Why Salt Sugar Fat is a Must-Read
Oh, this book, this book. I’m thinking if you’re reading here, you’re probably already familiar with Michael Moss’s Salt Sugar Fat at least in title. If not, it’s a fascinating read on how our current processed, fast-food, snacking-all-the-time culture came to be. The book details the driving forces behind convenience foods (such as more women joining the workforce outside of the home and having less time for meal prep, men working longer hours, etc.), but it also talks at length about the brilliant marketing efforts of big food companies, sometimes in partnership with the government, in creating the desire for this way of eating.
Salt Sugar Fat is one of those books that has the potential to completely rock the way you think about food.
I’ve read it twice now, and I feel like I could read it a third time and still learn more. It’s presented in the form of stories – how instant pudding, Lunchables, and double-stuffed chocolate-covered Oreos, for example, came to exist over time. Moss doesn’t vilify the food giants or the government, but instead provides matter-of-fact histories and interviews with those who were at the center of it: the food scientists, the salespeople, the advertising executives, and explains the impact of what was happening in the marketplace. Now, that’s certainly not to say that these processed foods began as sunshine and good intent. They didn’t. These are businesses with one main and often only objective: to maximize profit. And so that’s where the extreme amounts of salt, sugar, and fat come into play, amounts that you would never add to real food made in your own kitchen.
Because this isn’t real food – these are products that come out of a lab, having gone through rigorous testing to create foods that are spot-on in terms of bliss point. Foods that operate similarly to drugs in creating pleasure, withdrawals, and intense cravings for more.
For years, I had wondered why I could rarely stop eating that bag of Lay’s baked potato chips or those Famous Amos cookies, and it made me not only feel unsatisfied and lethargic, but I also felt guilty – like I didn’t have the self-control I should have had to be able to stop at the serving size on the package. And now I understand that these processed foods are engineered to require an absolutely heroic effort to eat the serving size, and that this serving size is really just a marketing ploy. It’s there so the calorie count and fat grams don’t make us balk when we read the label (if we read it at all), but the food companies know that we will most certainly eat the entire bag in one or two sittings. They’ve designed the food to be this way. It’s why cheese puffs (an old favorite of mine as a kid) are so loaded with salt and fat (and sugar!) and disappear on the tongue almost immediately, leaving us reaching for another and another and another.
There were so many of these lightbulb moments in Salt Sugar Fat, too many for me to cover in a single post. However, I do want to share some of the excepts that had a profound impact on my understanding of the processed food industry:
- “Our bliss point for sugar – and all foods, for that matter – is shaped by our earliest experiences… It’s not that food companies are teaching children to like sweetness; rather, they are teaching children what foods should taste like… They are manipulating or exploring the biology of the child.”
- “In 1985, General Foods got a new lease on life when the tobacco giant Phillip Morris acquired it for $5.75 billion… Thanks to the acquisitions of General Foods and Kraft, ten cents of every dollar that Americans spent on groceries now belonged to Phillip Morris.”
- “In the mid-1950s, the food industry undertook two cunning maneuvers to draw working women into its fold. The first was to create its own army of home economics teachers. The second move was perhaps the most influential of all… The industry wielded its very own Betty to preach the creed of convenience. Her name was Betty Crocker…she was entirely fake…invented by the manager of the advertising department at General Mills.”
- “Research suggests that our bodies are less aware of excessive intake when the calories are liquid.”
- “If sugar is the methamphetamine of processed food ingredients, with its high-speed, blunt assault on our brains, then fat is the opiate, a smooth operator who effects are less obvious but no less powerful.”
- “Dairies…are not beholden to the constraints of a free market economy. Since the 1930s, the federal government has viewed milk as vital to the nation’s health. It subsidized the industry by setting price supports and using taxpayer money to buy any and all surplus…With the cows making more milk than anyone wanted to drink and the milk that people did want to drink being stripped of its fat, the industry devised an ingenious solution: it started turning it into cheese.”
- “The Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion’s annual budget is a paltry $6.5 million, which amounts to 0.0045 percent of the Department of Agriculture’s overall outlays of $146 billion.”
- “The dollars for marketing beef added up to more than $80 million a year, and over the years, the total money raised has topped $2 billion. …$2 billion for selling America on beef, compared with the $6.5 million the USDA’s nutrition center gets each year to nudge Americans in the other direction.”
- “The most crucial point to know is that there is nothing accidental in the grocery store….think of the grocery store as a battlefield…it becomes all the more apparent why the food industry is so reliant on salt, sugar, and fat. They are cheap. They are interchangeable. They are huge, powerful forces of nature in unnatural food…knowing all of this can be empowering…you can see the products for what they are.”
I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes, which was appropriately stated as the last couple of lines in the epilogue:
“They may have salt, sugar, and fat on their side, but we, ultimately, have the power to make choices. After all, we decide what we buy. We decide how much we eat.”
I’ve always thought of myself as a proponent of moderation, but when it comes to processed food, moderation is a grueling, uphill battle. More and more, I think for myself (and perhaps many of you too), I’m likely better off avoiding it altogether. It’s just not worth the energy suck.
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What do you think? Have you read Salt Sugar Fat?
xo
Amanda
Disclosure: There are Amazon affiliate links in this post.
