How did we become a nation of junk food junkies? | Mahoney

As is documented through numerous sources, we continue to suffer as a nation from an excessive intake of highly processed foods and reap the negative consequences in terms of our overall health. 

Repetitive behavior that's difficult to quit and that causes harm — the most accurate definition of addiction — accurately describes what many of us experience when it comes to highly processed foods. In the U.S., the turn towards overeating these foods occurred in the early 1980s, and the subsequent rise in conditions like hypertension, heart disease, cancer and diabetes is linked to it.

An interesting book by the investigative New York Times reporter, Michael Moss was recently highlighted on National Public Radio. The increase in snacking on so-called “comfort foods” (i.e., processed foods) is not an accident but an engineered strategy for making foods more “craveable,” according to an investigation undertaken by Moss.

In particular, during the pandemic, many people have sought comfort in the snacks they remember from childhood.

In 2013 Moss published a book, "Salt, Fat, Sugar" which went into detail on food companies and their impact on our health. 

This column highlights some of the more salient points from the book and the text, in large part is provided through the editing of the live NPR interview with Michael Moss by Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner.  Check the Resource Material section at the end of this column for book details.

Processed foods

Moss notes that processed food is "inexpensive, it's legal, it's everywhere. And the advertising from the companies is cueing us to remember those products and we want those products constantly. So the food environment ... is one of those key things that make food even more problematic for so many people."

Memory and nostalgia play a large role in the foods we crave. In this book Moss examines the way these companies capitalize on our memories, cravings and brain chemistry to keep us snacking.

Some of the highlights from the National Public Radio interview with Moss follow: 

Appealing to sense of nostalgia

Moss believes that one of the reasons he came to think that some of these food products were even more powerful, more troublesome than drugs can be is memory.

What we eat is all about memory. And we begin forming memories for food at a really early age; possibly even in the womb, depending on what our mother is eating. And we keep those memories for a lifetime. They don't go away. ... And the more we eat these products, the deeper those memory channels go. And so the food industry, knowing that, spends lots of time trying to shape the memories that we have for their products.

Designed to make your brain react fast

One of the hallmarks of addiction that scientists who are studying drug addiction discovered back in the 1990s was that the faster a substance hits the brain, the more apt we are as a result to act compulsively, impulsively. So they sort of speak about tobacco and alcohol and drug products in terms of the speed that they hit the brain. But it turns out that there's nothing faster than food in ... its ability to sort of hit the brain.

For Moss, this puts kind of the notion of "fast food" in an entirely new light.

In fact, I like to call what we're talking about here "fast groceries" — that 90% of the middle part of the grocery store. We refine these things, because everything about the processed food industry is about speed, from the manufacturing to the packaging — making it easy for us to open up those packages and get at the food — to the actual speed of their products exciting our brains.

The language food companies use

Not just at Kraft, but at other companies, they use other language that's kind of startling when they talk about maximizing the allure of their products. They talk about engineering "snackability" and "craveability," and one of my favorite words, hearing from them is "more-ishness," as in, the person eating [and] wanting more and more of it.

Personnel in these companies include bench chemists, psychologists and marketing executives who all concur on these efforts to maximize consumption.

Drawn to high-calorie foods

Moss states that by nature we are drawn to food that has calories, because for much of our previous existence, getting calories was a matter of life and death.. It enabled us to put on some body fat, which enabled our brains to grow and us to get through hard times.

Trying to get us addicted?

Moss has been looking at this industry for 10 years now and still resists the idea of looking at them as this evil empire that intentionally set out to make us obese or otherwise ill on their products.

These are companies doing what all companies want to do — make as much money [as they can]. But I think ... the problem lies in, kind of, their own dependence on making their products inexpensive and super delicious and incredibly convenient for us. 

In much of the industry, there really isn't a smoking gun. They wear their marketing schemes and their psychology and the things they go after, kind of, on the sleeves. You can see it on the packages, except for the way that they go after sort of our basic biology — that you can't see on their products. And I think that that's what made the topic of investigating the phenomenon of being “hooked” so interesting for me. It was looking at the things that they're doing that aren't on the product label that cause us to lose control of our eating habits.

Thanks to Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner for the edit of the NPR audio interview which is a large part of the content in this column.

For an in-depth look at this issue, check out the recent book by Michael Moss titled, "Cheap, Legal and Everywhere: How the Food Companies Get Us “Hooked” on Junk."

Mark A. Mahoney, Ph.D. has been a "Dietitian/Nutritionist for over 35 years and completed graduate studies in Nutrition & Public Health at Columbia University. He can be reached at marqos69@hotmail.com.

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