal was the recognition that branding was overwhelmingly important. The Kellogg icons-Frosted Flakes or Special K-all had distinct identities, carefully honed by hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising. It labored to burn the brands into the minds of American consumers over the years. The concept drew on the psychology of perceptions. If a cereal could evoke the joy of an afternoon snack, it could generate sales not only as a breakfast food but also as a snack.