Ep. 56: Salt, Sugar, Fat and How Food Companies Affect What We Eat with Michael Moss
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Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Moss (Salt Sugar Fat, Hooked) and Globe and Mail nutrition columnist Leslie Beck discuss snacking, processed food and addiction. What makes Oreos more habit-forming than nicotine? What prevented one well-meaning food company from limiting the amount of sugar in its products? Beck also explores Moss’s tips for how to control your snacking, and how the pandemic has affected the way we’re eating. (The second part of a two-part episode.)
Insights
Competition among the processed food companies can be a powerful disincentive for change. “Behind the scenes, this is an incredibly fierce industry,” Moss says. When Kraft attempted to reduce the amount of sugar in its products, competitors swooped in and filled the gap in the market, affecting Kraft’s bottom line. Even when companies try to do the right thing, Moss says, they’re nudged by other companies that have a hold on grocery stores and the agricultural system. (7:15)
Foods can be so addictive that even the General Counsel at Philip Morris, a company that used to make cigarettes and Oreos, had more control over his cigarette smoking than his Oreo consumption. “He could smoke a cigarette during a business meeting and then put his pack of cigarettes away, not touch it until the next business meeting the next day,” says Moss. “But he told me that he couldn't open a bag of Oreos for fear that he would go down half the bag.” (12:00)
Michael Moss’s tips for fighting snacking cravings. “One of the lessons from cigarette, alcohol, drug experts, is that the cravings that hit us from those addictive substances come on so fast that you have to plan ahead,” he says. “And your approach to dealing with food can be your own approach. Nothing works for everybody. And so just to kind of give you an example, if you're somebody who gets a craving for cookies at 3:00 p.m., you probably need to be thinking about doing something else at 2:55 in order to prepare for and brace yourself and/or prevent that craving.” As for what that “something else” is, Moss suggests picking up the phone and calling a friend, while we suggest going for a walk around the block. (14:20)
Links
For the Daily Beast, Moss picks five other food-related books he finds fascinating.
Trust the New York Post to be blunt with their headline: “Why Sugar, Cheese and Fast Food Are More Addictive Than Heroin.”
The NPR review of Moss’s book, Hooked, calls the book “smoothly written.” “I won’t be buying potato chips anytime soon,” says the reviewer. Here’s the link.
Interview with Michael Moss, plus video, on Food Tank.
For further links, including Michael Moss’s website and Twitter feed, check out the show notes for Episode 55 featuring part one of the Michael Moss / Leslie Beck conversation.
Eat Move Think S01E56 final web transcript
Christopher Shulgan: Welcome to episode 56 of Eat Move Think. Christopher Shulgan here, executive producer. We did something a little different with our last episode, which featured Medcan director of food and nutrition Leslie Beck in conversation with Michael Moss, the author of the new book, Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions. Moss also wrote the bestseller Salt Sugar Fat. Moss is based in Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife and his two sons. He's been nominated multiple times for the Pulitzer Prize, and won once, in 2010, for writing he did about contaminated hamburgers and food safety.
Christopher Shulgan: There was so much fascinating material in their conversation that we split the episode into two parts. The material here stands on its own, but if you would prefer to listen to the conversation in the order that it happened, you may opt to download and listen first to episode 55, which features Beck and Moss discussing why Moss wrote Hooked, and the brain chemistry that causes the smell of, say, a Pop-Tart, to summon memories from long ago.
Christopher Shulgan: In this episode, Moss and Beck discuss what makes Oreos more addictive than nicotine, and how competition prevented one well-meaning food company from limiting the amount of sugar in its products. Beck also explores Moss's tips for how to control your snacking, and how the pandemic has affected the way we're eating. Here's the second part of Leslie Beck’s conversation with the author Michael Moss.
Leslie Beck: In the book, you wrote about an experiment—well, PepsiCo was using brain scans to see how our brain would respond to sugary drinks that still tasted sweet, but actually had considerably less sugar. Tell us a little bit about this research, which I believe came from McGill University, if I'm not mistaken. And why did PepsiCo pull the plug on it?
Michael Moss: Right. PepsiCo called this their big bet. And they were one of the companies that, to their credit, was looking at ways that they might be able to play a responsible role in our eating habits kind of going forward, as more and more of us were trying to better those eating habits. They were looking at the question, you know, to what extent can they pull sugar out of their soda without hurting sales, without diminishing our love and/or even cravings for soda? And so they brought on board, one of one of the best brain scientists out there. Her name was Dana Small. She was trained at McGill. Dana was the person who first figured out how to look at the brain on food in a brain scanner, because typically what happens is, if you go into a brain scanner and you're asked to kind of chew on something, the motion of chewing will distort the images and nothing will be of use to the scientists studying.
Michael Moss: But Dana, being a self-described chocoholic, discovered that you could put a square of chocolate on people's mouths, and it will melt on their own without any movement of the head, and she could study how the brain looks when it's taking in this food. So PepsiCo brought in Dana Small to look at this question of how and whether we can do with less sugar, if you will. And it was absolutely fascinating. This was great science. I mean, a little tricky for PepsiCo, because the idea of a big food giant using brain scans to sort of get a sense of our likes and dislikes and cravings was, like, a little dodgy, but the company decided, you know, it's worth taking a risk, because this is really important stuff. But things went bad very quickly when Dana discovered some very sort of troubling aspects of our metabolism when it comes to sugary drinks.
Michael Moss: And when she came up with these findings that really raised questions about our love for full sugary sodas, PepsiCo ended the research, cut off her funding, and then at one point, even sort of, you know, pushed back on her efforts to publish the findings that she had.
And it's not quite clear, because the work hasn't been completed, what she was looking at, but it kind of went into this notion that we may be more equipped biologically to sense the calories in solid food versus liquid food. That's one possibility. The other thing is that, in their effort to cut back on sugar, many companies are starting to use artificial sweeteners, several sometimes at once. And they're not always even on the label, so you can't always know that they're there, but they're showing up throughout the grocery store. And Dana was looking at formulations of sweetness that were using artificial sweeteners to retain the sweetness, even though the caloric sugar wasn't there, and may have stumbled across an issue in that realm as well.
Leslie Beck: So if you are consuming something that's very sweet, but you're not getting the calories that are normally associated with that food, that can be problematic for your body's metabolism.
Michael Moss: Yeah, that's the fear. I mean, look, nutritionists will say, look, if you need a diet soda to get through the day, and that's going to help you from eating that bag of Fritos, then go for it. It's probably worth it. But there is this raw science out there, and some concern that, yeah, maybe something weird is going on, the brain is expecting those calories, not getting them. How does the body react? You know, which is one of the most troubling things to me, which is that there's so many open questions about nutrition, about health, about our reaction to these products, and yet so little quality research gets done in that field, in part because it's not in the interest of these food companies to fund that research, and the government has less and less money to do that as well.
Leslie Beck: That's troubling. I find, as a dietitian, that is troubling.
Michael Moss: Yes.
Leslie Beck: So you do talk about Big Food, the name given to an industry in which a few huge companies dominate the production and sale of food and drinks to consumers. Can you talk a little bit about the problem with only a few dominating our purchasing power?
Michael Moss: You know, I think that's true of so many industries. I mean, some people have called the processed food industry a cartel. It really comes to play in their ability to control what's on the grocery shelf. You may walk into a grocery store and think everything is, like, clean and peaceful and quiet. But behind the scenes, this is an incredibly fierce industry, fighting each other for space on the shelf. And in Salt Sugar Fat, you may recall I wrote about Kraft, which was the largest company at the time, used to be owned by Philip Morris. Insiders at the company became concerned about their culpability in obesity and type two diabetes and urged the company to do things to help people change their diet for the better. And so they put restrictions on the amount of salt, sugar, fat in some of their products. They cut back on marketing to kids, they changed the label to alert people that they were eating five servings of calories and not just one if they went for the whole bag, which so many of us do.
Michael Moss: But when Kraft tried to do that—especially reducing the sugar—the competitors came in and basically edged it off the grocery store shelf with their products that had even more sugar on them. And so the ability of even big companies, but also small companies to come in and innovate, and create and invent new versions of food that are still tasty and inexpensive and wow us but are healthy for us, is hurt by the dominance of these large food companies that control not just the grocery store, but the entire agriculture system. I mean, most of the research and development money goes toward growing corn for processed food and also soybeans, as opposed to say, making fruits and vegetables more palatable and less expensive and available year round. So it's really kind of their dominance, sort of controlling the entire food system, is hurting sort of our ability to nudge companies wanting to do the right thing and to being able to do that.
Leslie Beck: To innovate. Right. So you talked about this earlier, but I'm going to ask it again. So what are companies doing today to help us eat a healthier diet? What have you seen happen out there since 2013, when your book Salt Sugar Fat came out?
Michael Moss: Yeah, so there was this incredible meeting, I think it was 2015, where the heads of the largest companies were brought together to a meeting in Florida to address their declining sales in some of the more ultra-processed foods that they were creating. More and more people were caring about what they were putting in their bodies. They were acting on that caring by changing their buying habits. And it doesn't take much to drive, put the industry in a panic. And in fact, Wall Street investors were saying to the companies, "Hey, wait a minute, what are you guys doing here to address this changing public sentiment?"
Michael Moss: And so the companies set about doing several things. One, they started cutting back on salt, sugar, fat, but in many cases, they were adding so much to begin with, that the cutbacks really weren't all that significant. And then they begin adding things that they knew we would look at as being positives. And so they began adding protein to foods, even to, say, sugary cereal, right, would have, like, a label on the front saying "added protein." It's still sugary cereal, but that added protein was kind of exciting to us. Fibre, more and more companies began adding more fibre because we came to think of fibre as being something, knowing that when you get a fresh piece of fruit—celery, again, something with lots of fibre—it does seem to tend to slow you down in the digestion and give your give the stop part of your brain time to catch up with the go part. So they added more fibre.
Michael Moss: And they've also been studying our DNA to look at some people who have an uncanny ability not to gain weight. It's really pretty fascinating. But there are a certain number of people out there who, no matter how much they eat, they can't gain weight, because they feel full really fast. And so much of this effort on the part of the company, whether it's to understand and tweak our genetic makeup, or add fibre and protein, is kind of aimed at this essential question is, you know, can they help us find ways to to resist the charms, the allure of their products and regain control of them, which if you think about it—well, I'll give you another great example. So I talk about in the book how the general counsel of Philip Morris—at the time Philip Morris made both cigarettes and Oreo cookies—was really only scared of one of those two things. He could smoke a cigarette during a business meeting and then put his pack of cigarettes away, not touch it until the next business meeting the next day, right? He was totally in control.
Michael Moss: But he told me that he couldn't open a bag of Oreos for fear that he would gulp down half the bag. And so he just, like, totally avoided doing those. Well, just recently, the new maker of Oreos put out a tutorial to help people learn how to eat Oreo cookies—I kid you not—in a more controlled way. And it's such a fascinating video because, you know, inadvertently the company is kind of pointing to all the things that drive us crazy about Oreo cookies, the texture and the smell. But at the very end of the video, the host of it says, "Look, you know, just try to put a couple Oreos on your plate, and instead of, like, cramming in your mouth, you know, take, like, a little bite of one and then put it back on the plate." And they call this tutorial "mindful snacking." Not just Oreos, but chips and etc. And that's huge, because so much of the industry's design of these ultra-processed foods is about creating mindlessness. So we eat them without even thinking about them increasingly as snacks. I mean, snacking became like the fourth North American meal, right? We're now getting more than 500 calories on average a day per person by just like, you know, kind of one-hand snacking while we're doing something else. And I think that's a really key aspect. Well, and that's one of the pitfalls in addiction and binging and full-bore cravings is being unable to pay enough attention to that food, to change the way you think about it.
Leslie Beck: Right. Right. So let's end on a hopeful note, then. In the epilogue you write, "When the food industry schemes, we can too." What advice do you have then for people to prevent food addiction?
Michael Moss: One of the lessons from cigarette, alcohol, drug experts, is that the cravings that hit us from those addictive substances come on so fast that you have to plan ahead. And your approach to dealing with food can be your own approach. Nothing works for everybody. And so just to kind of give you an example, if you're somebody who gets a craving for cookies at 3:00 p.m., you probably need to be thinking about doing something else at 2:55 in order to prepare for and brace yourself and/or prevent that craving. And that could be—you know, depending on your approach, it could be standing up and stretching or picking up the phone and calling a friend, or seeking out an alternative like a handful of nuts to sort of keep you full and satisfied until dinner.
Michael Moss: But the key thing is that cravings, whether it's for drugs or food, happen so fast that if you allow them to happen, you won't have the ability to kind of catch up to that. You'll be off and running to the pantry or kitchen these days, instead of the vending machine at work, to sort of fulfil that. And I think that's the biggest lesson. Because look, I mean, I really believe that knowledge is power, and knowing everything that the food companies do to get us to not just want their products but want more and more is oddly empowering. And I still believe that, but with this aspect of how they're going after us, that planning ahead, I think, is what plugs in the other aspect of this, which is free will. And really gives us the freedom to make those decisions for ourselves.
Leslie Beck: That's excellent advice. And you also write in your book that it's, you know, changing what we value in food is important as well.
Michael Moss: Yeah, I love that. And that's, you know, you're standing at the coffee shop, and you see the shelf of pastries. And kind of this question, and a neuroscientist had suggested this to me, look, so much of us are acting on kind of immediate impulses, immediate gratification, and not thinking about the long-term consequences of that. So some people are working on ways to sort of help us change how we value food. So even in the moment, the battleline, the battlefront, if you will, in our efforts to regain control of our food, even then, to sort of help us change what we value and look at food as something more than just taste and smell and that wow in the brain, but as fuel for our body and etc. is huge. And I love that expression, "Change how and what we value in food."
Leslie Beck: Tell me how the pandemic has influenced our snacking habits.
Michael Moss: I mean, I think I think our pandemic eating is really illustrative of the kind of the deeper problem that we faced before and we're going to face after. I mean, I was so hopeful that the pandemic—and I know this is a small thing in the context of all the pain of the pandemic, but it would help us change our eating habits. Because look, we pulled ourselves out of the food environment where all that advertising and the vending machine at work would, like, you know, lure us in. But what happened is that the food companies kind of followed us and they changed their advertising to go after our fear.
Michael Moss: I mean, Doritos, came up with this Twitter ad where it had two people measuring their safe six-foot distance with six-foot-long bags of Doritos, right? They were finding ways to push our emotional buttons and our fear, right? So we'd go to the grocery store, and that translated into soaring sales for the junkiest stuff. So the companies were rejoicing because when we went shopping, we were buying things—you know, remember the power of memory—that we hadn't eaten since childhood, just as kind of looking for that satisfaction in this moment of terror and chaos. And so I think that so many people found themselves falling for the food companies yet again, even at a moment when it seemed like we could have more control over, and regain control over our eating habits. But it's just so hard given their ability to tap those basic instincts of ours.
Leslie Beck: Yeah. And I think that is a really important point for people too is it's so critical, so key to be mindful of food marketing in all its many forms out there. And that's something actually in Canada, in 2019, Health Canada released a new food guide, and one of the messages to consumers was—and it gave consumers tips also on how to be mindful of food marketing. That was fantastic. Thank you so much, Michael, for spending time with me today, answering my questions. I've learned a lot. Your book was fascinating. Good luck with it. And thank you again for your time.
Michael Moss: Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it as well.
Christopher Shulgan: That was Medcan director of food and nutrition Leslie Beck in conversation with Michael Moss, author of the new book, Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions.
Christopher Shulgan: I'm executive producer Christopher Shulgan. We'll post links, show notes and the full episode transcript at eatmovethinkpodcast.com.
Christopher Shulgan: Eat Move Think is produced by Ghost Bureau. Senior producer is Russell Gragg. Chantel Guertin produced this episode, along with editorial and social media support from Emily Mannella and Tiffany Lewis.
Christopher Shulgan: Remember to rate and subscribe to Eat Move Think on your favourite podcast platform. Follow host Shaun Francis on Twitter and Instagram @shauncfrancis—that's Shaun with a U—and Medcan @medcanlivewell. Find Leslie Beck on Twitter @LeslieBeckRD. We'll be back soon with a new episode examining the latest in health and wellness.
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