Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss Read Free Book Online Page A

researchers are beginning to chart the pathway that sugar takes—which Reed described as more of a deliberate march. “There is a very orderly progress of pathways in the brain that people are just now starting to learn,” she said. “It stops at the first relay station and moves forward and forward and it eventually ends up in the pleasure centers, like the orbital frontal cortex of the brain, and that’s when you have the experience, ‘Ahh, sweet.’ The
good
aspect of sweet.”
    We don’t even have to eat sugar to feel its allure. Pizza will do, or any other refined starch, which the body converts to sugar—starting right in the mouth, with an enzyme called amylase. “The faster the starch becomes sugar, the quicker our brain gets the reward for it,” Reed said. “We like the highly refined things because they bring us immediate pleasure, associated with high sugar, but obviously there are consequences. It’s sort of like if you drink alcohol really fast, you get drunk really fast. When you break down sugar really fast your body gets flooded with sugar more than it can handle, whereas with a whole grain it is more gradual and you can digest it in a more orderly fashion.”
    In the testing that Mennella conducted to calculate Tatyana’s bliss point for sugar, the six-year-old worked her way through two dozen puddings, each prepared to a different level of sweetness. The puddings were presented to her in pairs, from which she would choose the one she liked more. Each of her choices dictated what pudding pair would come next, and slowly Tatyana moved toward the level of sweetness she preferred most of all. When Mennella got the results, it was plain to see that there was no way Tatyana would ever have fed Big Bird a twig of broccoli over a Krimpet,a Kreamie, or anything else from the TastyKake line. Tatyana’s bliss point for the pudding was 24 percent sugar, twice the level of sweetness that most adults can handle in pudding. As far as children go, she was on the lower side; some go as high as 36 percent.
    “What we find is that the foods that are targeted to children, the cereals and the beverages, they are way up,” Mennella said. “Tatyana’s favorite cereal is Cinnamon Crunch, and what we’ll do, we’ll measure the level of sweetness that the child prefers in the laboratory with a sucrose solution and it matches the sugar content of the most preferred cereal. There are individual differences, but as a group, in every culture that has been studied around the world, children prefer more intense sweetness than adults.”
    Beyond the basic biology, there are three other aspects of sugar that seem to make it attractive to children, Mennella said. One, the sweet taste is their signal for foods that are rich in energy, and since kids are growing so fast, their bodies crave foods that provide quick fuel. Two, as humans, we didn’t evolve in an environment that had lots of intensely sweet foods, which probably heightens the excitement we feel when we eat sugar. And finally, sugar makes children feel good. “It’s an analgesic,” Mennella said. “It will reduce crying in a newborn baby. A young child can keep their hand in a cold water bath longer if a sweet taste is in their mouth.”
    These are huge, powerful concepts—concepts that are crucial to understanding why so much of the grocery store food is sweet, and why we feel so drawn to sugar. We need energy, and Cinnamon Crunch delivers it quickly. We’ve been intimate with sweet taste since we were born, and yet our ancestors had nothing as thrilling as Coke. Sugar will even make us feel better, and who doesn’t want that?
    Mennella has become convinced that our bliss point for sugar—and all foods, for that matter—is shaped by our earliest experiences. But as babies grow into youngsters, the opportunity for food companies to influence our taste grows as well. For Mennella, this is troubling. It’s not that food companies are teaching children to