Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us Read Online Free PDF Page A

food manufacturers has been to give health-conscious consumers more of a choice by turning out better-for-you versions of their mainline products. The further they go down this path, however, the harder they bump up against two stark realities of their industry.
    First, the food companies themselves are hooked on salt, sugar, andfat. Their relentless drive to achieve the greatest allure for the lowest possible cost has drawn them, inexorably, to these three ingredients time and time again. Sugar not only sweetens, it replaces more costly ingredients—like tomatoes in ketchup—to add bulk and texture. For little added expense, a variety of fats can be slipped into food formulas to stimulate overeating and improve mouthfeel. And salt, barely more expensive than water, has miraculous powers to boost the appeal of processed food.
    The industry’s dependence on these ingredients became starkly evident when three of the biggest food manufacturers let me in to observe their efforts to cut back on salt. Kellogg, for one, made me a saltless version of their mega-selling Cheez-Its, which normally I can keep eating forever. Without any salt, however, the crackers lost their magic. They felt like straw, chewed like cardboard, and had zero taste. The same thing happened with the soups and meats and breads that other manufacturers, including Campbell, attempted to make for me. Take more than a little salt, or sugar, or fat out of processed food, these experiments showed, and there is nothing left. Or, even worse, what is left are the inexorable consequences of food processing, repulsive tastes that are bitter, metallic, and astringent. The industry has boxed itself in.
    The second obstacle the industry faces in exacting any real reforms is the relentless competition for space on the grocery shelf. When PepsiCo in 2010 launched a campaign to promote its line of better-for-you products, the first drop in sales prompted Wall Street to demand that the company return to promoting its core drinks and snacks: those with the most salt, sugar, and fat. At Coca-Cola, meanwhile, PepsiCo’s move was immediately seized upon as an opportunity to gain ground by pumping more money and effort into doing the one thing they do best—selling soda.
    “We are doubling down on soft drinks,” Coke’s executives boasted to Jeffrey Dunn, a former president of Coca-Cola North America and Latin America who left the company after trying, and failing, to instill some health consciousness at Coke. Dunn, who would share some of the soda industry’s most closely held secrets with me, said that Coke’s reaction was understandable, given the fierce competition, but indefensible in the contextof surging obesity rates. “To me, that is like damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. If they choose that path, they have to be accountable for the social costs of what they are doing.”
    In the end, that is what this book is about. It will show how the makers of processed foods have chosen, time and again, to double down on their efforts to dominate the American diet, gambling that consumers won’t figure them out. It will show how they push ahead, despite their own misgivings. And it will hold them accountable for the social costs that keep climbing even as some of their own say, “Enough already.”
    Inevitably, the manufacturers of processed food argue that they have allowed us to become the people we want to be, fast and busy, no longer slaves to the stove. But in their hands, the salt, sugar, and fat they have used to propel this social transformation are not nutrients as much as weapons—weapons they deploy, certainly, to defeat their competitors but also to keep us coming back for more.



chapter one
“Exploiting the Biology of the Child”
    T he first thing to know about sugar is this: Our bodies are hard-wired for sweets.
    Forget what we learned in school from that old diagram called the tongue map, the one that says our five main tastes are detected by five