Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (25 page)

I
n one respect, fat is considerably less powerful than the other two keystones of processed foods, sugar and salt. Fat’s public image has always been horrid.

Sugar—at least until the surge in obesity in the 1980s—has been something that manufacturers have eagerly touted in their foods with a long list of charming euphemisms. The words
honeyed, sugarcoated, sweet, syrupy
, and
candied
were effective marketing tools in attracting consumers. More broadly, the word
sweet
was used to connote anything good, innocent, or attractive. Likewise, until blood pressure rates in America went up in the 1980s, salt had a favorable image, too, helped along by colloquialisms like, “the salt of the earth.” Picture in your mind a hot pretzel with big white
crystals of salt on top; your brain is probably, at this very moment, sending you signals of pleasure.

Now picture that same pretzel dipped in oil. That is not such a positive image, is it? There are some exceptions to this, to be sure. (What’s a lobster without a dish of hot melted butter?) By and large, however, and for as long as anyone in the food industry can remember, fat has been saddled with more than its share of negativity. (No kid’s grandmother will say to them with a pucker: “Give me some fat.”) For starters, its lingo is deeply unappealing. If a food isn’t “fatty,” it’s “greasy” or “oily” or “heavy.” Even worse, fat in food is equated with fat on the body, and there is ample justification for this. Fat is an energy colossus. It packs 9 calories into each gram, more than twice the caloric load of either sugar or protein. Surveys have shown that grocery shoppers who stop to read nutrition labels look first and foremost at the fat content of foods. This has led to the proliferation of products that claim to have less fat or lower fat, and it has spurred a host of marketing tricks the industry uses to make it seem like they have cut back. Take milk, for instance. Through the 1960s, sales of milk plunged as it bore the brunt of public concerns about fat, both in terms of its calories and its links to heart disease. At the same time, however, the dairy industry figured out a way to soften this blow to their business by putting the phrases “low-fat” and “2 percent” on milk in which a little of the fat had been removed. The popularity of this defatted milk grew so fast that it now outsells all other types of milk, including skim, which has no fat at all. But there is a marketing scheme at work in this: The “2 percent” labeling may lead to you to believe that 98 percent of the fat is removed, but in truth the fat content of whole milk is only a tad higher, at 3 percent.
Consumer groups who urge people to drink 1 percent or nonfat milk have fought unsuccessfully over the years to have the 2 percent claim barred as deceptive.

While fat’s PR has suffered greatly, the food industry has privately treated fat as a cherished friend, one whose quirks and mysterious ways it has labored hard to understand and cultivate. At the General Foods research center in Tarrytown, New York, fat became the lifelong obsession of
a Polish-born scientist named Alina Szczesniak, who retired in 1986. One of her more lasting contributions stemmed from her realization that fat, in one respect, is not about taste at all. Nor did people have to like the sight of oil pooling atop their pizza to be enthralled by what happens inside their mouths. Szczesniak was the first to grasp that fat is about feel, or texture, and that it is an enormously powerful force in processed food that often flies under our radar, drawing us in without the blaring horns that a dose of sugar or salt will set off in the mouth.

Part of Szczesniak’s job involved evaluating new versions of products like Jell-O and imitation whipped cream toppings. She used ordinary citizens as guinea pigs, sitting them down in a room with some samples to taste and a rating chart to
describe the textures. As she developed these tests, Szczesniak accumulated a
long list of terms to describe the feel of fatty foods, including
smooth, firm, bouncy, wiggly, disappears, slippery, gummy, melts, moist, wet
, and
warm
. Her tasting system is still used today by manufacturers, and these textural attributes became known as the “mouthfeel” of fat. There is strong neurological science backing her up on this notion that fat is as much a feeling as it is a taste. We now know that we feel fat through a nerve called the trigeminal. This critical part of our anatomy hovers above and behind the mouth near the brain with tentacles that extract tactile information from the lips, gums, teeth, and jaw, which it then conveys to the brain. The trigeminal nerve is how we distinguish between sandy and smooth, and why grit in a salad causes us to cringe. When it comes to fat, it detects the enthralling crunch in fried chicken, the velvet in melting chocolate and premium ice cream, the creaminess in cheese. And it delivers these sensations with plenty of muscle, a recent brain study by Nestlé shows.

Nestlé, which has picked up on fat research where General Foods left off, has good reason to want to deepen its understanding of fat. Back when it was founded in the mid-1800s, the company had one product to worry about: milk chocolate. But today, Nestlé is a $100 billion global giant with a portfolio of processed foods and drinks that rely on fat, from Häagen-Dazs ice cream to Kit Kat bars to DiGiorno frozen pizzas, which have up to
8 grams of saturated fat in a single serving—half of the recommended daily maximum for adults.
^*

The indispensability of fat to Nestlé’s balance sheets becomes all the more evident to the company whenever it tries to cut back. In the early 1980s, one of its food scientists, Steve Witherly, was trying to save the company money by lessening the amount of cheese in a sauce. He used substituting chemicals designed to impart a cheese-like tang, but the fat in cheese, he realized, provided more than just flavor. It gave the sauce its silky, rich texture, the mouthfeel that people wanted—and that was something no chemical could replicate.
“We were always trying to make it cheaper,” he told me, “but people could always detect if we started messing around with the cheese. It’s the texture of cheese sauce people go crazy for. That gooey, sticky mouthfeel, kind of like a peanut buttery mouthfeel that really made people want to be on my taste panels. Something about the cheese made people go nuts.”

At Nestlé’s research and development center near Geneva, Switzerland, the scientists include a German-trained biophysicist named Johannes Le Coutre who is currently using some of the same brain-mapping science that academic centers like Oxford employ. His tools include electroencephalography, or EEG, in which a net of electrodes is affixed to the head to explore how the brain responds to various stimuli. In 2008, he wired up fifteen adults to an EEG machine and
showed them pictures of foods that were either low or high in fat. At first, he wanted to see if their brains would recognize the difference, and they did. But then he made another noteworthy discovery. He timed the signals given off by the food pictures, and found that they raced to the brain in a mere 200 milliseconds. The brain was identifying fat with incredible speed. In his quest to learn more, Le Coutre rounded up fifty of his colleagues in industry and academia and asked them to help produce an “all known facts” compendium on fat. Published in 2010 with 609 pages, the resulting book,
Fat Detection: Taste
,
Texture, and Post Ingestive Effects
, serves as a roadmap for companies looking to harness the power of fat in their food and drink.
“Why is fat so tasty?” Le Coutre asks in the introduction. “Why do we crave it, and what is the impact of dietary fat on health and disease?”

To answer the part about craving, the book turned to an American scientist who had made an intriguing discovery about sugary chocolate chip cookies—that the compulsion to overindulge these and other sweets could be suppressed by the same drug that doctors use to block and counter the effects of heroin. This was one of the earliest pieces of evidence that obesity had parallels to drug addiction, but this scientist, Adam Drewnowski, has been making equally important discoveries about the role that fat alone plays in driving people to eat.

D
rewnowski’s work has been pioneering in several areas of nutrition science, including the links between the epidemic of obesity and processed foods. A professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington at Seattle, he directs the school’s Center for Obesity Research. In recent years, he has focused on the economics of eating, studying the factors that make processed foods more attractive than fresh fruits and vegetables, and the decisions people make in choosing what to put on the table.
“I want to know where people compromise,” he said. “You have to take into account the cost, but there are other constraints. When you have kids, the question becomes,
What can I buy that won’t cost much, that the kids will eat, and that won’t take long to prepare?
Beans and eggs have good nutritional value at low cost, but you have to cook them. Most veggies are going to be more expensive, though not potatoes and carrots. For them, the question becomes, How many dishes can you cook with potatoes and carrots before you say, ‘Kentucky Fried is not so bad after all’? My other question is, At what point is not wanting to feel hungry going to outweigh the nutritional value of the product? Such as tomatoes, at two dollars a pound. They are nutritious but won’t keep me satisfied. And here is a pizza. It’s not nutritious,
but I know I will be full at the end. This all gets much starker in looking at a big bag of potato chips versus veggies.”

Drewnowski started asking questions about fat in 1982. He had a degree in biochemistry from Oxford, and he was hunting for something to focus on as a doctoral student in mathematical psychology at the prestigious Rockefeller University in New York City. The field of nutrition, in which he was interested, was a close-knit world where everyone kept tabs on each other’s work. He knew that his peers had already trammeled the ground on sugar: He followed the progress that Howard Moskowitz had made in pinpointing the bliss point for sweet taste, and he had read the scientific papers that Szczesniak at General Foods had written on the texture of fat, and he had seen the rating system she devised that many food scientists used. In fat, however, he saw an area of research that remained largely uncharted. No one had yet tried to measure with any precision just how alluring it really was. To the contrary, he noticed that scientists who were studying food cravings were making a mistake that could be obscuring the power of fat. They wrongly identified things like candy bars as sugary foods, when in fact they were also loaded with fat. “I came to the realization that most of the ‘sugary foods’ in our diets were not just pure sugar,” he told me. “They were really linked up with fat.”

Drewnowski
devised an experiment. Sixteen undergraduates, eleven women and five men, were given twenty different mixtures of milk, cream, and sugar. He then asked them how much they liked each combination; to sort out their answers, he used his math skills and an early-model computer. (His partner on the 1983 study, M. R. C. Greenwood, went on to have her own illustrious career that included a stint in the White House as associate director for science.) Two significant findings emerged from the data. Drewnowski knew about the bliss point for sugar, how our liking for sugary concentrations goes only so far; after a point—known as the break point—adding more sugar only lessens the appeal.

“But there was no bliss point, or break point, for fat,” Drewnowski told me. The sixteen people in his experiment never once cried uncle in working their way through the increasingly fatty mixtures. The fat, no matter
how rich the food, was so pleasing to their brains that they never gave the signal to stop eating. Their bodies wanted more and more fat. “The more fat there was, the better,” he said. “If there was a break point, it was somewhere beyond heavy cream.”

The second finding concerned the relationship the fat had with sugar. He found that the heaviest cream tasted even better to his subjects when he added a little sugar. There was something about this combination that created a powerful interplay. They boosted one another to levels of allure that neither could reach alone.

Given the vast numbers of products on grocery shelves that are loaded with sugar and fat, Drewnowski assumes that the processed food industry was already aware of this synergy, if only in broad, practical terms. Still, being an inquisitive type, he had yet more questions to ask and answer. Was the brain just being the body’s servant in extreme gluttony, seeing fat as the best way to store energy for emergencies down the road? Or was there something else going on between the sugar and fat? A few years later, Drewnowski had fifty college students taste and rate fifteen different formulations of cake frosting in which the sugar and fat content was varied. The tasters were able to taste and quantify the sugar content of each sample quite accurately, but not the fat content; the participants in his study found it difficult to detect its presence with any precision at all. On top of that, when sugar was added to the fattier formulations, the students mistakenly thought the fat had been
reduced
. In effect, the fat had gone into hiding. This meant the food manufacturers could use fat as an allure in their products without ever having to worry about a backlash from people’s brains, which they do with abandon. Many soups, cookies, potato chips, cakes, pies, and frozen meals deliver half or more of their calories through fat, and yet consumers won’t identify these as fatty foods, which is great for sales. For some extra insurance on this, all the manufacturers have to do is add a little sugar.

Drewnowski
published his study, “Invisible Fats,” in 1990, and it showed that fat was a double-edged sword when wielded by the processed food industry. In certain circumstances and with certain foods, manufacturers
might be able to reduce the fat content without causing a significant drop in the product’s allure. (Depending on the product, adding more sugar might be needed to maintain the allure.) On the other hand, these same manufacturers could crank up the fat content as high as they wanted, and unless people studied the nutrition label carefully, the fat would get eaten in bliss without setting off any alarms in the body’s system that help regulate our weight by telling us we are eating too much.