Howard Moskowitz, the man who re-invented Dr Pepper, explained “I’m not a soda drinker. It’s not good for your teeth.”
As every reader of this blog is probably already well aware, most of the food we eat today is crap. Books, films, news stories and television programs in recent years have drawn attention to the fact. The link between our poor diet and rising rates of obesity heart disease and diabetes is now well known and the numbers inflicted has grown into a pandemic.
The food industry are well aware that sugary, fatty and salty foods stimulate the same pleasure centers in our brains that cocaine does but they avoid using the word “addictive”. Instead they talk about “crave-able” foods that have a “bliss point” of sugar and “mouthfeels” of fat. Yes, food companies engage in false or misleading advertising. And yes, they target kids. And no, Wall Street really doesn’t care if you die eating this stuff. The bottom line is that junk food is an easy sell because we are hard-wired to respond to it. Salt, sugar and fat are addictive substances. And they employ insidious tactics and tricks of advertising to keep their “heavy users” using and to hook new consumers, especially children. Food companies exploit our built-in urge for salt, sugar and fat, by aggressively marketing junk food not just to children but also to the poor.
If the use of the word “addiction” brings to mind the lawsuits against the tobacco companies of recent memory, that’s no coincidence. The people running the big American food companies also appreciate the similarities and, in the case of Philip Morris (the giant tobacco company that owns both General Foods and Kraft), they are in fact the same people. They’ve been down this road before and aren’t looking for a replay. And so, some of the strategies they employ, including paying their own experts to blur the science and generally blaming the consumer, are familiar.
Cleverly marketed to working mothers and priced affordably (yet loaded with high levels of saturated fat, sodium and sugar), fast food is a huge hit. Convenience, it seems, overrides parents’ health concerns, and companies know this all too well. Cooking and preparing meals has increasingly become either a specialized hobby or a draining, time-consuming and thankless chore to be avoided at all costs.
Big Food executives know that eating their products causes severe health problems, and yet they work hard to make them as irresistible as possible. Once-wholesome foods such as yogurt and spaghetti sauce are being laced with astonishing amounts of sugar and sodium. “No sugar, no fat, no sales.” as one excutive put it.
The book “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us” by Michael Moss makes clear, “it’s simply not in the nature of these companies to care about the consumer in an empathetic way.” That is the true essence of capitalism. Profits come first before ethics or morality.
As every reader of this blog is probably already well aware, most of the food we eat today is crap. Books, films, news stories and television programs in recent years have drawn attention to the fact. The link between our poor diet and rising rates of obesity heart disease and diabetes is now well known and the numbers inflicted has grown into a pandemic.
The food industry are well aware that sugary, fatty and salty foods stimulate the same pleasure centers in our brains that cocaine does but they avoid using the word “addictive”. Instead they talk about “crave-able” foods that have a “bliss point” of sugar and “mouthfeels” of fat. Yes, food companies engage in false or misleading advertising. And yes, they target kids. And no, Wall Street really doesn’t care if you die eating this stuff. The bottom line is that junk food is an easy sell because we are hard-wired to respond to it. Salt, sugar and fat are addictive substances. And they employ insidious tactics and tricks of advertising to keep their “heavy users” using and to hook new consumers, especially children. Food companies exploit our built-in urge for salt, sugar and fat, by aggressively marketing junk food not just to children but also to the poor.
If the use of the word “addiction” brings to mind the lawsuits against the tobacco companies of recent memory, that’s no coincidence. The people running the big American food companies also appreciate the similarities and, in the case of Philip Morris (the giant tobacco company that owns both General Foods and Kraft), they are in fact the same people. They’ve been down this road before and aren’t looking for a replay. And so, some of the strategies they employ, including paying their own experts to blur the science and generally blaming the consumer, are familiar.
Cleverly marketed to working mothers and priced affordably (yet loaded with high levels of saturated fat, sodium and sugar), fast food is a huge hit. Convenience, it seems, overrides parents’ health concerns, and companies know this all too well. Cooking and preparing meals has increasingly become either a specialized hobby or a draining, time-consuming and thankless chore to be avoided at all costs.
Big Food executives know that eating their products causes severe health problems, and yet they work hard to make them as irresistible as possible. Once-wholesome foods such as yogurt and spaghetti sauce are being laced with astonishing amounts of sugar and sodium. “No sugar, no fat, no sales.” as one excutive put it.
The book “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us” by Michael Moss makes clear, “it’s simply not in the nature of these companies to care about the consumer in an empathetic way.” That is the true essence of capitalism. Profits come first before ethics or morality.
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