HOOKED
Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions
By Michael Moss
As an entree to Michael Moss’s excellent new book, “Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions,” try this experiment. Imagine or — even better — place two bowls in front of you: one with potato chips; the other with whole walnuts. Make sure they are both good quality brands and fresh from a never-opened bag. Sample a walnut first. Enjoy how its initial slightly bitter crunch transforms into something soft, buttery, faintly woodsy. Next munch a potato chip. Its flavor is less complex than the walnut’s, but every chip instantly delivers an intense combination of salt, sugar and fat. They are so crispy you can hear them snap between your teeth, and then they miraculously dissolve into nothingness on your tongue, making you want another. And another. And another.
Now ask yourself which is more likely to make you fat. From a purely nutritional perspective the answer is easy: the walnuts. According to the nutrition labels helpfully provided on both packages, an ounce of walnuts contains 186 calories, 25 percent more than the 150 calories delivered by an ounce of potato chips. To be sure, walnuts pack more protein and fiber and less salt, but if weight gain is your worry, you should eat the potato chips.
Obviously, it is preposterous to consider potato chips less fattening than walnuts — because potato chips are among the most addictive foods on the planet, along with French fries, pizza, cheeseburgers and Oreos. Too many of us can’t help eating too much of this stuff. And that’s the chief motivation for “Hooked,” which is in many ways a sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist’s 2013 tour de force, “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.” That book exposed how multinational food companies churn out processed foods that are both cheap and alluring. “Hooked” asks how food manufacturers manipulate these foods to addict us, helping along a national crisis in which 40 percent of Americans are obese.
No one questions that the nutritional quality of foods has health consequences, but “Hooked” redirects our attention to the arguably more important question of quantity. To do so, Moss first focuses necessarily on the brain, the true fountainhead of addiction, which he defines (using the words of a Philip Morris C.E.O.) as “a repetitive behavior that some people find difficult to quit.”
If you are not a neuroscientist, you’ll be relieved by Moss’s jargon-free approach to this complex biology. Without going into much detail, he describes how foods can be engineered to trigger the brain’s “on switch” (mostly the neurotransmitter, dopamine) and inhibit its “off switch” (a region called the prefrontal cortex). These switches and the instincts that turn them on and off have deep evolutionary origins that likely helped our ancestors survive and thrive when food was scarce.
And, wow, are the hard-wired instincts to eat these foods powerful — more so than those that push us toward addictive drugs like heroin and nicotine. Even seeing the pictures of certain foods can cause us to salivate. In unforgettable language, Moss describes how less than a second after you bite into a luscious chocolate or a glazed doughnut, flavor sensations derived from a combination of sugar and fat, as well as other smells and tastes, hit your brain, interact with memories and release a flood of neurotransmitters that stimulate and perpetuate fundamental cravings.
We find out how Big Food innovates to manipulate and intensify these addiction-inducing sensations. We also learn how multinational food companies, in gastro-Orwellian fashion, hook us by expertly tapping into our memories, introducing endless new varieties, and combining sensations and ingredients rarely seen together in nature like sugar and fat, brittle and soft, sweet and salty. None of us are immune.
According to Moss, Big Food is relentlessly and cynically striving to maximize their “share of stomach,” industry parlance for how much of the food we eat they can supply. Beyond hunting for genes that predispose us to particular cravings or quantifying exactly how much sugar our brains prefer, these corporate peddlers perniciously play with serving sizes on nutrition labels to deceive us into thinking we are making healthy choices.
To trick us to eat more they also lure us in with low prices, dazzling packaging, convenience and trumped-up variety. One example among many: Differently colored M&M’s taste the same but dupe our brains to consume more than if they were all just brown. Perhaps most cunningly, Big Food has also acquired many major brands of processed diet foods like Weight Watchers and Lean Cuisine. One has to admit it’s clever to make money helping us get fat and then profit from our efforts (usually futile) to lose weight.
All in all, “Hooked” blends investigative reporting, science and foodie writing to argue that the processed food industry is no different from tobacco companies like Philip Morris that for decades lied about the harmful and addictive nature of cigarettes. In Philip Morris’s case they were the same company (until recently, Philip Morris owned Kraft and General Foods).
Which leads to a question: Who is at fault? No one is forced to eat at McDonald’s or drink Dr Pepper, and few Americans are unaware that a salad for lunch is healthier than a cheeseburger with fries. But Moss’s argument is that free will is an illusion, at least for certain foods.
He’s right. It is sometimes said that for some of us sugar is as addictive as cocaine, but from an evolutionary biological perspective, cocaine is actually as addictive as sugar, because it takes advantage of ancient mechanisms we inherited from our distant ancestors that helped them acquire rare but needed calories. To stay healthy in our current, modern food system, consumers have to overcome instincts and make choices over which we have little control.
Moss’s attention to food addiction should open eyes and convert some free market advocates. On legal grounds, Big Food may be safe in court for now, but their actions raise ethical questions. Should we judge companies solely by their profits or by how they affect the world? Regardless of debates about the law and free will, is it acceptable to market to children breakfast cereals like Cotton Candy Cap’n Crunch, which is nearly half sugar? These and many other harmful habit-forming foods have fattened corporate bank accounts at the cost of fattening hundreds of millions of Americans, contributing to countless premature deaths and debilitating illnesses as well as costing trillions of dollars. Even if you don’t consume these foods, you are paying big time for their consequences.
“Hooked” can also help us pay more attention to the relationship between food quantity and quality. Over the last few decades modern, westernized attitudes toward food have increasingly focused on nutrition labels that inform us how many grams of saturated fat, fiber and other stuff are in the foods we buy. These labels can make many highly processed foods seem deceptively harmless compared with more calorie-dense natural foods like avocados, salmon and walnuts. Yet how many people overeat unprocessed wholesome foods?
Nutritionist perspectives on food combined with the challenges of losing weight also generate confusion over the relative merits of alternative diets, sometimes promoting new kinds of disordered eating as we Google the glycemic index of muffins or bananas, and worry about whether chocolate, eggs or peanuts are “good” or “bad.”
I’ve done my share of Googling and fretting, but I’m done with this. One doesn’t need a degree in nutrition science to recognize that just about every traditional, nonprocessed diet from every culture on the planet that isn’t loaded with junk food is probably generally healthy. What’s more, like those walnuts, those diets are tastier too.
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March 13, 2021 at 05:09AM
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Book Review: ‘Hooked,’ by Michael Moss - The New York Times
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