Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

Author: Michael Moss

Rating: ⭐ 4/5

Date Read: 2013/10/04

Pages: 480

Go into a typical American grocery store, and you won’t find that they stock much food. The real food lines the edges: produce, meat and seafood, dairy. If you want real food that was produced locally and sustainably, with care paid to proper animal-husbandry practices, you’re probably out of luck entirely. The interior of the store is filled with food products: mostly nutrient-poor corn and soy based “foods” engineered to make you keep reaching for just one more. These products are heavily marketed towards children.

Let’s take a look at the ingredient list for Cheetos, which is available online but are not able to be copied and pasted because Frito-Lay seems to want to keep this information as secret as possible. Spoiler alert: this stuff is pretty much poison. My comments on the ingredients appear as footnotes.

Enriched Corn Meal [1] (Corn Meal, Ferrous Sulfate, Niacin, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, and Folic Acid), Vegetable Oil [2] (Corn, Canola, and/or Sunflower Oil), Cheese Seasoning (Whey, Cheddar Cheese [Milk, Cheese Cultures, Salt, Enzymes], Canola Oil [3], Maltodextrin [Made From Corn] [4], Salt, Whey Protein Concentrate, Monosodium Glutamate [5], Natural and Artificial Flavors [6], Lactic Acid, Citric Acid [7], Artificial Color [Yellow 6] [8]), and Salt.

Cheetos were the first food product I could think of, but many food products have similar ingredients. Seriously, the crap that lines the grocery store shelves is mostly corn with artificial flavorings. I wouldn’t feed most of these products to anyone, but millions of people are buying them for their children. How the hell did this happen?

Salt Sugar Fat attempts to provide an answer, by detailing a historical account of processed food. The first section, Sugar, explains how we’ve gone from healthy breakfast standards like eggs, bacon, and sausage, to eating bowls of glorified sugar for breakfast. It’s incredibly disturbing, especially when you hear how food companies go about creating and marketing these products. Unbelievably, many cereals make claims about their “healthy whole grains”(which aren’t even particularly healthy) even though their cereals are pretty much 50% sugar.

Case in point: the insane claim that Frosted Mini Wheats “boost brain power.” Check it out. This is all based on in-house studies, and they didn’t even do a good job biasing the studies because the data don’t support the claims, but that didn’t stop the food companies from marketing sugary wheat as a health product. Seriously, you can’t make this shit up.

The fat section is a bit more uneven than the sugar section. See, sugar is something that pretty clearly has no nutritional value and shouldn’t be a major part of anyone’s diet. Fat, on the other hand, is more complicated. Moss writes based on the misconception that polyunsaturated fats are healthy and that saturated fats should be avoided at all costs, which is outdated (the true story is much more nuanced than that, and really depends on whether you’re getting your saturated fat from grass fed cows or from processed foods). This grated on me. However, the kinds of fats he’s talking about are processed fats, so my nit-picking isn’t terribly relevant, because no one thinks processed cheese and trans fats are healthy.

I didn’t realize how much cheese people were eating. See, Americans have decided that whole milk is, like, super bad for them; apparently, they’ve traded milk consumption for seriously excessive amounts of cheese consumption. Moss outlines how cheese turned from something to be enjoyed in moderation with a little charcuterie and wine, to an ingredient that can be used in a ton of different products (on the cheap, of course). This is mostly due to some incredibly insane government subsidies that lead to more milk being produced than the market needed, or even wanted. You’ll never look at that box of Mac and “Cheese” (really, cheese product) again.

The final section, Salt, deals with the truly insane amounts of salt put into processed foods. People seem to know that salt can be damaging in large quantities, but the “solution” has been removing the salt shaker and eating bland food at home. Truth is, if you’re making food from scratch, you don’t really need to worry about the amount of salt you’re consuming. The major issue is the sodium in processed foods, which contributes to the texture and covers up off flavors, like the “warmed over flavor” that comes from oxidized food products. Without salt, processed foods taste completely disgusting, so don’t expect to see truly low-sodium versions of these foods in the future.

I’m subtracting one star, because processed foods are deeply connected to science, which Moss does not write about well. As a scientist myself, it pains me to see descriptions like this one about “brain imaging, which allowed [Nestlé] to perform nifty experiments like wiring the scalps of its human test subjects to EEG machines in order to see how, say, Dreyer’s ice cream…excites the brain’s neurology” (emphasis added). Read that again, because it’s terrible. EEG measures electrical signals that indicate neuronal activity in the brain. Neurology is a brach of medicine that deals with nervous system disorders. The book includes many errors like this, although more often Moss fails to include any sort of methodological information at all. Of course, if Americans were more science literate, we wouldn’t need books like this in the first place.

My criticisms aside, I would definitely recommend this book, especially for people who are newer to healthy eating.

[1] Made from genetically modified corn, although they don’t have to say that on the label on the label, and grown in a monoculture that’s incredibly harmful to the environment

[2] A chemically extracted, terribly unhealthy oil that’s been touted as healthier than good old-fashioned butter (if this sounds surprising to you, I highly encourage you to check out this debunking of the China Study, as well as the wonderfully accessible book Real Food, which explains the sound nutritional advice of the Weston A. Price Foundation. Besides being horrible for you, most vegetable oils are genetically modified.

[3] Why Canola oil would be added to cheese, I have no idea, as cheese naturally contains a fair amount of milk fat

[4] Maltodextrin is a type of sugar

[5] Yep, that’s MSG

[6] Both “natural” and artificial flavorings are created in labs; “natural” products aren’t particularly natural, but they’re made from things you might find in nature, ish. This Scientific American article explains it well.

[7] Lactic Acid and Citric Acid both act as preservatives

[8] This is manufactured from petroleum, and is a carcinogen. Yummy.