Salt Sugar Fat

Michael Moss is an investigative reporter, and he has written an eye-opening book on food manufacturing and marketing. Salt Sugar Fat goes a long way in explaining why eliminating processed foods from your diet helps you lose weight and improve your health. It also helps explain why both Dr. Fuhrman and Mark Bittman experienced a profound change in food cravings after following their respective eating plans for a while.

Want to know why you can’t eat just one potato chip? Most food in American supermarkets is engineered to get you to crave it and to buy more of it. Food companies have figured out the “bliss point” of their sweet products, creating cravings for sweets. While there is a point at which a food can taste too sweet, there is no upper limit on fat. No wonder almost anything – including an ice cream sundae – can be improved by adding bacon. Salt is another ingredient that creates food cravings. And the interplay between these three ingredients – salt, sugar, and fat – can be very powerful.

Food manufacturers play on our desires for convenient, inexpensive foods (as well as our biology), and load up their products with these three ingredients to give us more and more of what they have conditioned us to crave. Salt, sugar, and fat cover up the unpalatable taste of all the other ingredients and processes used to make processed foods more and more inexpensive and convenient. Even the inventor of Cheez Whiz, who loved the stuff and ate it daily, discovered one day in retirement that Kraft had removed real cheese from the product and left it tasting to him like “axle grease.”

The food manufacturers have succeeded in their quest for more and more sales and profits. Americans now eat triple the amount of cheese and pseudo-cheese than we did in the early 1970s. Cheese consumption has increased 3 pounds per person per year since 2001. Consumption of sugar-sweetened soda more than doubled in the 30 years since the 1970s, and although it has since tapered off from its high of 40 gallons per year per person, consumption of other sweet drinks, such as teas, energy drinks, and sports drinks, has increased.

This book is full of interesting stories about people involved in the food business, fascinating facts, and insight into food manufacturing corporations. I guarantee you will be amazed by what you learn from this book. You will never look at a food label or supermarket shelf in the same way again.