Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (52 page)

This dependency poses varying levels of difficulty when it comes to identifying and fending off all of the tricks—in formulation and marketing—that companies use to draw us in. To give me a sense of some of the most extreme struggles that people have, a food company marketing
executive invited me to a meeting of her local chapter of Overeaters Anonymous, and it was startling to hear the attendees talk about sugar like it was heroin. Their cars would be littered with food wrappers—just on the drive home from the supermarket. They felt incapable of resisting the treats they bought, so their survival strategy was to avoid all sugar, an approach that struck me as extreme until I sat down with one of our nation’s foremost experts on addictive behavior, Nora Volkow, who directs the National Institute on Drug Abuse. A research psychiatrist and scientist, she pioneered the use of brain imaging in finding parallels between food and narcotics, and she became convinced that for some people, overeating is as difficult to overcome as some drug addictions.
“Clearly, processed sugar in certain individuals can produce compulsive patterns of intake,” she told me. “And in those situations I would recommend they just stay away. Don’t try to limit yourself to two Oreo cookies because if the reward is very potent, no matter how good your intentions, you are not going to be able to control them—which is the same message we have for people addicted to drugs.”

One of the most promising experiments in resisting the sirens of overeating is taking place in Philadelphia, where a professor of clinical psychology at Drexel University, Michael Lowe, is trying to overcome another root cause of obesity. Besides the influence of Wall Street and the aggressive marketing by soda companies, he points to a tear in the social fabric that first appeared in the early 1980s, as the obesity rates started to surge.
“When a lot of us grew up,” he told me, “there were three meals a day, and maybe a planned snack at bedtime—and that was it. You never ate outside of those times because you would spoil your appetite. That changed. People began eating everywhere, in meetings or walking down the street. There’s no place where food isn’t acceptable now, and people are so busy they don’t make time to sit down for meals. We have to work to encourage families to eat together, and that used to be automatic.”

Lowe has a program under way in which the participants are completely reorienting themselves to processed foods. They’re avoiding the worst products, buying healthier substitutes, and dividing the massive serving sizes into reasonable portions so that they will be less tempted to overeat.
Steve Comess, a health care executive, went from 232 pounds to 177, and while it took him two years, he said he finally felt in control of his shopping and eating.
“It’s behavioral,” he told me. “I started by reading the labels, so I was making better choices, with better control of my food environment. I’m maximizing the use of fresh foods, to control not only calories, but the fat, salt, and sugar. It’s not being perfect; it’s keeping within a sustainable range.”

This notion of seizing control in order to ward off an unhealthy dependence on processed food may be the best recourse we have in the short term. Consumer advocates are pushing the government to compel the food industry to undertake a wide range of changes in their formulations and marketing, including large reductions in their loads of salt, sugar, and unhealthy fats, restrictions on what foods can be sold through school vending machines, and redesigns of labels to make their nutritional information easier to read. But if the government or industry resists, these changes could take many years. In the meantime, only we can save us.

I
made several trips to Philadelphia in the course of reporting this book, drawn to a small neighborhood on the north side of the city that couldn’t be more different from the cushy environs of Nestlé in Switzerland. It is called Strawberry Mansion, and the kids here weren’t climbing any mountains to stay fit; they could hardly step outside to play on the cracked sidewalks in front of their homes, for fear of the violent crime.

There was, however, plenty to eat. The neighborhood was
riddled with corner stores, each with its devastatingly clever layout: soft drinks by the door, followed by rows of sweet cakes graduating into salty snacks and a jackpot of candy at the register. The average kid who walked through the doors of these stores, researchers had found, scooped up chips, candy, and a sugary drink that came to 360 calories—all for just $1.06. With the tiniest bit of spending money from their parents, these kids would often hit the corner store for breakfast on the way to school and then again for a snack
on their way back home. The store owners called these times their “rush hours,” but in truth the traffic kept up all day and through the late evenings.

I spent hours observing the Strawberry Mansion convenience stores, but it didn’t take long before I saw an endless stream of soda and snack trucks making their rounds—practicing their “up and down the street” marketing as they filled up the racks and coolers with Coke and Pepsi, Cheetos and Lay’s, Hostess and the locally produced sweets called TastyKake. I’d heard about a group of concerned parents banding together, vigilante-style, with walkie-talkies and battle plans for hitting the stores around one of the neighborhood’s schools. So on one trip to the city I caught the first day of their intervention. It was the winter of 2010, bitter cold, but the parents were setting themselves up on the sidewalks outside, blowing into their bare hands, aiming to keep the kids from going in.

This group had had been organized by an ambitious school principal named Amelia Brown who was fed up with the jittery nerves, rising obesity, short attention spans, and all-around declining health of her students, which she blamed, in large part, on the food these stores sold to her kids. She had decided she needed to work on their health, just as she needed to work on boosting their grades. Inside the William D. Kelley School, a spectacular, homegrown effort was under way to teach the students healthier eating. Where posters once hung on the wall warning the kids about drugs, there now were posters warning the kids about salt, sugar, and fat, with their own drawings of the ideal dinner plate. The gym teacher, Beverly Griffin, used replicas of the food pyramid, songs, and games—like dashing around the gym picking up plastic replicas of foods: The team with the most fruits and vegetables won; those with more meat and grains lost.
“It’s like somebody is saying, ‘let’s let all those kids get fat, get obese and die,’ ” said Griffin. Efforts are under way to replicate programs like this, and they shouldn’t stop until every elementary school in the country, and the world, has a Beverly Griffin, and every high school delivers basic skills in healthy shopping and cooking.

Principal Brown, however, knew she also had to do something about
the corner stores that ring her school. At a meeting held in the school auditorium, she told the volunteer parents,
“I need you to go to those stores and say, ‘Look, can you not sell to our kids between 8:15 and 8:30? We don’t want them to eat sugary items. There is a breakfast program right here. And if you don’t do this, we’re going to have to boycott for a while.’ ”

She herself had called on the stores that previous summer, only to realize that her students brought the owners much of the income they needed to pay their bills, including the money they had borrowed to open their stores. So she recruited the parents—not to boycott the stores per se but rather to try to steer her students away. The parents received tactical training from a local community group that used to teach citizens how to fight crack dens, in the 1980s and 1990s, back when cocaine was ravaging this same neighborhood. It wasn’t a coincidence that the soda and chips these kids were buying had come to be known on the street as “crack snacks.”

On the first day of the operation, one of the parents, McKinley Harris, positioned himself outside the Oxford Food Shop and tried to dissuade kids from going in. They came by in groups, walking themselves to school. Some complied; many did not.
“Candy?” he said, shaking his head and peering into the bag held by one of the kids who came dashing out of the shop. “That’s not food.” He didn’t try to confiscate it. He was trying to get the kid to think about his choices. I met later with shop owner Gladys Tejada, who said she empathized with the parents but didn’t hold out much hope for their success.
She
certainly couldn’t prevent the kids from buying whatever they want. “They like it sweet,” she said. “And they like it cheap.”

The real heartbreaking moment, however, came a few minutes later when McKinley’s wife, Jamaica, came rushing down the street with their kids in tow. She and her husband had been working hard to improve their own family’s diet, which required taking taxis to reach supermarkets where they could buy fresh, wholesome food. But this morning had been frenetic, getting the kids ready for school. They still needed breakfast, so she ran into the store to get something for them. The Oxford didn’t sell fresh fruit, not even bananas, so she came out a minute later with a healthy-sounding alternative: “fruit and yogurt” breakfast bars for her kids. Reading
the front of the label, she said with a measure of pride, “It has calcium.” But the fine print on the back told a different story. The bars, in truth, compared poorly with the candy her husband was trying to block. The “healthy” bars had more sugar, and less fiber, than Oreos.

I was overcome by this scene. Here they were, these people of Strawberry Mansion, sick of their kids getting the jitters and stomachaches from the corner-store food, trying to rehabilitate their own eating habits, and getting snookered into buying a “healthy” item that was no healthier than candy. This persistent tactic by food companies to promote one good ingredient, hoping that consumers will overlook the rest, was one of the oldest tricks in the book, going back to the 1920s and 1930s, when companies began adding vitamins to their cereal, touting these healthy additives on the front of the boxes—decades before they had to disclose the sugar content in the fine print on the back. But today, this ploy seems even more pernicious, as more and more people are trying to do the right thing by their eating habits. With all of life’s distractions, reading and understanding the
entire
food label is as critical as it is hard to pull off.

If nothing else, this book is intended as a wake-up call to the issues and tactics at play in the food industry, to the fact that we are not helpless in facing them down. We have choices, particularly when it comes to grocery shopping, and I saw this book, on its most basic level, as a tool for defending ourselves when we walk through those doors. Some of the tricks being used to seduce us are subtle, and awareness is key: the gentle canned music; the in-store bakery aromas; the soft drink coolers by the checkout lanes; the placement of some of the most profitable but worst-for-you foods at eye level, with healthier staples like whole wheat flour or plain oats on the lowest shelf and the fresh fruits and vegetables way off on one side of the store.

But there is nothing subtle about the products themselves. They are knowingly designed—
engineered
is the better word—to maximize their allure. Their packaging is tailored to excite our kids. Their advertising uses every psychological trick to overcome any logical arguments we might have for passing the product by. Their taste is so powerful, we remember it
from the last time we walked down the aisle and succumbed, snatching them up. And above all else, their formulas are calculated and perfected by scientists who know very well what they are doing. The most crucial point to know is that there is nothing accidental in the grocery store. All of this is done with a purpose.

It is, perhaps, not unreasonable in this scenario to think of the grocery store as a battlefield, dotted with landmines itching to go off. And if you accept this, then it becomes all the more apparent why the food industry is so reliant on salt, sugar, and fat. They are cheap. They are interchangeable. They are huge, powerful forces of nature in unnatural food. And yet, for us, knowing all this can be empowering. You can walk through the grocery store and, while the brightly colored packaging and empty promises are still mesmerizing, you can see the products for what they are. You can also see everything that goes on behind the image they project on the shelf: the formulas, the psychology, and the marketing that compels us to toss them into the cart. They may have salt, sugar, and fat on their side, but we, ultimately, have the power to make choices. After all, we decide what to buy. We decide how much to eat.

T
he reporting that led to this book stemmed from three fabulous meals, starting with the crackling hot mess of catfish that Ben Cawthon and I wolfed down at Marilyn’s Deli, a roadhouse on State Route 52 in southern Alabama. Ben is a goodhearted civil-rights brawler in the nearby town of Blakely, Georgia, where a deadly outbreak of salmonella in peanuts first drew my attention to food manufacturers. He showed me that the factories that turn out America’s food—hardly the fortresses I imagined—are staffed with principled workers quite willing to hold their employers accountable at the risk of their own livelihoods. I’m honored to know Ben, and wish him all the best in his ongoing civic pursuits.

The second meal was lunch at a Washington hotel, where it wasn’t the burger that opened my eyes, but how it was ordered. My guest was Dennis Johnson, a soft-spoken lobbyist for the beef industry who is said, in an obvious stretch of the truth, to own the U.S. Department of Agriculture. What he does have, for sure, is a keen insider’s view of the health risk in eating ground beef that is undercooked. “I’d like mine
well done
,” Dennis instructed the waiter, which got me started asking food company officials about their own eating habits when it comes to salt, sugar, and fat.