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Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss is one of my favorite books describing the addictive ingredients in our processed foods. If we cut down on processed foods, many of our weight issues would resolve themselves. The problem, is that we are addicted to the salt, sugar, and fat in our processed foods.
Today, we live in a world of processed foods. The race with time makes us even more addicted to fast and easy to prepare dishes (good for time, but not our bodies).
Processed foods are filled with sugar, salt and fat, all enemies to our health. Salt, sugar, and fat are the “3 pillars of processed food."
After World War II, instead of staying home and do house chores, women began to work. Working meant that they had less time to spend on housework, including cooking as well. Another factor was the increased usage of the television, and the existence of many shows people watched, leaving them with yet again less time for preparing dinner. Food companies noticed this trend and decided to use it to their advantage, by processing convenience foods which are easy and quick to prepare and suited this shift of behavior.
The notion of eating home cooked meals was not easy to change because many teachers in high schools were teaching their students how to make them.
In order to decrease the resistance to convenience foods, food companies employed their own teachers, who advocated processed foods by teaching mothers and teachers how to prepare quick and easy meals.
Processed foods had another ace up their sleeve: they contain a huge amount of salt, sugar and fat, which humans love and crave.
The need and love for sugar are biological since in the past, getting quick energy from sugar meant increased chances of survival.
Starch also turns into sugar in our bodies, so we love starchy foods as well, such as pizza.
Nowadays, sugar is everywhere: sodas, breakfast cereals, desserts, sauces, pasta and other meals.
Brain pleasure centers light up in functional magnetic resonance imaging studies With sugar and fat intake, similar to cocaine. Adding more sugar leads to a “bliss point” of maximum taste satisfaction. This leads a person to crave sugar like an addiction.
Americans consume an average of 22 teaspoons of added sugar per day, most from processed food.
Notes:
Apart from sugar, the other favorite ingredient of processed-food companies is fat.
While there is a limit to how much sugar we find tasty, when it comes to fat, we do not seem to have such a limit. There is no "bliss point" for fat, but instead a quite potent “mouthfeel” (dryness, gumminess, and moisture release).
This can be easily explained by the fact that we do not taste fat, as we do sugar, we can only sense the structure of fatty foods.
Thus, most of the time people fail at guessing the fat content of the foods they are eating. Fat can be added to food without limit.
The processed food industry uses this fact to their advantage and loads their foods with fat since it gives items better appearance, texture and longer shelf lives.
Notes:
Salt is different from fat and sugar because it does not contain any calories, but it contains sodium, which essential for the human body to function up to a point, after which it becomes bad for the human’s health.
High intakes of sodium lead to high blood pressure and hypertension.
Food companies know how bad it is, but use it because salt brings out the food’s flavor, increases shelf life and hides unpleasant residue tastes after manufacturing.
As far as the human’s salt “bliss point,” it does exist, although evidence suggests that it can be increased by continually increasing the daily intake of salt.
And as long as there are people that crave salt, sugar, and salt, there will be companies that produce foods that contain them.
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