7 More Reasons to Fear Packaged Food

Can you handle more facts about the food industry, which is playing you like a sugary, cheese-filled fiddle? Read on, if you dare.

1. There are several reasons kids get addicted to sugar. Sugar signals to the brain that the food is rich in energy, something fast-growing kids need. Additionally, humans didn’t evolve eating intensely sweet foods, so sugar has an excitement factor. And sugar just makes kids feel good—it will quiet a crying newborn baby, and a young child can keep her hand in cold water longer if a sweet taste is in her mouth.
2. Scientists hired by food companies discovered that our enjoyment of sugary foods can be charted in an inverted U—we like added sugar, to a point. Eventually, too much sugar makes the food less alluring. The top of that U is our bliss point, or the sweet spot manufacturers try to hit.
3. Sneaking cheese and fat into a product makes it more alluring to customers, and unlike sugar, there is no peak bliss point for fat. The more fat a food contains, the more we like it.
4. Scientists say we are usually able to tell when our food is laden with sugar, but we’re not good at detecting fat. One study found that we’re even worse at detecting fat when the food in question is also sugary. In fact, in that case we often believe the fat has been reduced. Companies found they could add loads of fat to products, and customers wouldn’t notice as long as they also added loads of sugar.
5. In the 60s, Americans started to cut back on fat intake, something that was of great concern to the dairy industry, which started seeing a huge surplus of milk and milk fat products. They didn’t have to stop making their product, though, because since the 1930’s, milk has been subsidized (something Moss calls “one of the most stunning examples of overproduction in the American food supply system.”) Therefore, taxpayers paid for of the dairy surplus, ensuring that dairy companies would never go under and removing incentives to create a good product worthy of purchase. Eventually the government decided the problem was that Americans just weren’t eating enough dairy, so they started expensive marketing campaigns to get us to eat up, and to get companies to use the excess milk and milk fat in their foods. That’s why now there is cheese in many processed foods where you wouldn’t expect it—companies are encouraged to add it in whenever possible.
6. Salt is smarter than you think. Cargill makes a special salt sold to food manufacturers. This salt has hollow, pyramid-shaped crystals that adhere better to food and create the maximum possible contact with the mouth’s saliva. The salt also dissolves three times faster than normal salt, allowing it to race to the brain with faster, bigger jolts of salty flavor.
7. Addiction to salt can be reversed. In a 1982 study, researchers discovered that when people eat less salt, they don’t stop liking it, but the salt-sensitive taste buds in their mouths became less sensitive to it, requiring them to need less.

Are you ready to swear off the Doritos yet?