Ep. 55: Mouth Feel, Bliss Point and How We Get Hooked on Processed Food with Michael Moss
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Snacking more during the pandemic? Ever wondered whether you’re addicted to food? The Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Michael Moss, author of the new book, Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions as well as 2014’s Salt Sugar Fat, argues that the processed-food industry has engineered their products to compel us to eat them—causing all sorts of health problems at the population level. Here, Moss is in conversation with guest host Leslie Beck, the Globe and Mail columnist and Medcan director of food and nutrition.
Insights:
Food can be even more addictive than hard drugs. Because of the way our bodies are built, we’re hardwired to love food and overeat. Companies exploit this primal vulnerability. About 50 years ago, the food industry deliberately changed the nature of food to tap into that instinct. Addictive compulsions range in a continuum depending on the cause. Power of the compulsion is proportional to the speed of the biological response. The body reacts much faster to sugar than it does to alcohol or nicotine. (3:41, 8:00)
We love information. One scientist described people as “infovores”. “Just give us something new and the brain gets excited by that,” Moss said. That’s why we’re more attracted to a product that has the word “new” splashed across the front. Companies are aware of this and take full advantage. (17:50)
Memory plays a powerful role in the way we eat. Our memory of food can create intense cravings. When Moss visited a Kellogg’s Research Development factory that was making Pop Tarts, the smell sent him decades into the past. “It took me instantly back 40 years to being a latchkey kid in California, where I would come home from school and have Pop Tarts. I hadn't had one since. But it was like those 40 years just disappeared.” Companies appeal to us by linking their products to positive experiences, so those memories can carry on for life. (25:01)
Links
Michael Moss’s website.
Check out Michael Moss’ recent USA TODAY article on How Big Food is Feeding Our Snack Addiction
Purchase your copy of Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us at Amazon and Indigo
Purchase your copy of Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions at Amazon and Indigo.
Connect with Michael Moss on Twitter
From protein bars to pumpkin spice lattés, Michael Moss breaks down what’s in the foods we eat in a series of video clips called What’s in It? .
Moss’s New York Times article The Cookie Dough Oreo looks at imitation in marketing. Specifically, he explores how the makers of Oreo branded its cookies with pictures of real-looking cookie dough and chocolate chips on the package, but added neither to their product.
People are rebelling against poor nutrition, and startup companies that offer healthier food choices are coming to the rescue. Moss explores this in his New York Times article New and Healthier Food Choices are Being Pushed By Old Hands.
In his article Is Water Overrated?, Moss delves into the question of how much water we really need to drink, and why the soda industry and Food Giants are pushing it so hard.
Eat Move Think S01E55 final web transcript
Christopher Shulgan: Welcome to episode 55 of Eat Move Think. Christopher Shulgan here, executive producer. Do you find yourself snacking more lately? More than you did years ago? That could be the result of the food industry's increasing ability to engineer snack options that perfectly cater to our brain circuitry. That, at least, is the argument that the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Michael Moss explores in his new book, Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions. Moss is based in Brooklyn and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times' Sunday Magazine. You may have read his first book, the bestseller Salt Sugar Fat, from 2014.
Christopher Shulgan: Here, he's in conversation with Globe and Mail nutrition columnist and Medcan director of food and nutrition, Leslie Beck. One quick word before we get to the episode: the conversation between Beck and Moss was so packed with fascinating material that we found it hard to cut, so we've split the conversation into two parts. In this episode, Beck and Moss discuss the impetus behind the author's latest book, how food can actually be more addictive than hard drugs, and the way the food industry figured out how to increase the appeal of snacks by mixing fat and sugar.
Christopher Shulgan: Next week, in episode 56, they'll discuss the fascinating mystery behind research Yale psychologist Dana Small conducted for Pepsi, and Moss's tips for how to control your snacking. Here's the first part of Leslie Beck’s conversation with Michael Moss.
Leslie Beck: Well, I want to thank you so much for being with us, Michael. It's a pleasure to meet you, and to be able to interview you. I really enjoyed your book, I thought it was fascinating, as was your first book, Salt Sugar Fat. In this book, you set out to determine if we really can be addicted to food, like the way we can be addicted to, say, alcohol or tobacco. I guess my first question is, how did the idea about food and addiction come about? Take me back to, you know, the time when you first came up with the idea for this book.
Michael Moss: It really came from the very first question I got from a reporter when Salt Sugar Fat came out. The end of Salt Sugar Fat, I was trying to end on a hopeful note, writing that kind of knowing all the secrets that the industry uses to get us to love their products, is itself kind of oddly empowering. Ultimately, we're the ones who decide what to eat and how much. But the very first question from a reporter, and I think this was a British television tabloid reporter. So he was in my face a little bit and was like, "Look, Michael, come on. I mean, isn't this stuff you're writing about addictive like heroin? And if so, you know, what do you mean we have any say in the matter?" And I was really kind of taken aback. And I kind of avoided the word "addiction" because it seemed too acerbic, and it just on the face of it seemed ludicrous to compare Oreo cookies with crack cocaine, because they are in so many ways different. So that's what got me very curious about that.
Michael Moss: And the more I looked into it, of course, the more fascinating it was. And thus, the adventure of kind of going back into the food industry to kind of take the true measure of the peril and see is food not only addictive in some ways, like drugs or alcohol or cigarettes, but what lessons can we draw from those addictions that might apply to this huge trouble we're having with food?
Leslie Beck: Mm-hmm. Right. We're going to get into that, for sure. Let's first define addiction. Tell me about the definition that you used in your book. What does it mean to be addicted to food?
Michael Moss: Right. So the definition has changed over years. And that was one of my first hurdles I had to get over, because years ago when people talked about drug addiction, they talked about withdrawals, and those kinds of cravings, but increasingly, drug researchers realize that drugs act upon us in all kinds of ways, and you can be addicted to certain drugs and not have any withdrawal pains. And really, the moment of awakening for me was tracking how the tobacco industry dealt with the concept of addiction. For decades, they used all of their resources to deny that smoking was addictive, and we kind of agreed with them. But in 2000, the largest company of all, Philip Morris, completely changed its mind, conceded that smoking was addictive. And not long after, the CEO of the company was being questioned in some legal proceedings, and was asked what his definition of addiction is, and I'll read it to you to get the quote exact, but his definition was, and this is a quote, "Addiction is a repetitive behaviour that some people find difficult to quit."
Michael Moss: It was such a moment for me because, while the industry was comparing cigarettes to, like, Twinkies and denying addiction, in fact, Philip Morris at the time was the single largest manufacturer of processed food in North America. And you can really apply perfectly that definition to our trouble with food. And one of the key words in there is, you know, "some" people find difficult. Because not everybody at all times of their lives are affected so strongly by processed food, especially addiction happens on a spectrum.
Leslie Beck: A spectrum, you said. That's right.
Michael Moss: Yes. Which is critical to understanding kind of what we're talking about here.
Leslie Beck: So the key concept here that you introduce in the book is the idea that yes, food can be addictive, maybe even more so than drugs and alcohol. How so?
Michael Moss: Yeah, so that—you know, I told you, I came full circle thinking, "Wait a minute, that's, like, crazy to think of food as like a hard drug," to thinking, "Wait a minute. In some ways, food can be even more addictive than those drugs." And a lot of that sort of goes back to sort of our bodies and the way we were built to not just love food, naturally, but to overeat. And so we have systems in our body that draw us to food from the stomach to the brain, that get us not just to like food, but to want to overeat. And none of that was a problem until 50 years ago, when the food industry kind of changed the nature of food in some really significant ways.
Michael Moss: But one of the things that defines addiction is speed. The faster that a substance hits the brain, the more apt you are to act compulsively on that signal. And there's nothing faster than food in the way that it hits the brain. It cheats a little bit, but I'll give you an example. Scientists did a little experiment where they put some sugar on people's tongue and asked them to press the button when they taste sweetness, right? So sugar on the tongue sends a signal to the brain, the brain sent the signal back to their finger to push the button. Guess how long it took for that signal for them to push the button? It was eight-tenths of a second. Incredibly fast. You know, smoking, alcohol, drugs typically will take at least a few seconds or longer. So food is actually faster in the way that it hits the brain and gets us to act.
Leslie Beck: Wow. And tell us a little bit more about, there are many ways in which our brain drives us towards food. Can you talk about those?
Michael Moss: Yeah, so I love the scientists I'd met who kind of divide the brain into two parts: the go brain and the stop brain. And the go brain is sort of that primitive part of us that gets us to do things, whether it's to run from trouble or to eat. The stop brain is that part of the brain, mostly up here in the frontal cortex that says, "Hey, wait a minute, Michael. I think you've had enough of that bag of chips. Maybe you should stop and think about kind of the consequences." And the food industry has kind of diabolically if you will, exquisitely perfected its ability to sort of tap into our basic instincts that affect the brain. And we can go into that in some detail. But their engineering of food to make it inexpensive, to make it have as much variety as possible, to have as many calories as possible, are all things that are part of our sort of evolutionary system in our body, that get us really excited about the brain. And so the brain basically—and the issue with cravings and food is that, when we see cues as psychologists call them—advertising or marketing or smell food or taste it—the signal that it sends to the brain is either going to drive you to act impulsively, or you're going to be able to sort of say, "Wait a minute, let's think about this impulse to eat that."
Leslie Beck: And that has to do with dopamine.
Michael Moss: Right. So one of the early discoveries came from none other than a scientist who grew up at McGill in Montreal, Roy Wise was his name. And he was one of the first people who really kind of came to grips with the notion that addiction happens in the brain. They experimented with rodents, where they would put little electrical wires in and give them a little jolt of electricity. And when they placed the wire in the perfect part of the brain, the animals would get ravishingly hungry, where just seconds before they were they were perfectly calm and satisfied. Brain scientist students still see the work that Roy Wise did on this years ago. But he also discovered that our brains are these living chemical laboratories that, on their own, create chemicals that attract us to food, to get us to want it and to like it. Which was another hurdle that I had to get over because the food company said to me, "Look, Michael, how can you blame us, you know, and our products for being addictive? We don't have any of these harsh chemicals that you find in cigarettes and alcohol and narcotics, right?" Well, the fact is, food doesn't need those because our own brain produces those chemicals, including dopamine, and that's what's triggered, whatever the addictive substance is you're imbibing in.
Leslie Beck: That's interesting. So I'm going to ask you this question, and you may have partially answered it already, but that's okay. There may be more to the answer. There's a lot of talk today and research around ultra-processed foods, you know, and they're linked to a number of different chronic health problems, be it obesity, heart disease, type two diabetes. Can you explain how these foods are made or formulated really, if you will, to make them highly palatable and habit forming?
Michael Moss: Of course. So the definition of ultra-processed foods is sort of interesting too. And sometimes I use the term "convenience foods." There are lots of ways to kind of think of them. One of the hallmarks of ultra-processed foods is you generally don't have to chew them, because they're made with so much technology and engineering that the final product really doesn't resemble the original foodstuffs that went into them, whether that's kind of cold breakfast cereals, or hot pockets, microwavable sandwiches, whatever. And this is what we're talking about in terms of the food industry's ability to sort of get us to not just like its products, but to want more. There are several things that they work on.
Michael Moss: One is cheapness. I mean, we are by nature addicted to cheap food. If you go back to when we were hunter-gatherers, it made total sense that instead of running down an impala for dinner, we would grab that aardvark that was just sitting there and eat that. The least amount of energy expenditure is something that's wired into our brain. And so when we walk into the grocery store, we may think we're making food choices based on health, taste even, but really in our brains, cost is a driving factor. And so the food companies have what they call flavour houses, chemistry labs working for them, that create the flavours and the smells that go into ultra-processed foods. And their number one mission is to come up with formulations of those chemicals to drive the cost down, so we're more attracted to them.
Michael Moss: Second thing is, you know, we're hooked on calories. We love calories, because it's fuel for our bodies. And so the industry learned to contrast a stick of celery, which has lots of water and fibre, you know, with a TV dinner, which is packed densely with calories, because for one reason: that gets the brain really excited about eating those. And becomes problematic for us, because we end up eating so many calories before the brain can realize that and put the brakes on overeating.
Michael Moss: And then the third thing it has going for it is variety. We love variety, as a basic instinct. When we populated different parts of the world as humans, we were incredibly good at changing our diet to accommodate whatever food was there on the ground to be had. The industry took variety and ran with it in incredible ways. And again, walk into the grocery store or look at a fast food restaurant menu, you're getting hit by what's called the smorgasbord effect, which is, you know, you go down the line of the Chinese buffet, you're totally stuffed but hey, here's a new item. It gets you excited, you put it on the plate, and you're probably going to eat that. Or walk into the cereal aisle of the grocery store. We're basically talking about sugary starch. But there's, in the larger stores, you know, 200 versions of sugary starch just to kind of get you and keep you excited about their products.
Leslie Beck: Yeah. The quote in your book from a 1980s research project that the variety seekers have consistently been heavy users, you wrote.
Michael Moss: Yeah, the industry is really good at kind of figuring out, and sometimes they refer to this as the 80-20 rule, which is that 20 percent of the people eat 80 percent of the product. And they're really good at figuring out kind of who that 20 percent is, who among us is most vulnerable to their salesmanship and their products. And yes, sort of variety is one of those sort of targeted basic instincts of ours.
Leslie Beck: So back to ultra-processed foods for a minute. I'm wondering if another reason why, you know, they are so highly palatable, habit forming is I mean, they're formulated from many different additives, as you said flavouring agents etc., contain little if any real food at all. They're also typically very, very low in fibre, so we don't get that sense of feeling of satiety or fullness that—is that one of the reasons?
Michael Moss: Yes. Yes, and in fact, we're jumping ahead but, you know, in the last few years, more and more people caring about what they put in their bodies has affected their shopping habits and the food companies are trying to respond. So they're cutting back on salt, sugar, fat, and they're adding things that they claim or hope will actually help us deal with cravings for their own products. And so they're adding protein to products, they're adding fibre to their products. And I argue in the book that much of that is sort of fake health-washing, because it's not enough protein, and it's not enough of the right kind of fibre to make a real difference in terms of your cravings. But it's so interesting that the food company itself is acknowledging the power of its product to sort of focus on that aspect of them, their ability to drive cravings.
Leslie Beck: I wanted to ask you a question. You wrote in your book how food manufacturers have nailed the concept of "dynamic contrast." Can you explain that in terms of our drive towards certain processed foods?
Michael Moss: Yeah, so it turns out that we love information almost for information's sake. One of the scientists I met called this infovores. Because just give us something new and the brain gets excited by that. And that's why in the grocery store, you see the word "New" splashed across the front of products, like, all the time. And that's one of the reasons that variety makes such a big difference. And so our attraction to that aspect of their food is something that the companies know fully well. And so even when you turn to the nutrition facts box on the label of products, which supposedly is designed to help us evaluate kind of the health aspect of their products, the mere position of that information on the label is enough to sort of lull people into complacency in thinking that, "Well, if they have all these—you know, if it's all this analysis of the product in this facts box, it's probably okay." And so the information aspect that the company uses to sell its products is absolutely fascinating.
Leslie Beck: That is very interesting. I hadn't thought of that before. You also wrote that, you know, when sugar gets combined with fat, our brain gets even more aroused than it does by when we consume either of those two ingredients alone. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Michael Moss: Yeah, and part of that, there was a scientist who's now at the University of Washington, but he was at the Rockefeller University in New York, when he kind of saw that people were studying candy. And they were thinking about candy as being sugar. But he kind of realized, well, wait a minute, it's not just sugar in your typical candy bar. There's also a lot of fat in there. And so he did these really kind of fun, remarkable studies where he gave people just plain sugar, and then sugar combined with fat, and looked at their reaction. And found that, when the two get combined, we're much less apt to be able to put the brakes on the sugar, much less apt to be able to recognize that that sugar, we're getting too much of it. But the other way of sort of thinking of that too, is that what happens in the body is that the brain is getting two different signals. So you're getting that lusciousness of the mouthfeel—which is how the industry describes fat—and then the bliss point of the sugar as it hits your tongue, those are sending two separate signals to the brain.
Michael Moss: And going back to what we talked about us being infovores and loving information, that kind of combined signalling to the brain increases the power of the craving if you will, or the potential of the craving, and kind of suppresses the ability of the brain to kind of put the brakes on overeating because it gets so excited about those double signals.
Leslie Beck: Mm-hmm. While researching the book, you spent time with people who suffer greatly from food addiction. What are they dealing with?
Michael Moss: I mean, again, it happens on a spectrum. And I think at one end of the spectrum are people who, you know, maybe have control over their eating habits, but it takes so much energy to exert that control, or it's just a feeling of missing the love and the passion of home-cooked meals before we fell so hard for convenience foods. But at the other end, are people who exhibit eating disorders, bingeing, absolute sort of loss of control when faced with the tiniest amount of their trigger food, which is often sugar or refined starch, I met a man named Don in Ottawa, who walked me through his experience with food. He weighed 360 pounds, and through an enormous amount of willpower and good fortune on his part, because he didn't have children to worry about, and he had a good job that that he could rely on, he could focus entirely on food and his issue with it, he lost half of that weight in 13 months, which was really kind of incredible. But it was at that point that the real trouble began for him, because his entire body was rebelling against his own new weight. It was almost like that weight never really disappeared.
Michael Moss: And so for so many people, losing the weight—if they can—is only part of the struggle that you have when you've eaten too much and gained weight. I mean, he would have to do things like put locks on his kitchen cabinets to slow himself down, to help the "stop" part of his brain say "Wait a minute. Let's not rush in there and grab that." He would get on inter-city buses to remove himself from just the mere chance that he might be confronted by and seduced by the kind of food he wants. And, you know, to this day, it's been six or seven years now, he has a very strict diet, where he has to avoid so much of what's available in the grocery store.
Leslie Beck: In your book, you write also about how memory has such an important role in our eating habits. And foods do create powerful memories, of course. Can you talk a little bit about that part of food addiction, perhaps?
Michael Moss: Yeah, I had no idea memory was that powerful. I got to speak on the phone—she was in California—with a famous food writer/chef named Paula Wolfert who introduced Moroccan couscous to the Western world. She was so good at smelling and tasting food that she could stand in front of a pot of boiling water that another chef was preparing to cook some pasta, take a little taste, and know if a different brand of salt was used than the one she was used to. Her perception was so—and she said to me at one point that, "You know, Michael, memory is everything when it comes to food." And she really knows because Paula has come down with Alzheimer's, and as the disease grew worse, she lost her ability to smell, to taste. But more importantly, to sort of remember food as she knew it.
Michael Moss: And one scientist explained to me that memory is like these river beds in our brain in the desert, where a gusher of storm will come along and deepen the riverbed. And that storm, by the way, can come out of the blue. Sometimes it can be raining 10 miles away, you won't even know it, but there's a flood coming down that channel. And the more experiences we have with that memory, the deeper the channel is, and the more responsive we are to those cues, whether it's food advertising or what have you. And so through our eating habits, we develop powerful memories for food, which is another way that food is more problematic for us even than drugs, because those memories start probably even when we're still in the womb, certainly as adolescents when—there's something called the adolescence bump. Adolescents create more and more powerful memories than at any other time of our lives, and we carry those memories through life.
Michael Moss: I was visiting a Kellogg's Research Development factory that was experimenting with Pop-Tarts, and a big batch of messed up and they were dumping it into a vat. And the aroma of those Pop-Tarts came across the factory floor, and it took me instantly back 40 years to being a latch-key kid in California, where I would come home from school and have Pop-Tarts. I hadn't had one since. But it was like those 40 years just disappeared. The power of the smell, but also the power of that memory to drive us toward those products, which is why again, the industry works so hard to sort of control our memories with their advertising and marketing.
Leslie Beck: Yeah, I thought of your examples in the book. You talked of a few people who, remembering the very first time on a hot day they had their first bottle of Coca Cola, the shape of the bottle, that was incredible actually, just reading that.
Michael Moss: Yeah, it's like we all have these powerful food memories, because food gets associated with family. I mean, you mentioned Coke. It's one of the reasons why Coke began advertising and marketing so heavily in baseball or in sports stadiums, because they knew that when kids went to a joyous event like that, you know, with their parents, the memory of that event—and if you can get a Coke in their hands, the memory of that event will get embedded in their memory channels like nothing else associated with that wonderful moment.
Christopher Shulgan: That was the Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalist Michael Moss in conversation with Leslie Beck, who writes about nutrition for the Globe and Mail and runs Medcan's food and nutrition programs. Moss and Beck will continue their conversation next week, when they'll discuss the question of which is more addictive: Oreos or cigarettes? The episode also features Michael's tips for how to fight food cravings, and how the pandemic has transformed our relationship with snacking.
Christopher Shulgan: I'm executive producer Christopher Shulgan. We'll post links, show notes and the full episode transcript at eatmovethinkpodcast.com.
Christopher Shulgan: Eat Move Think is produced by Ghost Bureau. Senior producer is Russell Gragg. Chantel Guertin produced this episode, along with editorial and social media support from Emily Mannella and Tiffany Lewis.
Christopher Shulgan: Remember to rate and subscribe to Eat Move Think on your favourite podcast platform. Follow our host Shaun Francis on Twitter and Instagram @shauncfrancis—that's Shaun with a U—and Medcan @medcanlivewell. We'll be back soon with a new episode examining the latest in health and wellness.
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