How The Food Giants Hooked Us is the wry subtitle of this intriguing read about what we eat and how it is prepared. Children too obese to play suffer from diabetes and the early signs of hypertension and heart disease. Why do the food giants add such quantities of harmful ingredients and fool us into thinking a yoghurt with twice the sugar content of a sweetened cereal is good for us?

SALT SUGAR FAT is the list of three main additives which make food more alluring, or specific to children's tastes. By the end of the 1990s with over half the adult American population overweight and nearly a quarter obese, healthcare costs were high and specific linked illnesses such as cancers were on the rise. Middle-class adults worked a second job to make ends meet and needed quick food, with no time for exercise. Generals testified in Washington that young people were too obese to recruit and surgeons blamed a rise in maternal deaths on overly fat mothers undergoing problematic caesareans. Yet in 1999 a meeting of CEOs of major food companies was presented with the alarming facts and totally refused to change policies.

Low-fat food often contains high levels of sugar instead, disguised by names such as fructose and dextrose. Sugar, fat and salt are cheap additives. Neurologists have found that the brain lights up on receiving sugar just the way it does for cocaine, so manufacturers are desperate to pour it into everything from breakfast cereal to main courses. This empty-calorie ingredient replaces tomatoes, fruits and grains. Salt brings out the taste of food and fat improves texture in the mouth, also adding bulk.

The tobacco industry is compared with the food industry; in some cases they had the same parent company and were undergoing the same threats - from people concerned about marketing to children and ingredients listings. Consumers and health boards are now conscious that these three food ingredients can be harmful in quantity.

Michael Moss persuaded some major firms to make him versions of his favourite products without the additives. Kellogg's made him a saltless cracker which he now found was like tasteless cardboard. Campbells made him soups with a reduced fat, sugar and salt content; they were either overly bland or metallic and bitter.

The text contains visits to molecular biologists and biopsychologists, results of lab rat experiments and comparisons with addictive drugs. We learn the science behind the term 'mouth watering' and see that food technicians experiment to add the three ingredients to food in the most innovative ways. Diet soft drinks made with saccharin make people prone to eat more. High-fructose corn syrup added to sweeten soft drinks makes people eat more and even when they don't they still gain weight.

This book covers some of the same ground as 'Fast Food Nation' - the demand for quick, easy, tasty, cheap food; the dubious methods used by industries to protect themselves, such as paying private food health inspectors to produce reports. Slaughterhouses refuse to supply meat to food processors unless they are guaranteed it will not be tested for e-coli bacteria until it has been mixed with meat from other producers. Living in Europe I found that astonishing. Here we put a huge value on traceability 'from farm to fork' and at the order of the Irish Commissioner, the whole of Europe is currently testing the DNA of processed meat products - alarming finds have included pork DNA in supposedly halal meat supplied to prisons and a supermarket own-brand beef lasagne which was 100 percent equine DNA; arrests have been made, meat producers closed and major contracts cancelled.

The message of Michael Moss's SALT SUGAR FAT is that no matter what we do about banning advertising to children of unhealthy foods, or taxing sweet drinks, the manufacturers are so dependent on their processes to make profits that they are not going to stop. We need to protect ourselves with correct nutritional advice and to make the right choices.

Book Summary

From a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter at The New York Times comes the explosive story of the rise of the processed food industry and its link to the emerging obesity epidemic. Michael Moss reveals how companies use salt, sugar, and fat to addict us and, more important, how we can fight back.
 
In the spring of 1999 the heads of the world’s largest processed food companies—from Coca-Cola to Nabisco—gathered at Pillsbury headquarters in Minneapolis for a secret meeting. On the agenda: the emerging epidemic of obesity, and what to do about it.
 
Increasingly, the salt-, sugar-, and fat-laden foods these companies produced were being linked to obesity, and a concerned Kraft executive took the stage to issue a warning: There would be a day of reckoning unless changes were made. This executive then launched into a damning PowerPoint presentation—114 slides in all—making the case that processed food companies could not afford to sit by, idle, as children grew sick and class-action lawyers lurked. To deny the problem, he said, is to court disaster.
 
When he was done, the most powerful person in the room—the CEO of General Mills—stood up to speak, clearly annoyed. And by the time he sat down, the meeting was over.
 
Since that day, with the industry in pursuit of its win-at-all-costs strategy, the situation has only grown more dire. Every year, the average American eats thirty-three pounds of cheese (triple what we ate in 1970) and seventy pounds of sugar (about twenty-two teaspoons a day). We ingest 8,500 milligrams of salt a day, double the recommended amount, and almost none of that comes from the shakers on our table. It comes from processed food. It’s no wonder, then, that one in three adults, and one in five kids, is clinically obese. It’s no wonder that twenty-six million Americans have diabetes, the processed food industry in the U.S. accounts for $1 trillion a year in sales, and the total economic cost of this health crisis is approaching $300 billion a year.
 
In Salt Sugar Fat, Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Michael Moss shows how we got here. Featuring examples from some of the most recognizable (and profitable) companies and brands of the last half century—including Kraft, Coca-Cola, Lunchables, Kellogg, Nestlé, Oreos, Cargill, Capri Sun, and many more—Moss’s explosive, empowering narrative is grounded in meticulous, often eye-opening research.
 
Moss takes us inside the labs where food scientists use cutting-edge technology to calculate the “bliss point” of sugary beverages or enhance the “mouthfeel” of fat by manipulating its chemical structure. He unearths marketing campaigns designed—in a technique adapted from tobacco companies—to redirect concerns about the health risks of their products: Dial back on one ingredient, pump up the other two, and tout the new line as “fat-free” or “low-salt.” He talks to concerned executives who confess that they could never produce truly healthy alternatives to their products even if serious regulation became a reality. Simply put: The industry itself would cease to exist without salt, sugar, and fat. Just as millions of “heavy users”—as the companies refer to their most ardent customers—are addicted to this seductive trio, so too are the companies that peddle them. You will never look at a nutrition label the same way again.