Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (41 page)

“This kind of blows my mind,” said another. And a third: “When you run out of ideas, spread it on your hand and lick it off!!!!” And a fourth: “I want to put my whole face in it.”

The tubs of chocolate cream cheese reminded me of the work done by Adam Drewnowski, the Seattle epidemiologist, in measuring the effects that fat has on the brain. Because fat is so energy dense—it has twice the calories of sugar—the brain sees fat in food as the body’s best friend. The
more fat there is in food, the more fuel the body can have for future use by converting the fat to body fat. Indeed, the body holds fat in such high esteem that it is slower to activate the mechanism that helps us avoid overeating. This mechanism is the signal the brain sends out to tell us we’ve had enough.

Drewnowski knew that this signal was quite operational for foods that are sweet. Even kids can take only so much sugar in their food before the taste buds cringe, but as Drewnowski discovered, the bliss point for fat, if there is one, is much higher, probably up in the stratosphere of the heaviest cream. Thus did cheese and beef become such powerhouse ingredients in processed foods. As Drewnowski also found out, however, there is something even more powerful in foods than fat alone: fat with some added sugar. Faced with this combination, the brain loses sight of the fat altogether. Fat becomes even more invisible in foods, and the brakes on overeating come right off.

This ability of food manufacturers to find synergy in the interplay of their key ingredients is not limited to fat and sugar, of course. The true magic comes when they add in the third pillar of processed foods: salt.

I
n the late 1980s, a flurry of news reports and editorials focused the country’s attention on a growing menace: high blood pressure. A public health survey found that one in four Americans were afflicted by this condition, also known as hypertension, and that the numbers were climbing steadily. Doctor groups held press conferences to sound the alarm that many patients didn’t even know they had high blood pressure until they developed more evident complications, such as congenital heart failure, earning it the nickname “the silent killer.” The precise cause was elusive, but several key factors were cited, including obesity, smoking, and diabetes. The other was salt.

The problem was not salt per se. The problem was sodium, which is one of the chemical elements in salt. Further complicating matters, public health officials explained, even sodium itself was not all bad: A little bit of sodium in the diet was essential to good health. The problem was, Americans were eating so
much
salt they were getting ten times—even twenty
times—the amount of sodium the body needed. This was also far more than it could handle. In large amounts, sodium pulls fluids from the body’s tissues and into the blood, which raises the blood volume and compels the heart to pump more forcefully. The result: high blood pressure.

In looking for ways to reduce the consumption of sodium, health officials identified one obvious target: the saltshakers on everyone’s kitchen table. This certainly seemed like a logical notion. The saltshaker was not only a focal piece at dinner, passed around the table and then left there like a sentinel to guide the next meal. It had established itself as a form of Americana, something people collected and showed off. Even food companies got in the act: Coca-Cola branded a collectible saltshaker to look like a miniature can of Coke.

With all these shakers on all these tables, it was no wonder that health officials felt compelled to act. They urged Americans to trash their saltshakers, or at the least relegate them to the knick-knack shelf. In 1989, the American Heart Association began marketing an alternate way for people to season their food. It created and sold its own shaker, which contained a salt-less blend of cayenne pepper, basil, thyme, and other herbs, and it even came up with a catchy slogan to brand it as the answer to high blood pressure: “Shaking the salt habit.”

In this attack on sodium, however, no one bothered to examine, with any accuracy, the assumption that table salt was responsible for America’s massive intake of salt. The quantities people were ingesting should have been a tipoff that something else, something bigger, was afoot. Teenage boys and men under forty, especially, were pulling in
more than ten grams of salt a day, or nearly two full teaspoons. And this was merely an average. Untold numbers of people were even heavier users. Women and girls clocked in at a bit more than one teaspoon a day, but even their numbers should have made it clear that the shaker wasn’t up to this kind of salting.

So where was all this salt coming from?

The answer arrived in 1991 when the
Journal of the American College of Nutrition
published the results of a clever experiment. To identify the true source of America’s sodium problem, a pair of researchers rounded up
sixty-two adults who liked to use salt and gave them pre-measured saltshakers to use at home for a week. The bona fides of the scientists who conducted the study were impeccable: They worked for the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. This was the place where researchers perfected the calculation of the bliss point for sugar and explored the alluring properties of fat, pulling apart its molecular underpinnings to explain how the lower melting point of artery-clogging fats like butter causes them to liquefy in the mouth and produce instant joy. Monell, it was true, accepted substantial financial support from the largest food companies, including the manufacturers of iconic salty foods. The industry money, however, had not made the institute’s independent-minded researchers shy about pointing fingers at the processed food industry. They were plainspoken in chastising food manufacturers for abusing their influence on America’s eating habits, especially for the way the industry used sugar to increase the allure of its products. This, they knew from their own research, exploited the natural cravings that kids get for sweets. Now, in hunting for the source of sodium in the American diet, the Monell researchers were just as prepared to let the chips—or rather the grains—fall where they may.

The sixty-two participants were asked to keep careful track of everything they ate and drank for the week. To increase the reliability of their record-keeping, the Monell investigators spiked their saltshakers with a tracer that showed up in their urine, a particularly clever move that, through the regular samples they took, allowed the researchers to see precisely how much salt the shakers were contributing. At the end of the week, they gathered up all of the data and crunched the numbers.

There was hardly any sodium in the water they drank, so that was ruled out as a source. Some sodium occurs naturally in foods—such as Swiss chard and spinach—but the participants would have had to gorge themselves on these things for them to make any difference. The naturally occurring sodium in their meals contributed only a bit more than 10 percent of the total sodium they consumed in the week. And as for the much-maligned saltshaker: It delivered just
6 percent
of their sodium intake.

Had they conducted this study a few centuries earlier, the Monell researchers would likely have gotten very different results. The salted fish that Swedes ate in the sixteenth century, for example, pushed their sodium intake way beyond even the levels consumed today, and until the advent of the refrigerator, people throughout the world
relied heavily on salt to preserve their meat and fish. For the people in the Monell study, however, the natural sodium in their food and the salt they were adding themselves came to barely a fifth of the salt being consumed. Where was the rest coming from?

By 1991, when this study was done, cooking from scratch was in steep decline, steadily replaced by processed foods that were preassembled, precooked, and packaged to go. Like everyone else in the country, the study participants were getting the bulk of their meals at the supermarket, where the price of convenience was the salt that these groceries contained. The researchers discovered that more than three-quarters of the salt they consumed in the week came from processed foods. The companies making these products weren’t just adding salt. They were dumping sack after sack of it into their boxed macaroni and cheese, their chicken à la king heat-and-serve meals, their canned spaghetti and meatballs, their salad dressings, tomato sauces, pizzas, and soups. Even items that manufacturers were making expressly for people who wanted to lose weight or manage afflictions like diabetes—the low-fat, low-sugar versions of their brands—were delivering huge doses of salt. From one aisle to the next, there wasn’t much in the grocery store that didn’t have added salt. As much as, if not more than, sugar and fat, the salting of processed food had become a way to increase sales and consumption.

The power of salt in food is smartly summed up by the industry’s largest supplier of salt, Cargill, which says in its sales literature:
“People love salt. Among the basic tastes—sweet, sour, bitter and salty—salt is one of the hardest ones to live without. And it’s no wonder. Salt, or sodium chloride, helps give foods their taste appeal—in everything from bacon, pizza, cheese and French fries to pickles, salad dressings, snack foods and baked goods.”

People don’t just love salt, they crave salty foods. Depending on one’s point of view, the supermarket is either a goldmine—or a minefield—of salt-heavy foods. For perspective on the salt loads delivered by groceries,
consider the number 2,300. This is the maximum amount of sodium, measured in milligrams, that the federal government recommends people eat every day. In 2010, the government
lowered this target for people who are especially vulnerable to the hazards of salt: people fifty-one years or older, blacks of any age, and anyone with diabetes, hypertension, or chronic kidney disease.
These 143 million people—a majority of American adults—were now being urged to keep their sodium intake below 1,500 milligrams a day—less than a teaspoon a day.

With these lower limits in mind, it is easy to see why most of us are getting far more sodium than we should, with teenage boys and men averaging twice as much. The labels on foods in the grocery store tell the story. And going natural is no help when it comes to salt; even health-conscious manufacturers deliver heavy doses. Amy’s Organic Minestrone Soup has 580 milligrams of sodium in a cup. Newman’s Own Organic Pasta Sauce has 650 milligrams in half a cup. In perusing an expansive supermarket in New York City, my personal favorite was a frozen roast
turkey dinner from Hungry Man. Salt made nine separate appearances in the list of ingredients on the side of the box, more than any other item. Helpfully, the list broke the dinner down into all of its parts. Not only did salt appear in the meat component, the gravy, the stuffing, and the potatoes, it was also the leading ingredient in something called “turkey type flavor” and ranked near the top in another mysterious component called “potato flavor.” In all, the sodium in this microwavable dish came to 5,400 milligrams, which is more salt than people should eat over the course of two days. Unless, that is, the people are baby boomers or older, black, or suffering from sodium-sensitive disease. In this case, the Hungry Man dinner would deliver enough salt to meet their quota for half a week.