Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (50 page)

The recipes range from Corn Chowder made with potato chips to Frito Chili Pie to Frito’s Ranch Chicken Delight with four cups of corn chips and half a pound of cheese, and, for dessert, Peanut Butter Parfait with Stacy’s Cinnamon Sugar Pita Chips for dipping.

Ernest Dichter died in 1991, so I couldn’t ask him if he had known back in 1957 just how prescient he was, having convinced the snack industry to weave chips into the fabric of American cuisine. One person, however, working thirty-five miles south in Manhattan, would rival Dichter’s genius. His name was Len Holton, and he coined one of the most famous advertising slogans of all time.

Holton had passed away as well, but one of his colleagues, Alvin Hampel, told me the story. It was 1963, and the crew at the ad agency Young & Rubicam were racking their brains to come up with a new slogan for Frito-Lay. Holton was the senior copywriter, already elderly at the time, a stoop-shouldered gentleman who shuffled quietly around the office. While his young colleagues went through their antics, Holton simply took a seat and jotted down a phrase. When he passed it around, his colleagues were dumbstruck by its obviousness.
“It was just waiting there to be plucked,” Hampel said.

The slogan that Holton came up with, of course, was, “Betcha Can’t Eat Just One.”

Those five words captured the essence of the potato chip far better than anyone at Frito-Lay could have imagined. In 1986, as obesity rates in America started their climb, a massive multiyear study began that tracked the eating habits of Americans. The study was hardly representative of all Americans. The subjects all worked in the health field, with a professionalism that lent itself to accurate self-reporting. But if anything, these men and women were also likely to be more conscious about the nutritional aspect of the foods they ate, so the findings might well understate the overall American trend. The study followed 120,877 women and men. The researchers excluded people who were already overweight and monitored everything that they ate as well as their physical activity and smoking. In the ongoing study, the participants have been surveyed every four years.

In 2011, the
New England Journal of Medicine
published
the latest results. Every four years since 1986, the participants had exercised less, watched TV more, and gained an average of 3.35 pounds. The researchers wanted to know what foods were causing the largest share of the weight gain, so they parsed the data by the caloric content of the foods being eaten. The top contributors to the weight gain included red meat and processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages, and potatoes, including mashed and French fries. But far and away, the largest weight-inducing food, outstripping all others, was the potato chip.

The chip, at about 160 calories an ounce, led to a 1.69-pound gain in weight in each of the four-year study periods. By comparison, sweets and desserts accounted for less than half a pound.

When the data was published, observers pointed out just how irresistible the chip was, including the way they were packaged. The portion size stated on the chip bag—usually one ounce, or 28 grams—was completely irrelevant to how many chips a person might eat. “People generally don’t take one or two chips,” said obesity expert Dr. F. Xavier Pi-Sunyer of the St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York. “They have a whole bag.”

But that was only half the story. The chip’s ingredients were likely just
as effective, if not more so, in leading people to overeat. This starts with the coating of salt, which the tongue hits first, but there is much more inside the chip. They are loaded with fat, which gives them most of their calories. It also delivers the sensation called mouthfeel the moment they are chewed. As food scientists know, fat in the mouth is not like oil on the hand; it is a marvelous sensation, which the brain rewards with instant feelings of pleasure.

There is still more: Potato chips are also loaded with sugar. Not the kind of sugar you will find on the label, though some chip makers do add sugar to their potato chips to meet the cravings of kids. No. The sugar in regular chips is the kind of sugar that the body gets from the starch in the potatoes. Starch is considered a carbohydrate, but more precisely, it is made of glucose, the same kind of glucose you have in your blood. Potatoes don’t taste sweet, but the glucose starts working on you like sugar the moment you bite into it, said Eric Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the study’s authors.
“The starch is readily absorbed,” he told me. “More quickly even than a similar amount of sugar. The starch, in turn, causes the glucose levels in the blood to spike, and this is a concern, in relation to obesity.”

These surges in blood glucose are highly problematic for anyone watching their weight. Recent research suggests glucose spikes will cause people to crave more food, as long as four hours after they’ve eaten whatever caused the blood glucose to spike. Eat chips one hour, crave more the next.

In this regard, potato chips are not the poster child for junk food, as Frito-Lay executives once warned. They are the epitome of processed foods generally, which use salt, sugar, and fat, sometimes interchangeably, to maximize their appeal to consumers. Frito-Lay could take all the salt out of its chips it wanted to create whatever aura of health it wanted. As long as the chips remain alluring—through their fat, their crunch, their salty flavor from salt substitutes—and the marketing campaigns give you psychological permission to eat as many as you like, they will continue to deliver calories. And that, after all, is the ultimate cause of obesity.

T
he sun was just starting to peek through the clouds when I landed in Switzerland on a Monday morning in May 2011. I was bound for the northern edge of Lake Geneva, where the food giant Nestlé had its research labs and headquarters. The hour was early, the week promising. For months, I had been hearing about the extraordinary and innovative work Nestlé was doing in nutritional science, so I came here to see what the future might hold for salt, sugar, and fat.

Nestlé was certainly in the best position to lead the industry toward making some changes. In the past couple of years, it had eclipsed Kraft to become the
largest food manufacturer in the United States—indeed, in the world. Founded in 1866 as an infant-formula maker, Nestlé now competed in almost every part of the grocery store, from drinks (Juicy Juice and Nesquik) to frozen (DiGiorno and Stouffer’s) to the checkout lanes (Butterfinger, Baby Ruth, the iconic Crunch). Twenty-nine of its product lines accounted for more than $1 billion in revenue a year each—the “Billionaire
Brands Treasury,” as Nestlé called them. Its annual sales had pushed past $100 billion each year, with profits in excess of $10 billion, giving Nestlé an accumulation of wealth so profound that one of its former scientists, Steven Witherly, cautioned me against thinking of it as a food manufacturer. “Nestlé,” he said,
“is a Swiss bank that prints food.”

More important, Nestlé was also running the industry’s most ambitious and opulent research operation, making it perhaps the company most capable of leading the way on change. Tucked into the hills above the town of Lausanne—with satellite centers in Beijing, Tokyo, Santiago, and St. Louis—the Nestlé research arm had a staff of 700, including 350 scientists. Each year, they conducted more than 70 clinical trials, published 200 peer-reviewed papers, filed for 80 patents, and undertook 300 collaborations with universities, suppliers, and private research institutions. Nestlé was attracting top talent from every corner of science, including the field of brain imaging, which allowed the company to perform nifty experiments like wiring the scalps of its human test subjects to EEG machines in order to see how, say, Dreyer’s ice cream (another Billionaire Brand) excites the brain’s neurology.

Touring the sprawling, shiny complex at Lausanne was a bit like stepping into the fictional Willy Wonka chocolate factory. (Nestlé, naturally, bought the real-life Wonka factory and brand in 1988, Gobstoppers and all.) Technological wonders abounded, but one of the highlights of the visit was room GR26, known as the “emulsions lab.” There, with an electron microscope towering over them, Emmanuel Heinrich and Laurent Sagalowicz showed me how they were tracking fat as it made its way from the mouth to the small intestines. Nestlé, I learned, has developed the means to improve the distribution of fat droplets in ice cream in order to fool people into thinking it is fattier than it really is. Through another sensory trick, it is also trying to keep people from noticing when saturated fat is replaced with healthier oils. To this end, Heinrich was putting the finishing touches on
a remarkable invention called “encapsulated oil.” In this sleight of hand, a healthier oil—like sunflower or canola—is encased by sugar or protein molecules and then dried into a powder; when used in
cookies, crackers, and cakes, this encapsulated oil can mimic saturated fat’s ability to generate the alluring sensation known as mouthfeel, but with less risk of heart disease. The upshot: same pleasure for the brain, less saturated fat for the body.

Nestlé also sells food for pets—Purina being yet another one of its Billionaire Brands—and its scientists have done compelling work on that front, too. Teaming up with researchers at Cargill, they corralled a group of compounds called isoflavones—derived from soy germ meal—into a new product called Fit & Trim. The aim is to make dogs more frisky or at least to speed up their metabolism enough to fight an emerging health crisis among canines.
“Obesity is not just for humans,” as Nestlé said in a report. “Up to 40 percent of dogs in developed countries are overweight or obese.”

The research center was all very impressive and state-of-the-art, down to the coffee bar with sleek machines serving Nespresso (the biggest Billionaire Brand of all), but ultimately it was disappointing. By the end of my visit, I came to realize that if Nestlé was going to save the world from obesity or any of the other ill effects of processed foods, it wasn’t going to be in our lifetimes. The food that people bought in the grocery store was so perfectly engineered to compel overconsumption that Nestlé’s scientists, for all their spectacular technology and deep knowledge of food science, were finding it impossible to come up with viable solutions.

Chief among the disappointments I saw at Nestlé was the quest to turn fiber into a cure for overeating. In its “digestion lab,” Nestlé has a refrigerator-sized masticator machine that simulates chewing and digesting—tubes running every which way and computer programming to replicate the gastrointestinal tracts of children, adults, even dogs. One of the lab’s scientists, Alfrun Erkner, walked me through their efforts to create the illusion of satiety, the sensation of feeling full. Nestlé has been laboring to create a yogurt that makes you feel full, with minimal calories. But to generate this feeling, the scientists have to stuff this yogurt with
so much fiber that even the masticator on its highest setting had trouble getting it down. “People want a magic bullet,” Erkner told me. “And it would
be nice if we had a pill that would let people eat as much as they want, without putting on weight. But that’s not what we can do.”

Nestlé had also stumbled in pursuing an even more coveted industry holy grail—a food that would cause you to
lose
weight, not just avoid getting fat. It was a drink called Enviga, and it was produced in collaboration with another formidable player in processed foods, Coca-Cola. Released in 2007, Enviga combined green tea, caffeine, and two artificial sweeteners and was billed, on its label, as a
“calorie burner.” The more Enviga you drank, the more weight you would lose. In fact, the drink was a sitting duck for the activist lawyers at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
They took one look at the underlying science and hauled Nestlé and Coca-Cola to court for deceptive business practices. Using Nestlé’s own data, the consumer group estimated that you would need to drink nearly 180 cans in order to lose one pound. And that was the best-case scenario. Some of the people in the study actually burned calories
more slowly
after drinking Enviga, which would appear to cause them to
gain
weight, not lose it.

An outcry arose from nutrition experts, sales collapsed, and in 2009 Nestlé and Coke settled a separate advertising case brought by two dozen states by agreeing to halt any weight-loss claims. Two years later, Nestlé officials were still sheepish about that venture, although they maintained that, technically speaking, in the best circumstances, the drink
did
speed up the human metabolism, if only a little. “We were a bit premature on Enviga,” the company’s chief technology officer, Werner Bauer, told me. “We should have first discussed, more publicly, the concept of energy burning. We put it on the market almost as a surprise. People didn’t believe it.”

As challenging as the science of nutrition might be, the future of salt, sugar, and fat in Nestlé’s hands started looking disconcerting when I moved further down the shore of Lake Geneva, to the town of Vevey, where Nestlé has its corporate headquarters. On clear days, the lobby frames the spectacular lake with the majestic Alps in the background, and a grand staircase rises through the building in a double-helix shape, like a
strand of DNA. Here, Nestlé was not waiting for its researchers to cue up another miracle drink or fibrous wonder. It was hard at work contradicting itself on the most critical issue of all: obesity.

Here, Nestlé was marketing food products that fatten us up—and then selling other food products that treat those of us who go too far.