Why are processed foods so irresistible?
Damn the man, eat vegetables.
Afternoon tea is a Held family ritual. When I was growing up, my mom would put the kettle on and place a cheap tea bag—Lipton, Red Rose, or Salada—in each mug. After she poured the boiling water, she’d add a splash of skim milk.
At some point, my siblings and I figured out that other people put sugar in tea and began clamoring for it. The answer was always a resolute, “No way.” I vividly remember the moment when, in college, I made my first cup of tea in my dorm room and spooned a heaping pile of sugar into the cup. It was freedom and agency and...I couldn’t drink it. I hated the taste.
This is one of the many things that popped into my mind recently while reading Michael Moss’ new book Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions. I read it as part of an assignment for FoodPrint to cover what science can actually tell us about whether or not ultra-processed foods are inherently bad for us. And I found the book so fascinating, I’m writing about it again, here, because there’s so much I didn’t get to in the FoodPrint story (which also includes other reporting).
When I say “ultra-processed,” I mean the engineered foods that fill supermarket shelves and fast food restaurants and lure you with a never-ending array of manufactured colors and flavors to hide the fact that they’re mostly some form (or many forms) of corn and/or soy. Processing as a rule isn’t bad. Cooking can be processing, or what about fermenting, baking, and blending? We’re talking about Sour Patch Kids, not sauerkraut.
In Hooked, Moss gets into science related to addiction, evolutionary biology, and memory to demonstrate how and what we’re programmed to eat, and how companies use that information to get us to buy their products.
On both the memory and addiction front, my mom was onto something. Give a kid tea without sugar over and over, and her brain will decide that’s what tea is supposed to taste like. Associate it with happy family memories, and it’ll stick. On the flip side, give a kid Arizona Iced Tea, and the sugar (90g in a bottle) will quickly excite her brain. Meanwhile, her stomach won’t even realize she’s ingesting calories so she won’t fill up, and she’ll just keep ingesting more and more because now she’s hooked. After a while, it’ll start affecting her health.
Here’s a better example of the way companies do this, via news that showed up in my inbox the week I was reading the book: Nestle’s newest product is…Stouffer’s LasagnaMac! It is the embodiment of everything Moss writes about. So many people have comforting memories of lasagna or mac ‘n’ cheese or both. Your brain loves variety (you can have both at once!) and calories (oh so many in a small package!) and salt-fat-sugar..it’s got all the addictive stuff shoved into one tiny rectangle. Plus hardly any fiber, so you can eat it super fast without feeling satiated.
The point is: If you’ve ever wondered why it’s so hard to stop reaching for a bag of Doritos or been confused about why some people can’t stop eating certain foods and others can, this book is filled with compelling (albeit complicated) answers. Food choices are about much more than personal taste, willpower, or values.
Here are a few of the most interesting points from my interview with Moss; there is much more in the book if you’re intrigued.
Unwrapped
Processed food is probably addictive—and not in a metaphorical way
“Let’s take the definition of addiction from Philip Morris, which I think is in line with the general understanding even among experts about addiction… ‘a repetitive behavior that some people find difficult to quit.’ I mean, I would argue that in many ways food—or the packaged foods I’m writing about in this book that fill 90 percent of the grocery store—is even more problematic than smoking, alcohol, or drugs. Not even just as problematic, but even more problematic. There are a couple of reasons why. One is the food environment. Drugs are not so cheap and available. This food is everywhere and is heavily marketed. For an alcoholic, it would be like living inside a bar. It’s ever-present. It's really hard to get away from and it's so accessible. There's no obstacle to eating and overeating.”
Your memories are more powerful than you realize
“The second way I think this food is more powerful than drugs is memory. We develop these incredible memories at a really early age. And those memories tend to get tied to other emotional happenings in our lives and remain really strong for the rest of our lives. I experienced that when I walked into a Kellogg's research and development factory, and they had bungled an assembly line full of Pop-Tarts dough, and they were dumping it. The aroma wafted across the floor and instantly took me back to when I was in elementary school. Being a latchkey kid, I would come in and put Pop-Tarts in the oven. I hadn't had a Pop-Tart in decades, and yet that memory was still strong in me.”
Ultra-processed foods short circuit your brain
“The third way...is the speed with which these products hit us. Speed is a hallmark of addictive substances. And it turns out there's nothing faster than food in the way that it hits the brain, especially sugar, salt, and fat. It kind of plays a trick based on our biology, because we are built to love food and to want more. When we put sugar on the tongue...it’s able to send the signal to the brain really quickly. Something yummy is coming in and let's start chewing that and eating it. [In one] experiment, they sat people down and tried to measure the speed [at which] sugar and salt [registered in the brain after it hit the tongue]. People were pushing the button because they recognized those flavors or tastes in less than a second, compared to cigarette smoke taking as much as 10 seconds to kind of fully engage the brain.”
You are programmed to want lots of cheap calories from a variety of foods
“Those biological instincts of ours...one of them is cheapness. We love food that is inexpensive, seemingly in part because for our forebears, finding the food that required the least amount of energy expenditure was really important to survival. You know, if you're in a hunter-gatherer society, it made a lot more sense that instead of running down the impala for dinner, just grab that aardvark that's sitting there. So the companies know that we love food that's inexpensive. They have these chemical laboratories working for them creating a lot of amazing things, including flavors out of test tubes. But one of the overarching missions for the food industry is to reduce the cost of their ingredients so they can knock ten cents off a package of Pop-Tarts, knowing that we'll get excited about that. So, it's kind of like we're hooked on cheap food and they make food even cheaper.
Variety is another one of those basic instincts that evolutionary biologists love to talk about. They view humans as being incredibly adaptable to eating lots of different things. There were previous swings in climate that caused us to completely alter our diets, and then when we spread around the globe, we were forced to fall in love with things like whale blubber, which we did. Being very flexible and loving variety [was good for our survival and helped us get the range of nutrients we needed]. So what the food companies do is they create this infinite variety in the grocery store, and that's where you walk into the cereal aisle and there's 200 versions of sugary starch for breakfast cereal, all just different in the color or the shape or what have you. But that variety in and of itself is really exciting to our brains. It prompts us to buy it. That's also called the smorgasbord effect, where you're going down the line and your plate is full and maybe it's your second trip down the buffet, but you see something new and you get excited and you put it on your plate. There's always room for something new.
And the calories. We are by nature drawn toward calories, and I didn't know this, but we have sensors in the gut and possibly even in the mouth that detect calories when we're eating. And the brain gets excited by calories almost as much as with sugar. Because calories for most of our existence were life or death. We wanted more calories in order to put on more body fat because that meant our brains could grow and we could have more offspring and we could get through hard times.” [Editor’s note: Of course for many people today getting enough calories is still an issue; here Moss is addressing how processed foods, when available, drive overeating.]
That “nutrition facts” box is also used as marketing and can hide the bigger picture
“My own impression of that information was always that it was almost entirely nonsense. I've been studying food for 10 years now, and it's still rather meaningless to me. I mean, looking at the nutrition facts box, what does it really mean that, say, a Hot Pocket has 375 calories vs. 325 calories or something? It’s all a jumble of grams and percentages. It turns out that the majority of people don't even look at that information and those who do are rather perplexed by it, except for one basic reaction, which is, ‘It's a lot of data from the government. It must mean that this product has been studied and certified as kind of being okay.’ And that's where the industry was coming from when it suggested [nutrition labeling]. They realized that if they told people they could know everything that's in the products, then maybe they’ll be less worried about them.
Those numbers mask the bigger question, which is, ‘Is this real food?’
That relates to fiber. Toward the end of the book, I talked about how the food companies, in response to our concerns about losing control when eating their products, are doing things like adding fiber to products. But there's hardly any good science showing the fiber that they're adding works in the way that fiber in vegetables works, which is to slow us down and cause us to feel fuller faster.”
Wrapped up, to go
*Food cravings and choices are driven by a complicated set of factors including biology rooted in how humans evolved and what we ate growing up.
*Ultra-processed foods are unhealthy because they’re designed to encourage you to ingest more calories quickly—and to keep on eating without ever feeling full.
*It’s not always possible for many reasons, but when it is: Damn the man, eat real food.
Still hungry?
Speaking of things that don’t show up on the nutrition facts…For Civil Eats, I wrote about how in the meat industry, most cattle feedlots and hog CAFOs still routinely put medically-important antibiotics in the animals’ feed for long periods of time, despite the fact that the chicken industry has almost eliminated the practice. This is a huge public health issue, since antibiotic-resistance linked to overuse is a serious threat.
Whose land is this? On The Farm Report, I interviewed Dania Davy about how a century of land loss has impacted Black farmers and families and whether new policies in Washington will have a meaningful impact on the ground. Davy recently joined the Federation of Southern Cooperatives as the director of land retention and advocacy. Here’s a takeaway stat for you: In 1920, close to one million Black farmers made up about 14 percent of America’s farmers. In 2017, less than 50,000 Black farmers remained, making up just over one percent. You can listen on Heritage Radio, here, or look for “Episode 419: Fighting for Black Farmers’ Land” anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Currently devouring
Meatless mania. Conversations about eating meat, cutting back on meat, and fake meat have been blowing up all over the place, from Epicurious’ and Eleven Madison Park’s announcements to Ezra Klein’s op-ed in The New York Times. Since I already recently covered techy meat replacements and JBS’ climate claims, I didn’t think it made sense to further analyze these things here. But I’ve been reading other people’s thoughts on these issues and there are two essays I think do a good job digging into it. Mark Bittman and his team’s take at The Bittman Project is one, and this op-ed on Civil Eats is another.
Actually eating
Here’s a quick-and-easy dinner we had this week: A big salad (spinach and red onions with a simple vinaigrette), creamy white beans, and bread. Spike cooked the beans and then added garlic, a chopped roasted pepper, and a bunch of chopped herbs. It had so much flavor.
One thing I learned from him recently is the fact that when you cook beans, you can just retain the water they were cooking in as it cooks down, so you end up with a creamy dish, not just dry beans. Maybe that’s common knowledge, but it was news to me. It works well for black beans for tacos, for instance, or in this case, you could spoon these over toast.
Let’s be friends
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