The Mafia of the Food Industry: We're Still Hooked on Poisonous Food
Disclaimer: Everything discussed in this post comes from a remarkable book called "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss. This book shows how three ingredients and marketing became keys to the success of processed and packaged foods. This post touches on why food companies never cared for the nutritional aspects of food marketing or acted responsibly toward the public, why we should stop romanticizing marketing, what threats food companies deal with, how the food industry makes tens of billions of dollars in annual sales, and how they hooked us.
With all the current information, we still make poor choices, not because of our unwillingness to resist the allure of the low cost of processed food but because our stores are filled with products that aren't exceptionally nutritious but are really convenient and tasty.
Food manufacturers have long understood the power of sugar, salt, and fat to make their products more alluring.
Through rigorous research, they learned that lessening the amount of these three ingredients would mean diminishing the taste, texture, and allure, thus resulting in fewer sales and profits.
“They are knowingly designed — engineered is the better word — to maximize their allure. Their packaging is tailored to excite our kids. Their advertising uses every psychological trick to overcome any logical arguments we might have for passing the product by. Their taste is so powerful, we remember it from the last time we walked down the aisle and succumbed, snatching them up. And above all else, their formulas are calculated and perfected by scientists who know very well what they are doing. The most crucial point to know is that there is nothing accidental in the grocery store. All of this is done with a purpose.”
We eat unhealthy food because we tried it, became addicted, and now crave it even though we know how bad it is for our health.
We're addicted to poisonous food.
You cannot blame any food product for your health problems, but they do cause some illnesses. The obesity trend is an epidemic, and there is no question that its roots are directly tied to the expansion of fast food, junk food, and soft drink consumption.
Unfortunately, there are other health problems like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Sometimes, even the government is protective of the industry it is supposed to hold accountable.
Food manufacturers convinced us to choose food based on taste, convenience, flavor, price, and sensory satisfaction.
When shopping, we tend to pick mostly the products that keep us satisfied and that we love for their taste and how they feel in our mouths, not to mention the signals of pleasure our brains will discharge as a reward for choosing the tastiest foods. Then, not to feel so guilty, we pick a few products that we think are nutritious.
Food giants never cared for the nutritional aspects of food marketing or acted responsibly toward the public.
They transformed traditional unsweetened breakfasts into dessert-like snacks. They invented new ones that made their consumers addicted by adding "illegal" amounts of sugar, salt, fat, and other ingredients directly responsible for the obesity epidemic, diabetes, and the earliest signs of hypertension and heart disease, especially in children.
Food manufacturers discovered that our bodies are hard-wired for sweets; the entire mouth goes wild for sugar. "They've discovered that the brain lights up for sugar the same way it does for cocaine." Thus, sugar has become one of the most dangerous additives in food.
However, salt and fat also play an important role in making our mouths drool and exciting the brain about eating.
“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 whose effects are less obvious but no less powerful.”… “Fat and sugar both produce strong reward effects in the brain.’”
But there's hope when it comes to salt. Addiction to salt can be readily reversed. All we need is to stop eating processed foods for a while. However, without salt, processed food companies cease to exist.
Stop Romanticizing Marketing
For food companies, marketing is a full partner with these three ingredients: sugar, salt, and fat.
Advertising is one of the food giants' most potent tools to create allure and distinguish themselves from competitors.
Food companies spend as little money as possible on making their products or on their employees; their money mostly goes on aggressive marketing.
Thousands of brands compete for the shopper's attention, so food manufacturers now spend nearly twice as much money on advertising their products as they do on the ingredients that go into them.
Their commercials convince us that eating junk food is normal, desirable, and fun; it is also an accepted way to satisfy hunger at breakfast or between meals.
The food giants' relentless drive to be above their competitors and to achieve the most incredible allure for the lowest possible cost has made them rework the food itself, playing with the magical formulations of salt, sugar, and fat.
They will never cut back on the amount of sugar, salt, and fat, as their only goal is to create the biggest craving that will generate the biggest sales and profit.
Food companies know how to make attractive grocery products to increase the consumption of their products. They have their own research teams that ensure their products will easily influence their consumers' eating habits and make them think their food is nutritious.
“Many soups, cookies, potato chips, cakes, pies, and frozen meals deliver half or more of their calories through fat, and yet consumers won’t identify these as fatty foods, which is great for sales. For some extra insurance on this, all the manufacturers have to do is add a little sugar.”
Manufacturers will play with color, smell, packaging, and taste to stand out from the crowd, excite shoppers, and boost sales. They will alter these variables ever so slightly by making dozens of new versions that are slightly different. There are no new products to sell, but they do appear to be so and succeed in bringing the excitement of trying a new product or brand.
Do you know what kinds of threats food companies have to deal with?
The CEOs and their companies have gone too far in creating and marketing products to maximize their allure.
Regarding strategies for dealing with the public's mounting health concerns, the food giants don't take measures that may benefit the public's health at least a bit.
They make strategies to look less guilty, blame others, and find new clever ways to sell their products or create entirely new unnecessary products and brands just for profit and to eliminate their competition.
They will never express remorse for causing and accelerating the rate of some illnesses; they will always say that it's our own fault, that we've done it to ourselves by not exerting enough willpower to resist consuming their products.
Every time the in-house dieticians of companies raise concerns about the health implications of all this added sugar, their voice of caution is quickly silenced.
If these companies have to deal with threats like the emerging epidemic of obesity in adults and especially in children caused by their products, or diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, gallbladder disease, osteoarthritis, and three types of cancer—breast, colon, and that of the uterus lining, they would come forward and appear very concerned, not for consumers' health but for the impact on their sales.
Almost all food companies played a central role in creating this health crisis.
Yet they don't care about addressing the obesity problem. Obesity is not their problem because they are not consuming their own products. They have personal trainers, gym memberships, and enough nutritional awareness to avoid heavy diets with their manufactured foods.
You call them entrepreneurs; you romanticize their capabilities, but they are only greedy experts. They are fixers, highly skilled in dealing with every threat coming their way.
The dominant players in processed industrial food are fiercely aggressive competitors defined by their skill in fighting each other. They only care about being above every competitor, even if this means slowly killing people. They fight to diminish any concern for our health that comes from us.
They will never adjust or change the formulations to fit a healthier aspect, like a lower calorie, sugar level, or fat level product line.
As long as there are so many junk food companies at every corner, I will never believe that the government does its job.
Food scientists always find new ways to create high-calorie foods that the public finds irresistible. Food giants don't blame themselves for the habits we see in commercials everywhere for sodas, chips, and TV dinners. This isn't an occasional habit anymore but a daily, even hourly, habit.
Any improvement to the nutritional profile of a product can in no way diminish its allure, and this has led to one of the industry's most devious moves: lowering one harmful ingredient like fat while quietly adding more sugar or salt to keep people hooked.
How do you think the food industry makes tens of billions of dollars in annual sales?
We must understand how these three ingredients became necessary for the food giants and their sales.
For decades, more than three hundred physiologists, chemists, neuroscientists, biologists, and geneticists have helped decipher the mechanisms of taste and smell and the complex psychology underlying our love for food.
The food companies hooked us on salt, sugar, and fat once they learned about the power of these three ingredients to excite our brains about eating, thus creating cravings.
They turned these three ingredients into the most powerful weapons they deploy to defeat their competitors and keep us coming back for more.
Food manufacturers compelled us through marketing to eat more junk food than we should, thus harming our health without realizing it until it was too late for some.
Understanding of how sugar creates such strong magnetism in food.
Our sugar craving results from the massive amounts of sugar added to processed foods. Scientists call this a learned behavior due to the increasingly sweet American diet, which drives the desire for more sugar and doesn't correspond to optimum nutritional practices.
The sweeter the industry makes its food, the sweeter we and our children like it. However, children prefer more intense sweetness than adults.
Food companies are not only teaching children to like sweetness; they are also teaching them what foods should taste like.
How did they hook us?
- First, they learned that hunger is a poor driver of cravings; we rarely get into situations where our body and brain are depleted of nutrients and actually need replenishment.
We are driven to eat by other forces in our lives: emotional needs, taste, aroma, appearance, and texture. When we eat nutritious food, we are saturated. Thus, they found ways to create delicious products high in calories, making us overeat and return for more.
Our bodies are less aware of excessive intake when the calories we consume are liquid.
But even when we get hungry, we may still choose junk food because it's more convenient.
- Second, they capitalized on our hunger for faster, more convenient food.
“Convenience is the great additive which must be designed, built in, combined, blended, interwoven, injected, inserted, or otherwise added to or incorporated in products or services if they are to satisfy today’s demanding public. It is the new and controlling denominator of consumer acceptance or demand.”
We search for food that costs little, that the kids will eat, that lasts longer, and that will take little time to prepare.
We don't have time to cook meals from scratch, even if they are more nutritious for ourselves and our families. Therefore, the food manufacturers saw the opportunity to create tasteful food that was easy to prepare: frozen, fast, and boxed.
Unhealthy products like ready-to-eat meals or frozen foods were designed to exploit working moms' guilt and kids' desire for empowerment. Thus, we consumed sugary products and processed food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner because they were convenient, tasteful, easy to prepare, and affordable.
- Third, they took advantage of our ignorance. We rarely question or understand what we put into our bodies; if we do, we don't have the luxury of time or money to get nutritious food.
- And fourth, instead of warning consumers about the ingredient loads inside and telling them how much the whole package contained, the nutrition facts said only, at first, how much there was in a serving, subtly encouraging people to buy and eat more. And even though they put a total calorie count on the front of food packages, these packages still bore huge loads of salt, sugar, and fat.
Every time a product gets a bad reputation among consumers, food companies create cheaper and more convenient alternatives for manufacturing and invest in advertising them everywhere.
They label their products in a manner that doesn't appear to be misleading to consumers with a long ingredient list of charming euphemisms, claiming that it is in keeping with the labeling regulations.
Remember that when you buy a product, you don't pay for its quality or nutritional value. You pay for the brand's marketing campaigns.
These entrepreneurs invented their own language and used devious marketing tactics that compelled us to try their products. They hooked us on them due to their power to temporarily make us happy and full, but we became addicted to them in the long term.
They could have put their competent scientists to work searching for ways to ease the industry's addiction to salt, sugar, and fat and make products that do not lack nutritional value, products with substantial amounts of whole-grain fiber, fruits or vegetables, and key vitamins and minerals. They could have put the brakes on advertising their addictive products, but they were too fond of their sales and profits.
After all, we can still decide what to buy and how much to eat. We now see the products for what they are. Therefore, we can take better care of our health by taking cooking classes, spending more time in the kitchen, buying more responsibly, exercising, paying attention to portion sizes, and monitoring our health.
To understand more about the cost we and our bodies pay for convenient food, read Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss. It reveals many statistics concerning our health; it shows how fat, as well as salt and sugar, relate to obesity and other health problems, and how food giants evolved and their deceptive and fraudulent practices that compel us to overeat without realizing it.
