Michael Moss on Salt, Sugar, Fat and The Role of the Food Industry in Creating Food Addiction

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and this week's guest is Michael Moss, an extraordinary investigative journalist for the New York Times who wrote a book called Salt, Sugar, and Fat, exposing the food industry tactics to keep us hooked and sick and fat. He's on coming up next, so stay tuned. so welcome to the Doctors Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and I'm really excited today to have an extraordinary guest, Michael Moss, a reporter for the New York Times, who's really had an extraordinary career. He's a prize-winning journalist. He wrote a book which I love called Salt, Sugar, and Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. It was a number one New York Times bestseller published in 2013. Amazing book. Everybody should get a copy. He's really working on another book, which I'm excited to read, which we don't know when it's coming out yet, but it's called Hooked. Food and free will, which is an important topic because if we are hooked and addicted to food, it's hard to have free will. When food's addictive, personal responsibility, I think, is a fiction. From 2000 to 2015, he was an investigative reporter with the New York Times, mostly reporting on the processed food industry. And in 2010, he won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting on his investigation on the dangers of contaminated meat. His hamburger article was the centerpiece of a body of work focused on surprising and troubling holes in the food system to keep food safe. Before joining the Times, Mr. Moss was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Newsday and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. And he was finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for his reporting on the lack of protective armor for soldiers in Iraq and in 1999 for a team effort on Wall Street's emerging influence on the nursing home industry. He received an overseas press club citation in 2007 for stories on the faulty justice system for the American held detainees in Iraq. Mr. Moss has been an adjunct professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In 1983, he covered an expedition up the West Ridge of Mount Everest in Nepal. I always wanted to do that. I'm really sad I didn't get to go. He was born in Eureka, California. He went to San Francisco State and he lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Eve, a writer, and their two boys. Welcome, Mr. Michael Moss. Thank you so much. Now, I first want to ask you, You know, you went from flak jackets and imperfect armor to food. So how did you switch from military to food?

It was a bit of an accident, actually. 2008, I was in Algeria reporting on anti-government militants there when a couple of FBI agents showed up at the New York Times headquarters where I was working, looking for me. I wasn't there, of course, but they explained to my editors that somehow having a report reported on the war in Iraq and having tortured the Pentagon for failing to equip US and Iraqi soldiers with the simplest body armor. And having written about militants in Morocco and Syria and Lebanon, I had landed on an Al-Qaeda hit list. True or not, I think it may have been just the Algerian government trying to get rid of me. ask to get on the next plane and come home, which I only sort of mentioned because I went from one war to another because while I was coming home, my editor at the time spotted an outbreak of salmonella in peanuts being processed in Southern Georgia, the state Southern Georgia. And suggested to me that I might go down there and have a look at that. And I kind of balked a little bit because like, I think I was hatching up a story about US arms sales overseas. I'm an investigative journalist. And she goes, you know, so she goes in her way, being a very, very smart editor. Look, Michael, think about it here, right? So these are peanuts for starters, healthy things that parents are giving to their little kiddies. And those little kiddies are coming up, you know, ill, and some people in fact are dying. In fact, thousands of people are dying across, I'm sorry, we're getting ill across the country. These are being processed here in the good old US of A. We can't blame China for this one. And they're being used by this $1 trillion processed food industry about which we really know very little. These are the base notes you look for when you're doing investigative journalism. And I went down and did the first story and was sort of off and running in opening up this incredible industry.

You started with peanuts and then you ended up in a food fight.

Well, I started with peanuts and then I moved on to sort of meat, the contaminated meat story. Both those stories were about the industry kind of losing control over its food chain, over the quality of its products. But I was having dinner one night with one of my best sources who tests meat for E. coli for the food industry. And he goes, Look, Michael, as tragic as these incidents are, you really should look at some of the things that my industry, and he was speaking about the meat industry, is intentionally adding to its products over which it has Absolute control. He was mostly concerned about the huge amounts of salt going into processed meat. When I looked at salt though, I also realized that sugar was a huge, a huge powerful ingredient to the industry and then fat as well. As sort of this unholy trinity in which the processed food industry relies on to make its products, you know, really cheap, really convenient, and irresistible.

Yeah, well that sort of brings me to this story that was in your book, Salt, Sugar and Fat. where it kind of was a wake-up call for me when I read it. Most of us say, well, the food industry wasn't really intentional about their actions in creating food that was addictive or trying to take over the food supply. They just were trying to promote and sell their products, which they thought were fine. But it turns out in the '50s, there was a meeting, which probably would be a collusion now around antitrust, if you knew about it, of General Mills convening all these food giants in Minneapolis, which was the grain capital of the world, and saying, how do we prevent the overtaking of the food system by these do-gooders who are trying to get people to eat real food back then? There was a woman named Betty you talked about in your book, who was a home ec teacher, who actually was passionate about getting families to learn how to cook and eat real food.

Yeah, so it's actually a little more, it was a little more recent than me. It was actually 1999, which is really significant. 50s, 50s. Yeah, no, no, no. It was, I think the meeting you're referring to was 1999, at the Pillsbury headquarters, the old Pillsbury headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But the fascinating thing about it is that it was convened by a cabal of insiders in the largest food manufacturers in North America who were becoming alarmed about their growing culpability in not just obesity, diabetes, but they felt their products were rightfully so being linked to several types of cancers. And they brought the heads of the biggest companies together secretly to talk about how they were going to deal with this problem from a corporate standpoint. And in fact, this cabal of insiders were pleading with the company's officials to do something to turn the corner on behalf of consumers, make their products more healthier, cut back on the marketing of the junkier stuff. And you can probably imagine what happened.

Yeah, there were a few people with a moral compass, but it didn't really work out that way.

I mean, the biggest response came from the then CEO of General Mills. He said, look, I mean, we make a low salt version of our products, put on the shelf, if people want that. We're adding whole grains to some of our cereals. We are sensitive to consumers and to help, but you have to realize that we are also beholden to shareholders. And there is no way we're going to mess around with the company jewels, he said, referring to salt, sugar, fat, if that's going to diminish the appeal of our products. And by and large, that's the position of the food industry going forward even today. These are companies.

And you shared how they tried to manipulate their products to have less of these ingredients and you tried to eat them and they were horrible tasting. Right, you couldn't even eat them, right?

Yeah, so at one point, I went to them and said, look, let's just take salt for a minute, right? Which seems to be like public enemy number one now because of its links to heart disease, high blood pressure. Everybody wants you to cut back on salt. Why can't you do it? And this was a beautiful moment for me when I really realized there was a rich story to tell here because Kellogg's invited me in to Battle Creek, Michigan, into its secret research and development laboratory where they put these foods together. But they did something really cool. They prepared for me versions of their products without any salt in them at all to show me why they were struggling so much to reduce the salt. And I have to tell you, it was one of the most god-awful dining experiences in my life. life because we started with the Cheez-Its, which, unlike you, I could normally eat day in and day out. The ones without salt, right? They stuck to the roof of our mouth. We couldn't swallow them because salt provides texture and solubility. We moved on to the frozen waffles, put them in the toaster, they came out looking and tasting like straw because salt adds, Color and taste. And the funnest part were the corn flakes, put them in the bowl, added some milk, took a bite. And before I could say anything, the chief spokeswoman for the company is sitting there next to me and she goes, she gets this look of horror on her face and she swallows and she blurts out, the word metal, I taste metal, M-E-T-A-L. And I'm thinking to myself, yeah, I thought one of my fillings came out of my mouth and was sloshing around. And also with us at the table is the chief technical officer he's in charge of all things scientific at the company. He starts chuckling and he goes, Not everybody will taste that, but one of the beautiful things about salt for us is that it will mask, cover up some of the off notes they call them, or bad tastes that are inherent to many processed foods. And so all of those things make salt to the industry more than just flavor, which you're adding when you're cooking yourself and salts of great thing there, but it's doing all these things that makes the products sort of the industrial powerhouses that they are.

And the truth is, when you take these processed ingredients that are highly refined, they taste awful, and the only way to make them taste good is to put in salt, sugar, and fat. And what was fascinating to me, Michael, was that you talked about the science behind the salt crystals and how they apply them and the different shapes of them and what they do and how they affect taste and the tongue and stimulation. This is not just, oh, let's throw some salt on. This is highly scientific processes that they use to to actually hook us.

Yeah, and it is extraordinary science that they use. And it's not, I mean, it's a very real thing. And in fact, since you want to talk about salt.

He's pulling out a bag of potato chips.

Well, these are us. My wife is from Baltimore, so this is actually a family favorite, even though it's actually made in Pennsylvania. So, the thing about the potato chip is that it kind of illustrates salt, sugar, and fat. The salt they call the flavor burst. And indeed, it comes in some 40 different versions with different additives and packaging size and all of that, each one kind of designed for a special purpose. The cool thing about salt on a potato chip is that it's typically on the outside of the potato chip, or at least that's the first thing that touches the saliva, which I'm licking right now. Which of course goes into your taste buds and sends that signal to the reward center of your brain, which sends that feeling of pleasure back saying, Michael, I love that, keep doing it. Excuse me, by the way, that noise, we can talk about the noise that the chips makes too, but the other thing about noise about chips is that they are of course loaded with fat. The industry calls fat the mouth feel. And there is a very precise formula that they want to hit in making snack foods. And it's basically 50%. 50% of the calories should come from fat because that will allow those products to melt in your mouth. This.

Is not good fat. They use refined oils, processed fats, and often trans fats. These are very bad for you.

Yes, but still a powerful weapon in the hands of the industry in terms of getting you to eat more than you otherwise would. And again, fat is a sensation that your trigeminal nerve picks up, also goes to the same part of your brain that sends back that feeling of pleasure. But what I didn't know, and you did, I'm sure, until I spent some time with these scientists developing these products, which is potato chips are also loaded with sugar in the form of the simple potato starch that gets converted into sugar in your body. And so you've got, which by the way they call the bliss point when they get that perfect amount of sugar. So the potato chips have all three things going for them. It's a great example.

It's unbelievable and these aren't foods, they're science projects masquerading as food essentially.

They like to refer to them as engineering projects and their invention of these products as engineering.

And one of the things you did, part of your research for the book is you went looked at MRI scans, functional MRIs, looking at brain patterning that happens as a result of eating these foods in the areas in the brain that are stimulated that drive addictive behavior.

Can you just talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I mean, so the whole sort of area of brain science and studying the brain to sort of kind of figure out what's going on inside us when we do eat these products. I mean, obviously it's a very young science. You have to take much of it with a grain of salt. I think somebody at Harvard said recently that if really understanding the brain is a mile long journey, we've come about three inches so far. But they are able to slide people into the MRI and either show them pictures of food, which is a very cool thing because that sort of measures the wanting or the desire of those foods. And then if it's something that you can easily kind of suck on and digest like chocolate, for example, then they can also record the the pleasure part of the system. I'll tell you a funny story on that. I was doing an interview recently with somebody who's doing these kinds of research and they have a system where they can put milkshake into your mouth to measure and then show you pictures of that to measure both the wanting and the desire once the milkshake actually drips on your tongue. Because you can't move your head in the MRI. And I said to him before, I'm not a huge milkshake drinker, but if we put some like Pinot Noir in a little tubing system and drip that in, I think you're gonna really see some reward signals going off in my brain.

It's pretty interesting. We think that it may be the mouth feel, the stimulation of the tongue, the taste buds, the pleasure that may be affecting that. And you go, okay, well it's just the design of the food, but we actually know from Dr. David Ludwig's work that people who had identical tasting looking milkshakes were the same same calories, same protein, fat and carbs and fiber. One had a high glycemic starch, meaning it raised the blood sugar quickly. The other one didn't. Had profoundly different effects. The ones that had the high sugar one, even that they didn't know they were eating something different, stimulated insulin, made their blood sugars higher, their cortisol higher. But also, when they looked at the brain imaging, it stimulated the area called nucleus accumbens, which is the area that is the same stimulated area for addiction like heroin or cocaine. really is fascinating that you don't even have to know what you're eating. It's really the biology of these foods is designed to make you hooked. And that's what your new book's on.

Yes, it is. It's sort of looking at that question, is this stuff really addictive? Can we compare it to drugs or tobacco or an alcohol and kind of in what ways? And also kind of going forward too, is that sort of, is that how we want to think about these foods? Is that sort of a good way to kind of wrestle with them as a social policy and a personal health?

Yeah, because then personal choice becomes a little bit of a fiction when you have products on the market that are highly addictive. Absolutely. Yes.

And speaking of that, when I read.

Your book, Salt, Sugar, and Fat, which everybody should get, it's an extraordinary book, you talked about the sort of intentionality here where they create taste institutes and hire craving experts to create the bliss point of food with the purpose of creating heavy users. These were their own internal terms. And you talk about Howard Moskowitz, who was a scientist, food scientist, who formulated a new tasting Dr. Pepper and had 61 different varieties that we tested over in 3,000 different taste tests. Yes. And they're looking for this magical point you call the bliss point.

It was Howard Moskowitz who coined the term the bliss point to apply to that sort of perfect amount of sugar in foods. And it is kind of a precise point on a bell-shaped curve. And anybody who likes sugar in their coffee, for example, can do the tests themselves at home. Just add sugar till you get to the point where you really love the coffee and keep adding sugar and pretty much you'll be going, yuck. The really kind of important thing for me about that, though, was not that the companies hired people like Howard Moskowitz to engineer foods with the perfect bliss point of sweetness, foods that we know should be sweet and we already consider to be sort of treats like ice cream and soda and cookies. The food companies marched around the grocery store adding sugar to things that weren't sweet before.

Salad dressing.

Salad dressing, yogurt, pasta sauce, creating kind of this expectancy in us that everything should be sweet. So if you've got kids and you're trying to drag them over to the part of the grocery store where we should all be spending more time, the produce aisle, and they get hit with some sour bitter notes, the other four or five tastes that Aristotle wrote about way back when, you know, that's why you have a riot on your hands because They are attuned. They are expecting everything to be sweet.

It's true. One of the surprising facts I uncovered was that your morning low-fat fruit sweetened yogurt, which is considered a health food, has more sugar per ounce than soda, which is startling.

Who knew that walking into the grocery store was such a treacherous thing? You have to be on your guard at all times. Look, these are companies. I always like to sort of make that point. It's not that I see them as this this evil empire that intentionally set out to make us usually overweight or otherwise ill. I mean, these are companies doing what all companies want to do, which is to make as much money as possible by selling as much product as possible. And they just happen to have some very smart people working for them to work on the marketing, on the packaging, on the ingredients, everything.

But knowing what you know and them, I think, knowing what they know, which is hard to not know it, 2018. Isn't there something nefarious about how they go about, for example, targeting children? I mean, I was with Senator Tom Harkin when he was a senator in charge of health, and he said he saw this little kindergarten preschool class with beautiful chairs all throughout the kindergarten. They were all labeled with Coca-Cola because Coca-Cola donated them, and that they target children to try to get them brand loyal early on, and then they look their population of users and the ones who were already drinking a lot of soda, they try to get them drinking more, like targeting the ones who drink over a thousand cans a year to drink even more. They must know what they're doing here.

One of my favorite characters in the book was Jeffrey Dunn for 20 years, one of the biggest warriors in Coca-Cola. He rose to become president of Coca-Cola for North America, South America, and he walked me through You know, those very marketing schemes that they used.

I mean, this was after he quit.

Well, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He had an epiphany at one point and decided to- Didn't live with himself anymore? Exactly. And, but one of those strategies is what they call up and down the street marketing, which refers to their trucks, like other snack food companies, driving from corner store to corner store, which in cities, typically surround the schools and get the kids coming and going and controlling the real estate in those stores. So it's the snack food companies that own the coolers, the racks up front near the cash register. And that's where the heavy salt, sugar, fat sort of snacking comes from, is they're controlling that very important space for kids, especially knowing that when a child goes in for the first time with their own spending money, they will become imprinted, brand loyal, and we'll start making a habit of that.

I mean, it seems that, you know, when you look at the science around how they develop these foods, that they're intentionally trying to create foods that hook people. So do you think they are blind to the idea that these are addictive, that they know it but just don't talk about it or hide it? I mean, what's really going on after all these conversations Do the people in these companies know what they're doing?

Well, there was this really interesting moment. After that 1999 meeting, I spoke about earlier, Kraft, which at the time was the largest processed food company, these insiders who had organized the meeting from Kraft went back and they actually managed to get Kraft to unilaterally adopt some reforms of their formulation and marketing of their products. And they sort of went after those things. And one of the hardest things for them was when they went to their food engineers and said, thou shalt no longer simply add as much salt to your fat as you want to these products as you want to. We're gonna put caps on them. And the food engineers were sort of like a little non- I mean, they were like a little baffled. Like, what's going on here? They spent their entire career in efforts to maximize the allure of their products. And here suddenly they were being asked to do something less than that. I think where they try to draw the line is saying that we never intended to people that people pig out. Clearly we intended to maximize the allure of our products. And I think that's where things got out of control is where products designed to be irresistible became really irresistible and commonplace. And snacking became the fourth American meal, which turned their products into something very treacherous for people that maybe initially they weren't.

Yeah, no, it's frightening. And when you look at the research you did, you've interviewed over 300 food industry experts, scientists, former employees, you sort of did a little muckraking, And what was the most surprising thing you found that sort of, you went, oh my goodness, I didn't know that.

Well, a few things. Being an investigative reporter, of course, behold and to go after the money, and there was certainly a lot of money to look at. But I kind of fell in love with the language that they use when they talk to each other about their efforts to maximize the allure of their products. They talk about, for instance, they don't have to use the word addiction. They talk about making their products craveable, and the difference is... Snack a ball, snack a ball. And one of my favorites is, you know, designing more-ish-ness into the products.

But going back to the extraordinary- There's a stomach share.

And stomach share, well here, we can talk about stomach share right here. So I've also brought for you a very orange and blue giant bag. Well, giant bag, this may be one serving for some people, which I'll open up right now to illustrate one of the other kind of language things that really got my attention. They realize that, and I'm going to do this since you didn't volunteer.

I will not eat that orange colored thing that's near the nose.

So this orange kind of thing about the size of my index finger here, very puffy looking, is gonna go into my mouth. And when I press it against the roof of my mouth, it will melt because of that 50% formula I mentioned before and disappear. And what the industry realized is that, the signal to the brain when that disappears is that the calories have disappeared as well, right?

So you're eating air.

So you're eating air. Michael, you might as well finish this whole giant bag, if you don't mind. And they call that phenomena the vanishing caloric density. It's a fabulous term that in so many ways kind of illustrates their their drive to use extraordinary science to make their products.

And you just keep wanting more and more and more. And it's easy to binge on a whole bag of Cheetos, but you're not gonna eat 10 avocados, right?

And Margaret, and they know that, and that was one of the more gripping things to me. That they were doing. The other surprising thing is that they don't eat their own products, especially when they get into health trouble. The former Chief Technical Officer of Kraft used to jog for for keeping his health and weight in check. And at one point, he blew out his knee and couldn't run anymore. And the very first thing he did was stopped eating some of his favorite products in the grocery store, knowing that he was one of those people who could open up a bag of chips and have to eat the whole thing when he came home after work. He could not eat just a handful of chips. So they themselves know how powerful their products are for many of us.

And what I find it fascinating is that they have the capacity to reformulate their products that are somewhat healthier. Yes. And a friend of mine, Vani Hari, called the Food Babe, found out that Kraft in the UK was not allowed to have any artificial colors or chemicals or additives.

Right.

And so they produce products out there. They're free of those.

Yes.

But in the United States, they didn't. And she forced them almost unilaterally under a lot of peer pressure and social pressure and social media pressure to have them change their formulation.

Right. There are different levels of salt sugar fat that they add to their products in different countries in the world, depending on sort of habits that people are in. And I think that also speaks to the phenomena that the companies, they are responsive to public concern. It's just that their ability now to play a significant role going forward as more and more people are caring about what they're putting in their bodies is really pretty suspect because again, these are miracle ingredients that they're using. They can dial back to a certain extent, but at some point their products just kind of fall off a cliff and they're not tasting very good.

And your book made a huge splash when it came out and I think raised a lot of eyebrows and certainly got my attention and many others How has the food industry's behavior or actions shifted as a result of this story coming out?

So less the food industry behavior than our own behavior. And again, more and more people have become concerned about what they're eating. And that concern has started to translate into purchase decisions in the grocery store. And it didn't take much to send the industry into a panic. So there was another meeting just a couple of years ago. Florida with investors. And one after another of the large companies stood up and reported dismal profit earnings. And the more forthright of them confessed that they were losing- Stomach share. Stomach share, but also the trust of their consumers. And that's really where you started to see this new trend now of everybody cutting back on, especially on salt sugar fat, but other things like artificial colorings, et cetera. in sort of this desperate gamble to try to win back the trust of consumers. And I think I have really mixed feelings about it.

Yeah, it's really interesting because you have to look at this from a bigger perspective. If you look at the foods consumed by Americans, 60% of them come from commodity foods, wheat, corn, and soy in the form of flour, high fructose corn syrup, and soybean oil, refined soybean oil, which is often the fat that's in your mouthfeel thing. And those people who consume the most of those are the sickest. And no matter how they dial up or down the ingredients or tweak their products, it's still junk. So this is an interesting phenomenon we're in, as people become more aware, how are they responding to that?

Well, the companies, I mean, people are the companies.

People and companies.

I think we're all having to get smarter. I mean, even looking at the nutrition facts label on some of these products, I have mixed feelings about it.

Fake news.

Well, yeah, because they're very good at adjusting these numbers to whatever is the immediate concern of people buying it. And in the past, it's sort of been sugar and and salt and then some kinds of fat and calories and fiber. And so you look at this, you go, okay, that seems kind of reasonable, but then you realize it's still junk.

Junk, right. It's a little less junky, but it's still junk.

So, I mean, it's better than nothing. At least we now know what's going in these products, especially because of the requirement that they list the ingredients. But I think it's incumbent upon us, and this is, easier for some people than others to think more about sort of what we're eating and is this real food and how can we make adjustments in our life to get better food for ourselves and our families?

Yeah, it's pretty interesting what's happening because in this country, as you mentioned, sales are going down. I mean, I think there's a 25% reduction in soda consumption in the United States, but globally it's increasing. So where they can't sell to us, basically selling to the rest of the world and particularly developing countries. We have 80% now of the world's type 2 diabetics in the developing world. And we're seeing massive obesity across the globe. And there are countries that are starting to sort of stand up against this. For example, Chile recently came up with a series of different policy recommendations that I thought were pretty profound because the doctor, the person who runs the country, Michelle Bachelet is a pediatrician. And the vice president of the Senate is a doctor. And they put in policies of 18% soda tax. They eliminated any food marketing to kids. In fact, they banned Tony the Tiger and all the cartoon characters on food products for kids. And they even put warning labels like on cigarettes on the front of the packaging in the box. They eliminated any advertising in radio, TV, or movie theaters. They eliminated advertising for formula because they want people to breastfeed. They cleaned up all the schools. It's profound. And the food companies went crazy, and they're actually suing the government. But is this the kind of thing that's going to shift things globally?

Yeah. I mean, it's got to be usually upsetting to the food companies because they did what the tobacco industry did, which is as concern increased in this country, they began shifting their marketing overseas. And that was their biggest hope for sales. So they've got to be really scared of those initiatives. And it's sort of ironic, too, that People in those countries are doing things that we've not been able to do in this country.

I mean, there's a lot of bravery. I read an article about Columbia where the food industry there was going after activists, food activists who were advertising for a soda tax in Columbia. And then there were their thugs threatening them. They hacked into their computers and their phones. They made it illegal to talk about a soda tax in Columbia. This is really kind of fascist behavior.

Well, now you're back to the fundamental issue here, which is the huge amount of money. being made by these companies?

Yeah, I mean, isn't it the biggest global industry? I think it's $18 trillion globally because 9 billion people eat.

That's if you throw everything in the food chain.

Everything. You mean the whole food chain? Yeah, the whole food system. Let's talk about labels because you were mentioning the food label. And, you know, in this country, you kind of have to have a PhD in nutrition to understand the nutrition facts label. I think it's called, it should be called alternative facts or fake news because it's so risk representative of what really matters. And in other countries, they're implementing things like the stoplight version, which is green, this is good for you, yellow, eat with caution, red, this is going to kill you. Or they put front-of-label packaging on, or they actually have it much more sensible. In this country, it's almost impossible unless you have a PhD to understand that. And even then, it's hard.

The first thing you realize is that the front of the package is the most valuable real estate. And that's where the companies put their best foot forward. And so, for example, these wonderful Potato chips, ripples, original, these great words, but you also notice at the top- Gluten free. Gluten free. Now they might have put on their reduced salt or reduced fat or added vitamins or minerals. That's typically what you'll get. And if people do turn the package over and look at the fine print, one of the deceptive things that goes on there is that this package of chips, for example, is something that somebody might eat the whole thing. In fact, a good number of us will sit down and eat an entire.

Bag of chips or something.

Well, right, but all the numbers in here, if you're concerned about trans fats, you're concerned about cholesterol or sodium or fiber, maybe on the positive side, that's another story, protein, the overall calories is per serving and there's three of those, so you have to kind of do the math yourself and realize that's not.

Well, I asked the former head of the FDA, Food and Drug Administration, I said, why can't you make the labels better? Why can't you actually make them make sense and clear? He says, well, when we try to change them, we get enormous pressure from Congress, who's getting enormous pressure from the food industry, and they threaten to shut us down in terms of our funding, which I thought was, you know, very revealing. So we have money in politics that's driving policies that are making us sick.

And fat, and the government's not protecting us. Yeah, and in many ways the food companies are more powerful than the regulators who are there supposedly to regulate them.

They're often the same people, right? They're often the revolving door of people from industry to government.

And often with dueling missions, the Department of Agriculture being the best example. I mean, one of its missions is to promote American companies, American products here and overseas as commodities, etc. And then a teeny tiny fraction of 1% of their budget goes toward promoting better eating, better nutrition, better health for us. And the department, you can imagine who sort of wins when push comes to shove.

And there's so many conflicting policies out there. The government really, one of the greatest stories in your book was about cheese.

Yes.

So we were like, everybody get off fat, low fat, low saturated fat. So the government's pushing this message out there at the same time that they're aggressively promoting the overuse of cheese because when you take the fat out of dairy, you're left with some fat to do something with and you turn it into cheese. And yet, so they're pushing it on the one hand, it's just a complete contradictory mess.

If only cows had made non-fat milk, which they didn't. So the fat from the milk was a commodity. They weren't about to throw it away and they could only slough so much of it off on other countries in the world. So they made cheese. and turn cheese from this kind of delightful, tasty treat, you know, in and of itself or cheese sandwiches into an ingredient to kind of increase the mouthfeel. And so suddenly you saw processed cheese made overnight in their factories going into everything in the grocery store, seemingly as a way. And if I did the rough math and basically all of the fat that people took out of their diet from drinking low or non-fat milk snuck back in as a result of these government overseeing programs to increase the consumption of processed cheese as a way of helping the dairy industry.

And they're in cahoots with the dairy industry. So the National Dairy Promotion Research Board works with the Dairy Council. So the government works with the Dairy Council to promote. They had these got milk ads, which actually had to be taken off the air because they were not based in science and they're making health claims that the FTC said were Illegal. Hey, I'm you from the future.

You're me?

I know. Drink this.

It's working. Keep drinking. Got milk.

So this is really where the government gets its hands dirty in a way that is really in bed with industry.

With maybe in some sense sort of a noble, a noble thought in the beginning. Look, no, I mean, It's hard not to be empathetic with dairy farmers, but the fact was they were overproducing. And instead of taking that overproduction and throwing it away or something, in fact, what they were doing was storing it, all that cheese in caves and realized the cheese was going moldy and they had to start pumping it out into school food programs or et cetera. That's what they did. That was their solution, was to promote more consumption.

And often it wasn't great cheese, right? It was processed cheese. In fact, I love the story about Kraft, we call it American cheese, but it's actually not allowed to be called cheese because it's not 51% cheese. It's called Kraft slices.

Well, there's all kinds of euphemisms that they have to use because of the standards and some of the fit- what.

Is the other 49%? 150%.

But some of the, in fact, Some of the cheese engineers at Kraft, you know, were, you know, in meeting them and tasting cheese are just kind of appalled at American processed cheese, which to them is, you know, was not real cheese.

It's not like your heirloom goat cheese from France or something like that.

No, but again, it serves this incredibly powerful role in processed food of sort of that providing that mouthfeel texture allure.

And it's in everything. It's just unbelievable. Yeah, I was pretty surprised how many of it. Everywhere you go, restaurants, fast food places, it's, you know, I have to say.

Please don't put the cheese on, you know? And that was by design, by marketing plans overseen by the federal government.

And then they made it easy, right? They graded it, they shredded it, they have all these prepackaged processed cheese to.

Make it super easy to add to everything. Cheap, easy, yummy. Those are the, that is the unholy trinity of them. of the industry.

Let's take a different direction for a minute. I recently gave a talk at Riverside Church about the way in which the food industry targets poor and minorities. And we know that, for example, that African American kids drink almost twice as much soda. We know that they target these communities through advertising. You see sports stars, athletes, you see stealth marketing, really targeted these communities. What did you find in terms of their practices around the poor and minorities in the book?

I mean, I got the sense that they were colorblind or rather, I never got any hard evidence that they were targeting those kids because of their race. They're going after potential consumers. And by and large, kids in the inner city have less choice about where to shop and they're going to be more exposed to the kind of marketing schemes that the companies use, especially those corner stores, which is huge for them. so that was the sense that I got is that they were going after kids because they were vulnerable because they're kids and they don't have farmers markets, they don't have access to full scope supermarkets, they don't have money.

How do they target the heavy users? Because these communities often are using more because they're targeted in some way. How do they go after and try to create heavy users who are using even more to go from 1,000 cans to 2,000 cans a day?

Yeah, but really, well, so right, so there's the 80/20 rule, which is the 20% 20% of your customers will, a certain 20% of your customers will drink 80% of the product. You focus your marketing, your advertising, your promotions, your displays, your up and down the street sort of placement and stuff on those very people.

Yeah, and it's frightening. In a place like Mexico, water costs three times as much as Coke.

It's just amazing, right?

20% of their calories came from Coke and the president of Mexico was formerly the president of Coke for all of Latin America.

The kind of ownership, increasing ownership of the food companies, including Nestle, of water, I think is a potentially very disturbing thing.

Yeah, let's talk about that, 'cause I think most people don't know about that. But in order to produce products, these drinks, which are the bulwark of these companies' profits, they have to have water resources.

And how is that affecting- Fundamental ingredients.

How is that affecting, you know, the global water supply?

I actually don't know the answer to that because I haven't done that reporting yet. And in fact, precious little reporting has been done on who is, how much of that ownership has shifted hands from us, the public, the government, into the hands of private companies, and what does that mean?

Extraordinary. So what is the cost to society to humans from this massive effort by the food industry to get us to become addicted or hooked to their foods?

I think you can measure it in terms of added medical cost. You can measure it in terms of lost productivity. How else would we measure? And those are the, we're talking billions and billions of dollars that are, you know, it's kind of the hidden cost of eating these products that we're all sort of picking up the burden on. I mean, the healthcare cost, I think, is the most interesting because people have been thinking, look, we were able to impose some very real marketing formulation curbs on the tobacco industry by the states getting together and suing the tobacco companies, not because they were faulting their product, cigarettes, But simply to recover the cost of taking care of people who got sick from smoking. And so there's some thought that going after the food companies in that same vein, look, you guys are creating a problem. It's wiping out our healthcare budgets. We're going to ask you to pay for that. It's a really sort of fascinating way of looking at it.

Well, let's talk about that because, you know, it's interesting to talk about tobacco and food because often they're the same companies. Philip Morris Kraft, RJR Nabisco. So they change the names to protect the guilty, but I think that this is same tactics that are being used. And how do we then attack food? Because tobacco is a very singular product, whereas you've got soda, you've got Cheetos, you've got all this fast food, processed food. It's more sort of squishy. How do you go about creating a litigation or even regulation around that?

Right, again, Ian, I'm not sure you do. That is one of the, that's one of the industries, I think a point where they feel really good about their chances in terms of litigation is that, you know, there aren't going to be seven process food company executives sitting up before Congress, you know, saying there's nothing addictive about their products like the tobacco companies. There would be, have to be hundreds. because there are tens of thousands of products, you know, in the grocery store.

You know, the truth is, Michael, that there's a handful of companies that own all the companies. Like, there's like maybe nine or ten, and they even own all the natural, healthy brands.

But the products are all different. And so who would you single out to, you know, to be the chief defendant in a legal case? Would it be Coca-Cola, would it be Pepsi, would it be, you know, Oat's Potato Chips? That's, you know, and then how would you prove that their product was responsible for your client's sort of poor health? I think that's one of the difficulties. And the other challenge too is that, you know, eating a potato chip is not inherently dangerous as smoking a cigarette.

Well, a potato chip or a cigarette, but that's like a bag or a pack becomes more concerning.

But then you start getting right. So then you start getting into sort of the marketing and the habit forming strategies of the companies. If you could show that there was intent to get people to eat not just one potato chip, but the entire bag and bag after bag, then I think you may have some potential for litigation. But also coming back to sort of the healthcare costs too. Another approach would be to, and people have started thinking about this and suggesting it is, Forget about the, you know, calling them evil or tying them to bad health, just go after the public health care cost and to get them to share that, the burden of the bill. And that inherently would undermine their marketing. Right.

Well, it was interesting when you wrote once that, you know, the CEO of General Mills said to you that maybe we should regulate because we're not going to change our behavior.

Independently, Mark, that was the head, that was a former CEO of Philip Morris.

Philip Morris, yeah.

Even more interesting because no industry hated government regulation more than the tobacco industry. But interestingly, and Philip Morris became, as you mentioned, the largest manufacturer of processed food in North America through its acquisition of the old company General Foods out of Tarrytown, New York, and then Kraft. and this Jeffrey Bible, this former CEO, was put in charge of the food industry. So he learned and he studied it and he met with me and agreed to talk about that. And he said, yeah, you know, and I asked him about regulation. He said, you know, look, Michael, I mean, I'm no fan of regulation, as you know, but, you know, this food industry is sort of so kind of out of control in the sense and so vicious in its fighting against one another for space in the grocery store, that there may be something valid to sort of getting them together and agreeing upon some regulation as a way of kind of defending themselves. I think he sort of, he foresaw what has been happening recently, which is declining sales and the junkiest stuff, and saw their acceptance of regulation as kind of the, you know, as a fallback position or something in their own interest to do.

Because something has to happen, right? This is the hidden crisis that nobody talks about, which is the burden on chronic disease that affects one in two people, the fact that Medicare and Medicaid are going to consume 100% of our federal budget in 20 years from the burden of chronic disease, it affects even our military kids are too fat to fight, kids can't learn in school because they're eating processed food, we see social justice, poverty, even violence being connected to the foods that people are eating. This is a massive global problem. And of course, it even extends beyond that to things like climate change and environment because of how we're growing the food.

Right. I think that the companies, to some extent, see their ace in the hole as being population growth. Because they talk about the year 2050 when the world is going to have helped me out here, 9 billion people. It's probably not the right number. And I think that gives them the hope that we'll get in the position where we will be desperate for calories no matter where they're coming from. And these companies that we're now vilifying will ride to our rescue providing those cheap, easy calories. The long-term healthcare consequences be damned. So they talk about food security and that's what they're referring to is sort of their ability and that's their argument is that we're the ones who can feed the world.

Well, it's fascinating. If you look at the food system now, 40% of our food is wasted and we have more than enough calories on the planet to feed everybody for a long time without increasing food production. and this is sort of the argument of big ag and big food. We need to deal with food insecurity. We need to feed the world. We need to do these bad things because there's no other option. And I think that's just not true. There are all kinds of innovations that can happen around this. You know, I recently got to know the vice chairman of Pepsi, very interesting guy, doctor. And he said he got asked to speak at the USDA's main meeting. So the agriculture department, which I thought was interesting. And he said to them, we need to convene, and the government needs to convene all the big food companies and big ag companies to think through these problems together. They can't do it together because that's collusion and that's sort of like antitrust. But they actually could solve these problems together by affecting how we grow the food and agriculture, all the whole food and supply chain could be rethought. And they're trying to think about this, but it's really tough. It's like getting a horse and buggy maker to think about designing a car.

And it comes back to their responsibility to shareholders. Pepsi has in the past decade at various times sort of promoted the idea of of pushing less bad for you products, healthier if you will, and has had considerable difficulty with that because by and large their profit center is still based on the junkier stuff. And so it's again, it comes down to this notion, I'm kind of still on the fence about their ability to play a meaningful role in our lives and making our food system better and for all of us moving forward.

Because I think everybody agrees it's unsustainable, right?

And yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So if you were king for a day, and you could change something in the food system in the world that would make a big difference, and you had autonomy, maybe king or a dictator, whatever, what would that be?

You know, it's funny you mentioned that. I mean, I don't know if I'd want to be king. I'd love to control. Yeah, I'd love to control one zip code because there's about 10 things you'd kind of want to do. And I think this is actually really doable. Somebody with some money could actually fund a project where you took a zip code and you started doing, like I said, 10 different things. You start with a school that's in that zip code and you plant a garden to get kids, not to feed the kids, but to get kids excited about radishes and strawberries. Then you convince the food delivery companies, home delivery companies to actually deliver to that ZIP code so they can have access to those products. Or you build a supermarket in that ZIP code where once the kid comes home is excited about radishes, they can then go with their parents to the store to actually buy those radishes. You throw in some nudge marketing to sort of help people develop kind of new eating habits. Help me out here. There's going to be seven other things you could do in that. And then you just kind of do this controlled study. And I think it would be absolutely fabulous to do that. But I think the point in my.

Mind is that-- Teach them how to cook.

Teach them-- yeah. Well, yeah, exactly. So I think often we've wished that one thing could solve it. And then, like, like labeling restaurant calories, putting calories on restaurant menus, in and of itself, it's probably not going to solve anything, but combined with these other things, that's probably the way to go. We're gonna get some synergy going on.

I think those are great ideas. I think it's important for us to think about where people live. It turns out that your zip code is a bigger determinant of your health and your genetic code.

Not just zip code, but I mean, entire swaths of the country are incredible food deserts. I've given talk, I gave a talk recently in Kansas to the Hospital Association, which was looking for ways to improve the food in hospitals, not just what they serve to patients, but in kind of the, you know, in the little store in the hospital for patients coming in. And one of the people in the audience explained to me that that for her buying food meant driving 100 miles to one of the big box stores where she could find some produce of certain type, but basically she could only do that run once a week. And that was the limitation. So they're not even talking about farmers markets there. They're talking about just a lack of basic access to fresh vegetables.

No, I used to live in Idaho. in a small town on a Native American reservation. And the grocery, the one grocery store there had a produce section that was about the size of a kitchen table with not very happy looking vegetables. And I literally had to drive 50 miles each way to go to the nearest town to go to Costco to try to get some vegetables. And I drive them back. I get it. It's hard. And I think that the distribution system, the access is an issue. but also education is an issue. People don't know what they're eating. And I think I'm shocked often by the fact that many people out there who are struggling with health and weight issues actually don't have the right information about what to do or how to do it. And that when they're empowered with that, they often can change.

Right, right. Well, that's what you're doing, of course, too, which is phenomenal, sort of helping people, you know, getting that information to people about what to do when they have the opportunity.

Yeah, working on a new project in the Bronx called Rejuvenation, bringing these skills and ideas to the communities there who suffer the most.

Oh, fantastic. There's our zip code idea.

There you go.

We could do it.

Yep, it's absolutely got to happen. So after you learned all this from your 300 interviews and you sort of got in the underbelly of the food industry and the products and what they are, what changed for you about what you eat and what you do and how you live?

Well, I have Two boys at home, actually one just left for college. Time flies.

Congratulations.

They, I have to say, were little walking bliss points for sugar, like most kids. But my wife and I kind of decided that we didn't want to be parents who said, no, no, no. We wanted to be parents who could have a conversation with our kids and talk to them about industrial, highly processed food, you know, in a political sense that these are companies trying to their best to get our kids to do their bidding and sort of think about it in that framework. And we get the sense that looking at it that way is really empowering them. So when they were younger, you know, We would go to the cereal aisle and they would realize that the sweetest brands were at eye level because that's where they're strategically placed at the cereal aisle. And I would nudge them a little bit to look low or I would reach high for the less sugary things. And could they maybe find a brand that had six or five grams of sugar or less per serving? And they would bring that plain Cheerios home or what have you. And yeah, I think that they would rather have had the Cocoa Puffs, right? Or one of the high sugar ones. But they actually liked the taste of the lower sugar ones more than they would have otherwise, having been engaged in a conversation about a food. And I think that's where the future, that's where the hope lies, is with young kids.

Yeah.

Helping them realize that knowing all the tricks that the food companies are up to to get them to do their bidding is empowering and will help them make better decisions for themselves.

Sort of making them go up against the oppressors and the injustice of it all, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And as it, you know, I imagine like a new home economics class in school that's designed around that sort of food as politics. And I think even high school kids could really get into them.

Yeah, well, let's talk about that for a minute. I actually once reminded me of a story when my son was like, there's nothing in the house to eat. I said, all right, let's go to the grocery store. I want it for my friends over, but there's never any food here. I said, okay, you can buy anything you want. There's one rule, no trans fat. And he couldn't find anything. Chips, pizza, everything had trans fat in it back and it was very educational for him to see.

I was on you.

Anything you want. So, one of the things that I think is sort of critical for us to think about is how these food companies are really pretty deliberate about these practices. And people can kind of get to understand what's going on when they realize that. And I once went to this family in South Carolina as part of the movie Fed Up. where they were very overweight, massive obesity. The father was 42, had kidney failure from diabetes, needed a transplant on dialysis. The mother was 200 plus more, maybe 300 pounds. The son was almost diabetic. And they lived in a trailer, a family of five, on food stamps and disability, one of the worst food deserts in America. They had 10 times as many fast food and convenience stores as grocery stores. And rather than sort of berate them and said, why don't you eat better? I said, well, let's cook a meal together. So I went to the grocery shop and we got simple food. I gave them a guide called Good Food on a Tight Budget, which is how to eat well for you, for the planet, and your wallet. And I showed them how to chop vegetables. I showed them how to cook a meal. And before I did that, I went through their cupboards with them and I said, Look, here's a box of your corn dogs. Here's Pop-Tarts. Here's salad dressing, here's what's in it, here's these ingredients, here's what they do to you, here's why they're deceptively not healthy. You know, I sort of looked at their faces and they were completely shocked. For example, Cool Whip, they thought it was a healthy topping because it said zero trans fat on the label.

Or added vitamins or something.

Right, but it actually, my rule is it has a health claim on the label, don't eat it. And when you look at the ingredients, the primary ingredient on the water was trans fat, hydrogenated oil, and high fructose corn syrup. And the reason they got away with it was because the FDA allows food companies to say zero trans fat on the front of the packaging if it has less than half a gram per serving. That's because of the lobby on the FDA. Now, when I showed them all this, they were like, wow, we didn't know this. And they were empowered, and they then learned how to cook, and they learned how to eat well. They lost hundreds of pounds. The son lost 128 pounds, and is now going to medical school.

So it's pretty profound when you actually empower people with this information.

They'll change.

Yeah, and I think one of the challenges for a lot of people is the next step too, which is how do you stick with it long enough to kind of change your habits? It's a little bit like picking up a new exercise thing, which people typically do in January, and then by March they've kind of given up. It's almost like we're fighting those years and years of the habit forming designed and imposed upon us by the companies and trying to change that. I think that's one of the other things people have to realize is that once you're usually overweight, it's really, really hard to change that. You can lose the weight and then the nightmare can begin in real earnest trying to keep that weight off until your body and your brain can kind of adjust to kind of the new reality, hopefully. So that would be, I mean, that's a great story you're telling and that's fantastic. But it's also really, really difficult for people to do. That and also, and I'm really intrigued about your eating guide because even for me wanting, and I do most of the cooking in our house now. So the real challenge is coming up with sort of menus that are of interest to people in my family, kind of week in and week out and kind of keeping that going and not getting in a rut of kind of cooking the same old stuff. Same thing. The same old stuff. I think that's a real challenge for people too. And I'm looking forward to people designing those kinds of programs that sort of help you.

Yeah, it's powerful. I think we, you know, I realized it was really one meal. Cooking one meal with his family made me realize that we're one meal away from changing everything. You know, it's not so much about telling people what to do, it's more like showing them what to do.

That's a great idea.

Very powerful. So after learning all what you learned, you had your policy perspective. What would you sort of power consumers to do to make a change around this?

You know, despite my thinking of taking a ZIP code and changing 10 different things, I mean, I really love the idea of changing just one thing because diets fail when they're too radical, too extreme, and you can't stick with them long enough. I mean, I think so I love that kind of notion of of starting simply with changing one thing in your life, health, diet, what have you. And that could be any, that could be anything that is maybe front and center of your desires. I think for a lot of people, it could be sugary drinks.

Yeah. That's a good one.

I think that's a good one. If you were to sort of single out one of those things I wrote about as being the most problematic one, sugar, In all of its manifestations, you know, could well be the most difficult.

So you brought a Coca-Cola to the party.

I did bring a Coca-Cola.

And I don't imagine that was to offer me a drink.

That's a nice bottle here. I'm happy to have you.

And I don't imagine it was for you to drink.

Ah, that noise, the effervescence that it makes, is really part of the, thank you, is really part of the sort of powerful allure of the, of the product. I mean, we could talk about Coke for a whole session because, you know, it's not just the ingredients in the Coke. It's not just the sugar, but it's the perfect balance of those ingredients. I discovered having spent time with Jeffrey Dunn, the former president of Coca-Cola, explained to me that one of the most powerful things about Coke is that it's imminently forgettable. So you take a sip like I'm doing right now, Brave man. And you're picking up some of the various flavor notes that they have in that, but it's not going to linger in the part of your brain that doesn't want you to get too much of one thing, which is called sensory specific satiety. Rather, it's a perfect kind of blend and that will have you thinking about this Coke in an hour, even if I drank the whole bottle in a way that otherwise it wouldn't. But going back to sort of the one thing, I mean, I think there is some science out there that, again, it's early, it's weak, but it's tempting to sort of look at it because we might not be able to deal with calories in liquids like we deal with calories in solid food. And if that's true, then cutting out calories in liquids. And everybody knows beer and wine doesn't have calories, so I don't have to worry about that.

I stick with tequila, 'cause beer has got a lot of carbs.

But soda and fruit juice if you're getting too much fruit juice and vitamin water, I saw that show up in my house the other day. My son was so proud of himself until we looked at the fine print on the label. I think it was 32 grams for a fairly little bottle.

Which is almost as much as a Coke.

Right. I think if you could, if a person says, look, let me just start with that and let me see if I can hook myself on plain water and fizzy water if you want. Hey, that would be a really fabulous start.

That is huge. Someone said, I just cut out soda and I lost 75 pounds.

I don't, yeah, and again, that's not gonna happen to everybody, but what might happen is you go, I could do that, maybe I can do this, and you kind of keep going. And again, weight loss is really difficult when people are really heavy. but there is that potential.

But actually the science of changing your hormones and your brain chemistry by eating different food is powerful. So when people do that, they don't crave or want it anymore. And we know how to do that now. I mean, there's amazing studies where they looked at using very, very high fat diets with good fats, cutting out all the starch, sugar and processed food. And you see a 60% reversal in type 2 diabetes. We just had a woman in our clinic the other day who's been on insulin for 20 years. who got off insulin in three weeks by cutting out all the crap.

Wow, that's amazing.

It's powerful, yeah. So I think maybe I would leave with the thought that Michael Pollan, our friend, said, which is if it was grown on a plant, eat it. If it was made in a plant, leave it.

And if it's being sold in a grocery store, you know, beware.

Beware, exactly. Well, thank you, Michael. This has been fabulous.

Great.

And thank you all for listening. I'm so glad we got a chance to share your story and your enthusiasm about what's really happening.

And thank you for your work. It's fabulous and keep at it.

I do my bit. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy, this time with Michael Moss, who's an extraordinary guy and I learned so many things that I'm gonna take to the grocery store with me. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review. They really matter to us. We listen to them, we take them into account and we want to hear from you. And you can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and sign up for my newsletter at Dr. Hyman.com. Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad free with Hyman plus on Apple podcasts. You can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple podcasts and tap try free to start your seven day free trial.