Salt, Sugar, Fat and How Food Companies Affect What We Eat with Michael Moss

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Moss (Salt Sugar Fat, Hooked) and Globe and Mail nutrition columnist Leslie Beck discuss snacking, processed food and addiction. What makes Oreos more habit-forming than nicotine? What prevented one well-meaning food company from limiting the amount of sugar in its products? Beck also explores Moss’s tips for how to control your snacking, and how the pandemic has affected the way we’re eating. (The second part of a two-part episode. Find the first part here.)  

Insights

• Competition among the processed food companies can be a powerful disincentive for change. “Behind the scenes, this is an incredibly fierce industry,” Moss says. When Kraft attempted to reduce the amount of sugar in its products, competitors swooped in and filled the gap in the market, affecting Kraft’s bottom line. Even when companies try to do the right thing, Moss says, they’re nudged by other companies that have a hold on grocery stores and the agricultural system. (7:15) 

• Foods can be so addictive that even the General Counsel at Philip Morris, a company that used to make cigarettes and Oreos, had more control over his cigarette smoking than his Oreo consumption. “He could smoke a cigarette during a business meeting and then put his pack of cigarettes away, not touch it until the next business meeting the next day,” says Moss. “But he told me that he couldn't open a bag of Oreos for fear that he would go down half the bag.” (12:00)

• Michael Moss’s tips for fighting snacking cravings. “One of the lessons from cigarette, alcohol, drug experts, is that the cravings that hit us from those addictive substances come on so fast that you have to plan ahead,” he says. “And your approach to dealing with food can be your own approach. Nothing works for everybody. And so just to kind of give you an example, if you're somebody who gets a craving for cookies at 3:00 p.m., you probably need to be thinking about doing something else at 2:55 in order to prepare for and brace yourself and/or prevent that craving.” As for what that “something else” is, Moss suggests picking up the phone and calling a friend, while we suggest going for a walk around the block. (14:20)

Links 

• For the Daily Beast, Moss picks five other food-related books he finds fascinating.

• Trust the New York Post to be blunt with their headline: “Why Sugar, Cheese and Fast Food Are More Addictive Than Heroin.”

• The NPR review of Moss’s book, Hooked, calls the book “smoothly written.” “I won’t be buying potato chips anytime soon,” says the reviewer. Here’s the link.

• Interview with Michael Moss, plus video, on Food Tank.

• For further links, including Michael Moss’s website and Twitter feed, check out the show notes for Episode 55 featuring part one of the Michael Moss / Leslie Beck conversation.