The Food Industry and You!

The New York Times recently published an article entitled "The extraordinary science of addictive junk food". The article, written by Pulitzer prize winning investigative journalist Michael Moss, paints a frightening picture of how the food industry attempts to hook customers to their products, under the guise of "Giving the customer what they want".

A few passages that really caught my eye I have included below, while the full article can be found here.

The article features a section on Howard Moskowitz, who is a consultant for the food industry, and is hired by companies wishing to create the best possible product. In this case "best product" simply refers to a product that sells.

Ordinary consumers are paid to spend hours sitting in rooms where they touch, feel, sip, smell, swirl and taste whatever product is in question. Their opinions are dumped into a computer, and the data are sifted and sorted through a statistical method called conjoint analysis, which determines what features will be most attractive to consumers.

The mathematical model maps out the ingredients to the sensory perceptions these ingredients create,” Moskowitz said, “so I can just dial a new product. This is the engineering approach.”

Moskowitz describes the ultimate product as having a perfect sensory specific satiety level.

In lay terms, it is the tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which responds by depressing your desire to have more. Sensory-specific satiety also became a guiding principle for the processed-food industry. The biggest hits — be they Coca-Cola or Doritos — owe their success to complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating.

An example of this may be a good quality chocolate, which is almost too rich. You can have a little bit, and it is amazing, but it is a hard food to eat in large quantities even though it tastes amazing. In this way cheap snack foods are actually designed to not overwhelm and instead encourage people to eat as much as possible.

Another food industry insider describes the idea of "vanishing caloric density".


This,” Witherly said, “is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure.” He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff’s uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density,” Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it . . . you can just keep eating it forever.”

This design, coupled with the flavour design described above, represents a powerful attack on will power.

Food companies shave also been known to target ethnic minorities that traditionally consume more of their product. In the U.S this has often been African-American, and Hispanic populations. This practice has been the subject of much criticism lately, with Beyonce becoming the new face of Pepsi. Some suggest this is a merely a strategy to encourage Pepsi consumption among young African-American girls.

In an effort to control as much market share as possible, Coke extended its aggressive marketing to especially poor or vulnerable areas of the U.S., like New Orleans — where people were drinking twice as much Coke as the national average — or Rome, Ga., where the per capita intake was nearly three Cokes a day.

By targeting the most vulnerable, the for-profit food system is actually increasing food insecurity, by creating addiction to processed food, and encouraging their consumption. It is incredible the lengths companies will go to turn a profit, and then rationalize it by suggesting if it's not them someone else will do it.

As a dietitian it is important to keep in mind the affect the food industry has on what people eat. While we may encourage people to consume less processed food, and provide an understanding as to why, this may not be enough. You can't underestimate the role that advertising, convenience, taste, and even addiction have on what people eat.

This is why policy is so important. Clearly personal responsibility does not work, at least not at the population level. Restrictions on advertising (especially to children), salt, and trans fat are good places to start. Since we've grown up with processed food, seeing it on a regular basis seems normal, but their is nothing normal about processed food. It is designed purely for profit, with only enough quality to makes us crave more.

JK