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In Salt, Sugar, Fat, Moss talks about his three year journey through the processed food industry and what he found was truly frightening. The three ingredients in the title are the pillars of the industry and to say the industry uses them liberally is like saying hockey can be a little violent at times. The amount of these ingredients used is shocking and has led to the epidemic of obesity, Type-2 diabetes, and other health concerns which are taxing our health and the health care industry.
Nor is the industry unaware of the problems it is creating. Moss spent a great deal of time talking to the scientists who are responsible for the creation of many of the worst offenders, many of whom have at least tried to make healthier changes. But, as Moss points out, this is an industry more beholden to its shareholders than its consumers. If they can't show profits, Wall Street will want to know why and it won't take 'health crisis' for an answer.
And the industry does its best to comply. Children's shows are inundated with commercials pushing cereals with enough sugar to take down an elephant; guilt-ridden working moms are told that fat-laden lunchables are a healthy and fun way to make the kids happy; and who doesn't like cheese on their easily prepared frozen pizza, lots and lots of cheese, something the whole family can enjoy. And the industry keeps the price low so that these processed foods are cheaper than healthy foods and they make sure they are placed at eye-level in supermarkets while real healthy choices like fruits and vegetables are pushed to the side. Poor neighbourhoods, where there are no supermarkets, are an especial target. And even reading labels to isn't always the answer since sugar, salt, and fat can come in different varieties, with different names. Unless you recognize all these names among the dozens of ingredients listed, you are not likely to realize the real amount of each within, say, that granola bar the commercials tell you is a great healthy substitute for fruit at breakfast.
So what can the consumer do? As Moss points out, very little. The FDA tends to be more of aid to the industry rather than a watchdog for the consumer and we all saw what happened when Michael Bloomberg tried to outlaw huge soda cups in New York. The backlash was heard throughout the nation - how dare he curtail our freedom to kill ourselves with sugar and his well-intentioned law was quickly struck down. The consumer, according to Moss, has only one choice - take responsibility for what you put into your body and that of your children. Changing your eating habits won't be easy - processed food is one of the hardest addictions to break (and it is an addiction) but it can be done. Reading this book is a good place to start.
For decades, I have been referring to the title of this book as America’s three basic food groups. Salt, sugar and fat are the most abundant additives in food, and their effects are cumulative - the more we eat them, the more we can eat them, and the more want to
The convenience of processed foods fits with our hurried society. It exacerbates the death of family meals, and encourages eating anywhere, anytime, and basically all day long. That by itself is enough to damn the industry, if traditional family values mean anything. Far more damaging than gay marriage, or abortion, or sexting, processed foods are destroying us, literally, physically. For hundreds of millions of Americans (and soon the world), this is normal. It is the way of life. There are no viable alternatives. This too, however, goes unexplored.
Moss divides the book into the three sections of its title. It contains the usual litany of incredible statistics – like how much of these ingredients the average American ingests annually, and how many billions of pounds the processors produce, but also some interesting developments on the way to perdition:
-Food processors call their customers users, like the drug addicts they want them to become.
-The “bliss point” is used by all of them to scientifically maximize the sugar effect along a bell curve. It allows food engineers to calculate how much sugar a child blisses out on compared to an adult, for example.
-Cereal makers spend twice as much on advertising as on ingredients.
-A child wanting cake for breakfast inspired Pop Tarts and its ilk. A whole new kind of meal evolved.
-Big Gulp, the 64 oz soda that New York’s mayor is trying to ban, contains 41 teaspoons of sugar.
-Salt is a learned addiction. Newborns wince if you give them salt. But by six months they’ve accepted it, and for the rest of their lives they crave it. We start ‘em off young.
-Cheese used to be a food – an appetizer in the US, a dessert in Europe. Now it is an ingredient, and we put cheese in and on everything. We have tripled consumption to 33lb since the 70s.
-The cheese plague is the result of the Reagan administration’s buying up and stockpiling overproduced cheese. The government bought it, marketed it, and provided it. Now it is normal to have cheese on everything, at every meal and snack. It’s difficult to find any meal without it. Salads come with cheese.
-Sugar is the methamphetamine of processed food ingredients; fat is the opiate. Perfectly legal drugs.
An interesting sidelight is Finland, where the government won. It mandated large bold labels “High In Salt”, like cigarette warnings. The result has been an 80% reduction in heart attacks and strokes. In the US, the processors beat back the FDA and the USDA again and again.
The most disgusting food in the book comes from celebrity cook (and now diabetic patient) Paula Deen, who recommends taking a casserole of Kraft Mac & Cheese, scooping it into balls, wrapping the balls in bacon, and dropping them in the deep fryer. That’s 0 for 4.
The book left two indelible impressions: the industry will do absolutely anything to beat back regulators. Health, untested chemical compounds, overeating, obesity – never even enter their equation, and the processors won’t be told otherwise. Their freedom to poison Americans at will is all that matters. Now that Americans are nearing saturation, the processors are taking on the world. Obesity in Mexico is comparable to the US, and Brazil and India are being worked intensely.
Second was the overarching momentum and effort to overwhelm the consumer that make us think this is normal, this is right, this is exciting, this is ideal. Two hundred choices of sweet breakfast cereal mean you must choose from among them, or why would they be there? To overwhelm us into consuming more, they mobilize as armed forces, saturating stores and neighborhoods with pretend foods that do far more harm than good. The industry is on autopilot and is out of control. Their intensity is fearsome. This is war.
On the plus side, Sugar Fat Salt is enormously well researched. No lead, no document seems to have been too insignificant to follow up and interview the writer. Visits to executives, to factories, to stores, to conventions – all make the book comprehensive, thorough and fair. This is due in no small part to the interviewees themselves, who came to the conclusion on their own that what they were designing and selling was bad for living beings. Often, Moss found they were working to undo what they had done to the world. And they were, as he admits, incredibly open and generous with their time. It shows.
On the minus side, for all the evidence, the book draws no conclusions. There is no prescription, no way out. Moss does not call for the dismantling or regulation of anything. The facts he found are left to speak for themselves. The book simply ends.
Also on the minus side, Moss sometimes takes forever to deliver a fact. He’ll foreshadow it in one paragraph, then spend several sentences describing some office building or scene before finally delivering the fact you were expecting. I guess he thinks he’s adding color, but at 400 pages, Sugar Fat Salt could use a little pruning of its own.
The relentless pounding of the consumer is replicated by relentless pounding in the book. Case after case of singleminded efforts to get users hooked, of the thoughtless ruination of perfectly good foods that need chemical compounds to make them palatable again, and of the constant pressure to cut costs and increase sales are a depressing insight to what’s wrong with the food industry.
It’s both insulting and sad, not to mention infuriating. The solution is as obvious as it is fantasy: people should steer clear of these poisons.
In the words of fitness buff Jack Lalane – if man made it, don’t take it.
This is a great example of the terrifying power of investigative reporting. I consider myself to follow a pretty healthy diet, with lots of
I also found the nutrition science Moss discusses quite fascinating (although I should say that due to my occupation as a social scientist, the frequently terrible research methodology they've used to study various issues made me extremely concerned for the state of that field). It sometimes gets a bit dry, but what you get out of it is definitely insightful not only for the way these products have evolved but your own reaction to them. I have definitely eaten an insane number of chips at once just because I mindlessly kept going. Understanding why I do that -- the airy crunch, the salt and sugar triggers in your brain -- will (I hope) help me think more critically about it in the future.
This is a long and somewhat depressing read, but I would recommend it for anyone interested in nutrition, the slow food movement, or exposes of frightening corporate practices.
The author is the journalist who first cracked open the "pink slime" meat scandal and the depth of his investigative journalism is really impressive. It seems that he has spoken with scores of researchers, marketers and financial officers of the processed food companies in order to learn about things such as the invention of the Lunchable, as a way to sell more processed meats, and the growth of cheese from a food meant to be savored on its own into an ingredient that is shoved into a million different kinds of food.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in nutrition, or in the business of food. I would also recommend it to anyone who is looking for a push to close up the bag of chips or give up a soda habit.
Fascinating and frightening, Salt, Sugar, Fat really sheds light on what the processed food
Moss provides a lot of information, but the story is incredibly interesting. There's plenty of information that many people are probably already aware of - when manufacturers reduce fat, or sugar, they boost some other bad ingredient, but cover that up by touting "reduced fat" or 'less sugar" for instance. But some things I didn't know and others might find surprising as well - 100% fruit in juice? What can be bad about that? Well...when it's reconstituted, it means it was boiled down, with sugar being one of the few things remaining.... vitamins? gone. Nutrients? Gone. Sugar? Still there. So I've been paying more for all-natural to give my kids a big dose of sugar? Great.
This book should serve as a wake-up call to many - know what you're eating, put pressure on companies and the government to provide more legitimate healthy alternatives and if you're able, make more meals from scratch and buy local. A quick general rule, if you look at a list of ingredients and can't identify or even pronounce them, chances are your body shouldn't get them!
The one real criticism I have is that Moss does repeat himself a little - generally, starting out each chapter with some statement, but then making the same statement toward the end of the chapter again, without seeming to acknowledge that he's reiterating rather than introducing a thought. Without that, it would have garnered another 1/2 star I think.
Salt, sugar, and fat are essential ingredients in varying combinations in processed foods. Their proportions and manipulations have become a science. New additives derived from these three components are invented to mitigate health concerns, but the end products still remain dangerous to the public health. For example, when concerns about fat arise, food companies will pull back on fat while adding more sugar or salt. This way they won’t have to sacrifice the taste of their products while claiming to be more healthful. In reality, it’s all a shell game.
Processed foods have become so much a part of our daily lives and our culture for two reasons – marketing and lack of regulation. Junk food began to show up in our lives more and more often beginning in the 1950s. Foods that were once rare treats became daily snacks, such as chips as sides to sandwiches when you used to get a pickle. When women began to work more and had less time at home, processed food truly exploded. Convenience became the mantra. Marketing to children, especially when their mothers became busier, was another very effective way to increase sales.
Although more efforts have been put into place to educate the public about the nutrition of their foods, the processed food industry still finds ways around providing a clear view of what we are eating. One way they do this is by downgrading portion sizes to make the salt, sugar, and fat content seem lower. Another method is to invent new ingredients that mimic salt, sugar, or fat. However, these new inventions come with their own negative health impacts.
The truth is that processed foods do not taste good if you reduce the salt, sugar, and fat to appropriate levels. Food that does not taste good does not sell. When having to answer to shareholders and in an industry as competitive as processed foods, making products healthier rarely outweighs making them more profitable. Although regulation has been slow and sporadic, it may be the best and only way to make processed foods healthier.
Michael Moss provides a compelling read, and his research on this book is in-depth and fastidious. His interviews give readers an inside view of the processed foods industry where we meet scientists, executives, and marketers. This was a pleasure to read.
I feel as though the split narrative meant that some parts had to be repeated, and that the emphasis of each component was diminished by the need to make each new section's lead character be portrayed as the biggest problem. This detracted from a nuanced picture of the triple-pronged role of these food components in the overall narrative Moss was constructing.
Having said that, his discussion of lunchables (which appears in all three sections) is a tour de force of deconstructing the variables that come into play when talking about factors such as consumer repeat buying, offloading cheap and declining-in-popularity foods, the combination of sugar/fat/salt, our desire to 'play' with and control our food (even if packaged) and the need of big business to reduce costs while increasing sales. Worth reading, but you may, like me, get frustrated at the lack of a clear timeline and the occasional repetition.
So, hey, lets start out with: a book that tells you things you already know.
And then there's the fact that while SALT, SUGAR, FAT presents itself as a sort of whistle-blowing exposé, drawing back the curtain on the processed food industry and sounding the alarm, it reads an awful lot like a business book. The passages where Michael Moss describes the invention of Tang and instant pudding could be cut and pasted into a different book, titled "Processed Food: Genius Secrets of Huge Money-Making Success" without much modification. He interviews a lot of food scientists and lets them tell their side of the story, what happened behind the scenes to make this or that junk food possible, and it's easy to imagine a budding MBA taking notes.
So the tone is occasionally odd.
In fact, in retrospect I'm not sure what makes this book so great, or why I found it riveting. But I did, and the first time I went to the grocery store after I started reading -- and every time since -- was a revelation. The grocery store looked different to me. I was alert, wary, mistrustful. The food all looked hostile.
I'm a cook and a foodie -- I said that, right? -- but I can get lazy. And it's easy for laziness to become a habit, and then they have you. And I can be outright duped -- the section on dairy came as a total surprise to me. Whole milk is only 3% fat? 2% milk is a marketing trick? What?!
In the end, I'd call SALT, SUGAR, FAT a corrective. A useful reminder, with all the information necessary to make its points stick. I'd recommend it to anyone.
These companies are slowly killing each of us.
This book gets me mad and I will eat healthier as a result of knowing these food companies do not care about any of us.
Until society is able to take a more holistic view of the problem and balance the profits against the human and monetary costs, I don't see much hope for the health of much of mankind.
Deeply depressing.
I wish there had been better proofreading in a book so filled with scientific data. One example: a statement that hypertension is known as the "silent Killer" because it can cause "congenital heart failure." I think Moss meant "congestive heart failure" -- though oddly, a Google search for the former brought up the latter. Parts of the book can be a little dry, but there is plenty in it to shock and alarm. Most Americans need to read this book, especially those who are responsible for making decisions about what children or other family members eat. Moss's conclusion is that, while there are some people in the processed food industry who are trying to lessen its dependence on salt, sugar, and fat, the industry as a whole will remain focussed on the bottom line. We will need to take responsibility for our own buying and eating habits, including being aware of the marketing ploys that the industry uses. Highly recommended.
The premise of this book can be summed up very simply. Food companies are creating products that while not intended to kills
Michael Moss’s definitive tome on food marketing is exhaustive, at times daunting and the best book on this topic I’ve read since “Fast Food Nation” so many years ago. Moss has covered the basics with a wealth of detail and reasoning that should be abundantly terrifying to those who find themselves putting frozen pizzas and Hot Pockets into their cart at the grocery store. He paints a picture that is stark and, sadly, a bit hopeless. While our author does spend a tiny bit of time on the efforts of food companies to stop killing us softly with salt, sugar and fat, he doesn’t really seem to hold out much hope. He closes with a chunk on liquid foods designed for people after they have bariatric surgery. The image of people tube-feeding themselves from a plastic container is pretty haunting but that seems to be what we’re coming to.
This book is wonderfully researched, eruditely and well written and I hope against hope that it’s somehow unbalanced. Moss’s picture is grim indeed but his arguments are so well constructed that one doesn’t really have the heart to argue with them. As a book it can sometimes be a bit daunting and is best taken, I think, in 1-hour chunks. On one level this lets the argument settle in over the course of several days and make you subconsciously examine what YOU’RE eating. The book is very helpful and specific in the foods and products it chooses to excoriate. A conscientious reader will find themselves at least slightly changed for the better. On another level, taking the book in small pieces dampens a bit the somewhat repetitive cadence of the whole thing. Here’s a type of food. Here’s why it’s bad. Here’s the history of it. Here’s who I talked to about it and what they had to say. Lather, rinse, repeat. Taken in long sittings this is probably much less effective. I stretched this one out over a week and felt myself well served and well-educated.
In summary, this is the sort of book that leaves you changed at a fundamental level. Like books before it, you never quite see the world the same way again. On the whole, I feel pretty good about my diet even before, relative to how Moss describes the typical American diet but there’s always room for improvement and this book is one that gives a not so gentle nudge in the right direction. It’s also the sort of book you want to pass around to everyone you know; it should be subtitled, “Read this before the next time you open your mouth.”
Food is weird. At least, it is nowadays. Humans like variety; variety in food makes them eat more. Put science and industry at the service of variety, and you get Guiness chips. Be still my British heart.
There are tens of thousands of different products in the
And, because the food industry is big business, and big business has shareholders to keep happy, the food industry wants you to eat its food. Lots of it.
GREED IS GOOD.
Yes, my friend, Wall Street wants you to be a greedy pig. It WANTS you to eat the whole bag of chips because, dagnammit, you're supporting the economy! It is the American Way to crave a FourthMeal! A Giant Gulp is a patriotic gesture!
But the trouble is, there's a price to pay. Obesity and its first cousins heart attack and diabetes are roaring along at record levels. And the food industry knows it. But the food industry is, first and foremost, an industry, responsible to its shareholders. As Michael Moss says, "It is simply not in the nature of these companies to care about the consumer in an empathetic way."
Salt, sugar and fat are the food industry's weapons in the war to sell more food, gain bigger market shares and keep the Wall Street analysts happy. Moss goes into the science behind why, the more processed food you eat, the more you WANT to eat; these foods are painstakingly engineered to be, well, as addictive as possible. The addiction factor is supported by marketing campaigns that literally make your mouth water, and by careful product placement overseen by regular visits from food company employees.
Chances are that if you've picked up this book, you're already converted to the idea that processed food is bad for you. As I am, after years of weight gain and other symptoms, blooming in middle age into terrible (and socially awkward) gastric attacks and asthma attacks as my body tries to expel that xanthan gum that snuck into my soup or the polysorbate 80 in the cream. The last few years have been one long lesson about what I can and can't eat, label reading and an increasing adoption of the clean eating ethos.
But enough about me. What will you find inside this book? Well, for one thing, absorbing entertainment and thought-provoking findings such as the very telling fact that the top executives in the food industry go out of their way to avoid eating the very foods they foist on the unsuspecting public (in America, but increasingly all over the world) BECAUSE THEY'RE UNHEALTHY. Moss doesn't hesitate to name names: in fact, one of the most fascinating aspects of Salt, Sugar, Fat for me is the way he engages with the personalities behind the products. He reminds us that the food industry isn't faceless; these are people who earn a living persuading us to eat more.
Not all of them. There are renegades and prophets of doom; those who remind their companies of the moment when forty or so states rose up against the cigarette industry on behalf of their health care systems. Obesity costs money; what the food companies gain, the economy as a whole suffers because of rising health insurance costs and sick employees.
There is a lawsuit waiting to happen; or, as Moss speculates, the solution may come in the form of government regulation. And he concludes with an appeal to the consumer: "They may have salt, sugar, and fat on their side, but we, ultimately, have the power to make choices. After all, we decide what to buy. We decide how much to eat."
Except that "healthy" food is an industry all its own. Open up any magazine aimed at consumers who are trying to eat right and you'll find it full of ads for products made by the selfsame companies that bring you the 32oz soda and the candy bar. Every time there's an eating trend, the industry jumps all over it and produces a solution that's not a solution. Low fat products that have more sugar and salt to make them taste better without the fat. Low sugar products that have more fat and salt than the regular version.
Oh, I could go on. There are so many goodies to feast on in this book that I could talk about it all day. Moss's journalistic style, while not always as fluent as I'd like, is that of the educated man on the street, and he appeals to a fairly well informed audience in his use of facts and figures and his incorporation of science. If you're starting to wake up to the power of food in your life and want to gain a better understanding of the role of the food industry in our global economy and everyday existence, you could do worse than to read this book.
At least I think they are facts. All of the authors citations are inconveniently at the end of the book. There isn't any indication while reading that the author is telling facts or opinion....which is annoying (I prefer directive foot or end notes so I can tell
But in the book is a pretty scary story that I do believe is true. All of our (processed) food is stripped of its nutritional values to increase profit for companies, extend shelf life, and get us to eat more.
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Business. Health & Fitness. Sociology. Nonfiction. HTML:NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Atlantic The Huffington Post Mens Journal MSN (U.K.) Kirkus Reviews Publishers Weekly #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE JAMES BEARD FOUNDATION AWARD FOR WRITING AND LITERATURE From a Pulitzer Prizewinning investigative reporter at The New York Times comes the explosive story of the rise of the processed food industry and its link to the emerging obesity epidemic. Michael Moss reveals how companies use salt, sugar, and fat to addict us and, more important, how we can fight back. In the spring of 1999 the heads of the worlds largest processed food companiesfrom Coca-Cola to Nabiscogathered at Pillsbury headquarters in Minneapolis for a secret meeting. On the agenda: the emerging epidemic of obesity, and what to do about it. Increasingly, the salt-, sugar-, and fat-laden foods these companies produced were being linked to obesity, and a concerned Kraft executive took the stage to issue a warning: There would be a day of reckoning unless changes were made. This executive then launched into a damning PowerPoint presentation, making the case that processed food companies could not afford to sit by, idle, as children grew sick and class-action lawyers lurked. To deny the problem, he said, is to court disaster. When he was done, the most powerful person in the roomthe CEO of General Millsstood up to speak, clearly annoyed. And by the time he sat down, the meeting was over. Since that day, the situation has only grown more dire. Every year, the average American eats thirty-three pounds of cheese (triple what we ate in 1970) and seventy pounds of sugar (about twenty-two teaspoons a day). We ingest 8,500 milligrams of salt a day, double the recommended amount, and almost none of that comes from the shakers on our table. It comes from processed food. Its no wonder, then, that one in three adults, and one in five kids, is clinically obese. Its no wonder that twenty-six million Americans have diabetes, the processed food industry in the U.S. accounts for $1 trillion a year in sales, and the total economic cost of this health crisis is approaching $300 billion a year. In Salt Sugar Fat, Pulitzer Prizewinning investigative reporter Michael Moss shows how we got here. Featuring examples from some of the most recognizable (and profitable) companies and brands of the last half centuryincluding Kraft, Coca-Cola, Lunchables, Kellogg, Nestl, Oreos, Cargill, Capri Sun, and many moreMosss explosive, empowering narrative is grounded in meticulous, often eye-opening research. Moss takes us inside the labs where food scientists use cutting-edge technology to calculate the bliss point of sugary beverages or enhance the mouthfeel of fat by manipulating its chemical structure. He unearths marketing campaigns designedin a technique adapted from tobacco companiesto redirect concerns about the health risks of their products: Dial back on one ingredient, pump up the other two, and tout the new line as fat-free or low-salt. He talks to concerned executives who confess that they could never produce truly healthy alternatives to their products even if serious regulation became a reality. Simply put: The industry itself would cease to exist without salt, sugar, and fat. Just as millions of heavy usersas the companies refer to their most ardent...… (more)