Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (43 page)

This notion that we eat not so much for pleasure as we do to ward off an awful feeling, reminded me of the work done by Howard Moskowitz, the legendary food scientist who engineered the new flavor for Dr Pepper. In the study he dubbed “Crave It,” he found that
people are drawn to foods that are heavily salty, sweet, or fatty for reasons other than hunger. They are drawn to these foods by emotional cues and the wish to avoid the lousy feeling that the body generates as a way to defend against starvation. The fear of hunger is deeply rooted, and food manufacturers know well how to push the buttons that evoke this fear. (A particularly stark example of this comes from the Mars company in promoting its Snickers candy bar, which won applause from the advertising industry with this slogan:
“Don’t let hunger happen to you.”)

As bad as the word
addiction
may be, however, the food industry has another problem when it comes to salt—one that could prove to be more problematic. In assessing the industry’s culpability for the epidemic of overeating, scientists have come up with evidence that the
manner
in which people have come to crave salt, rather than the craving itself, is far more damning.

As it turns out, the manufacturers of processed foods have been creating a desire for salt where none existed before.

Babies love sugar the instant they are born. Simple experiments have demonstrated this, by eliciting smiles with a droplet of sugary water. But babies do
not
like salt. They don’t like it at all until they are six months or more into their lives, and even then, they have to be coaxed.

This idea that salt is being pressed upon America’s kids comes from the scientists at Monell, who have been pushing hard to pinpoint the genesis of our taste for salt. They wanted to know what caused kids to like salt, if it wasn’t a natural thing for them to do. So they followed sixty-one children, starting at infancy. First, they surveyed their parents to learn how much salt the kids got in their diets, and the kids fell neatly into two camps: One group was eating what their parents ate, salty cereal and crackers and bread made by food manufacturers, while the other got baby foods that had little or no salt, like fresh fruits and vegetables.

Then the Monell researchers tested the kids to see if there was any difference in how much the two groups liked salt.

The results were published in 2012 in the
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
, and they kicked up quite a stir among regulators and food industry officials. To test the kids’ fondness for salt, the Monell investigators, led by Leslie Stein, gave them solutions of varying salinity to sip, starting when they were two months old. At that age, all the kids either rejected the salty solutions or were indifferent to them. At six months, however, when they were tested again, the kids split into two groups. Those who had been given fruit and vegetables to eat still preferred plain water to the salty solutions. But those who had been fed foods that were salty now liked the salty solutions.

Over time, the two groups—the salted and the unsalted—grew even more disparate. “Mothers reported that preschool-age children who had been introduced to starchy table food by six months of age were more likely to lick salt from the surface of foods,” the study said. “There was also a trend for these children to be more likely to eat plain salt.”

Of course, the kids didn’t have to resort to the shaker. By preschool, the salted kids were getting foods from throughout the grocery store that were loaded with salt—potato chips, bacon, soup, ham, hot dogs, French fries, pizza, crackers.

When the study was released, Gary Beauchamp, the center’s director and a co-author, talked about its significance. These were kids being studied, he stressed. Kids who were
not born
liking salt. They have to be taught to like the taste of salt, and when they are, salt has a deep and lasting effect on their eating habits.
“Our data would suggest that if one wants to reduce salt in the population as a whole,” Beauchamp said, “then it’s important to start early, because infants and children are very vulnerable.”

With this revelation, the industry’s heavy use of salt moves from the realm of merely satisfying America’s craving for salt to creating a craving where none exists.

A
s it happened, I wasn’t the only one who needed help from the experts at Monell to understand the powers of salt. In 2005, when Washington put a scare into the industry by urging people to slash their intake of salt to less than a teaspoon each day, some of the largest food companies convened a group they called the Salt Consortium to figure out a way to deal with this threat to their industry. The group kept its existence confidential for fear of generating unwanted attention, but I learned about it from food company officials who also divulged that they had chosen none other than Monell to gather the facts to help them out of their predicament.

The group’s goal was to learn precisely what made salt so alluring, so that they might find ways to reduce its presence in their products. As with sugar and fat, the industry has a strict bottom line on reducing salt: This effort can’t hurt their sales in any way. Their products, with less salt, have to be just as alluring as they are in full-salt mode.

But the more the industry looked at salt, the more it realized that the consumer was only part of the problem. The manufacturers themselves
were utterly, inexorably hooked on the stuff. Each year, food companies use an amount of salt that is every bit as staggering as it sounds:
5 billion pounds.

And that’s because, for them, the salty taste that drives people to keep eating popcorn until the bag is empty is just the start of salt’s powers.

Manufacturers view salt as perhaps the most magical of the three pillars of processed foods, for all the things it can do beyond exciting the taste buds. In the world of processed foods, salt is the great fixer. It corrects myriad problems that arise as a matter of course in the factory. Cornflakes, for example, taste metallic without it. Crackers are bitter and soggy and stick to the roof of your mouth. Ham turns so rubbery it can bounce. Some of salt’s power has nothing to do with the food at all. In commercial bread making, salt keeps the huge, fast-spinning machinery from gumming up and the factory line from backing up: Salt slows down the rising process so that the ovens can keep up with the pace.

Among all the miracles that salt performs for the processed food industry, perhaps the most essential involves a plague that the industry calls “warmed-over-flavor,” whose acronym, WOF, is pronounced something like the dog’s bark. WOF is caused by the oxidation of the fats in meat, which gives meat the taste of cardboard or, as some in the industry describe it, damp dog hair, when the meat is reheated after being precooked and added to soups or boxed meals. “Once warmed-over-flavor gets going, you are pretty well dead in the water,” said Susan Brewer, a professor of food science in the University of Illinois’s College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Science. “People can smell or taste it at very low levels. At my cafeteria, they will make a rib roast, and serve the leftovers the next day as roast beef sandwiches, and they taste nasty. That’s the warmed-over-flavor. People get very sensitive to its taste.”

This is where salt comes in. Once WOF sets in, salt becomes a convenient antidote for the processed food industry, which is heavily reliant on reheated meats. One of the most effective cures for WOF is an infusion of fresh spices, especially rosemary, which has antioxidants to counteract the meat’s deterioration. But fresh herbs are costly. So manufacturers more
typically make sure they have lots of salt in their formulas. The cardboard or dog-hair taste is still there, but it is overpowered by the salt.

To make matters worse for consumers, salt is not the only way that food manufacturers pump sodium into America’s bloodstream. Companies are adding sodium in the form of other food additives, completely aside from the salt they pour into their foods. They do this through the dozens of sodium-based compounds that are added to processed food to delay the onset of bacterial decay, to bind ingredients, and to blend mixtures that otherwise come unglued, like the protein and fat molecules in processed cheese. With names like sodium citrate, sodium phosphate, and sodium acid pyrophosphate, these compounds have become essential components in processed foods, making them look and taste attractive and last longer on the shelf. Together, these compounds contribute less sodium than salt, but the grocery store nonetheless has become filled with products dependent on them. The same Hungry Man turkey dinner that listed salt nine times among its various components also had nine other references to various sodium compounds.

The industry’s addiction to salt and sodium is evident on its product labels. But it is also evident behind the scenes, in how the industry reacts to the slightest nudging from Washington. In 2010, when the federal nutrition panel lowered its recommended daily maximum for sodium to 1,500 milligrams for the most vulnerable Americans, food manufacturers put on a full-court press urging the panel to back off. Kellogg, for one, sent the Department of Agriculture, which was overseeing the panel’s work, a 20-page letter detailing all the reasons it needed salt and sodium—and in amounts that would not make the 1,500 level feasible. “Serious technical constraints limit the ability to dramatically reduce sodium concentrations while maintaining consumer acceptability that is essential to sustain such products in the marketplace,” Kellogg implored. “We urgently request that the Committee consider these constraints.”

Kellogg did not mention WOF by name but more generally pointed to salt’s powers to override the dark sides of processed foods, in which all the additives being used can generate unpleasant tastes. Foods do not even
have to taste salty for salt to be critical to their success, the company noted. “The ability of salt to enhance other flavors and/or mask objectionable ones (e.g., bitterness) in foods that do not necessarily taste salty is more important. Examples of foods in this broad category include baked goods, cereals, cheese, entrees and numerous other foods.”

To be sure, Kellogg—like other food manufacturers—didn’t miss their opportunity to shift some of the blame for the country’s dependence on salt onto the people who buy processed foods. In its letter, Kellogg talked about salt as if it was a drug. It cited the “psychobiology of the innate craving for salt” and “the virtually intractable nature of the appetite for salt” and shifted the onus on consumers. “Taste is by far the most powerful factor that motivates consumers to purchase and consume foods,” Kellogg said, citing some recent polling. In these surveys, people conceded that they were not doing enough to achieve a healthy diet, but three in four cited the same excuse for their failure: “I don’t want to give up the foods I like.”

Yet, for people at least, there’s hope when it comes to salt. Addiction to salt, it turns out, can be readily reversed. All that is needed is to stop eating processed foods for a while.

This bit of wisdom—known instinctually to anyone who is forced to undergo a low-salt diet—was put to the scientific test by Monell. In 1982, when salt first landed on the radar of federal regulators, the institute’s director, Gary Beauchamp, performed an experiment on salt. He studied six women and three men as they slashed their consumption of salt by half by avoiding certain processed foods. For the first few weeks, nothing much happened, apart from the subjects missing the foods they used to eat. But then, slowly, bit by bit, a radical change occurred. The test subjects didn’t stop liking salt, nor did they lose their taste for it. Rather, the salt-sensitive taste buds in their mouths—the same ones that had grown used to bombardment by salty foods—became more sensitive to salt, so they needed less salt to experience its pleasures. A lot less. Enough to get them within the limits now being urged upon Americans by the federal government. “At the end of twelve weeks, after being on the low-sodium diets, we allowed
them to use as much salt from their saltshakers as they wanted to, and all they added back to their diet was about 20 percent of the salt we had taken out,” Beauchamp told me.

The subjects had, in effect, unhooked themselves from salt, or at least from the levels of salt that are considered potential killers.

That is the good fortune that awaits anyone trying to wean themselves off salt. As I would soon see, the food manufacturers are facing a much deeper and far more complex struggle in confronting their own addiction.

I
arrived at a modern office complex in Hopkins, Minnesota, ten miles west of Minneapolis on a cool morning in April 2012. This is where Cargill, the $134 billion food industry giant, houses its central operations. I walked into the lobby, picked up my security badge, passed through the security gates, and took the elevator to the sixth floor. When the doors opened, I was greeted by seemingly endless rows of cubicles with low partitions, filled with men and women staring at their computer screens. The mood was decidedly dreary.

They had a good excuse to feel down, my guide explained. They had just spent months drumming their fingers on their desks, waiting for their phones to ring. This was the unit that sold road salt, and the past winter had been a relief for everyone in the country—except for these workers at Cargill. Meteorologists declared it the fourth-warmest winter on record, which meant it had rained, not snowed, throughout the entire Northern Plains, the Midwest, and the Northeast, which meant there was no ice on
the roads. Icy roads are Cargill’s best friend; the more ice the winter brings, the more money the company makes. “We have a saying at Cargill,” the company’s spokesman, Mark Klein, told me. “When winters are brown, we are blue. And when they are white, we are green.”

As we moved deeper into Cargill’s sixth floor, however, the mood changed dramatically. In this part of the salt division, the workers were all happily green. There was no global warming to worry about here. These sales people were downing cups of coffee not to keep themselves awake but to keep up with the frantic pace of orders. These workers had been busy for as long as anyone could remember. This was because the salt being sold here was not for the country’s roads. This salt was for a much more reliable—and dependent—customer: the processed food industry.