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

like sweetness; rather, they are teaching children what foods should taste like. And increasingly, this curriculum has been all about sugar.
    “What basic research and taste in children is shedding light on—and why the foods that they’re making for children are so high in sugar and salt—is they are manipulating or exploiting the biology of the child,” she said. “I think that anyone who makes a product for a child has to take responsibility because what they are doing is teaching the child the level of sweetness or saltiness the food should be.
    “They’re not just providing a source of calories for a child,” she added. “They’re impacting the
health
of that child.”
    T his much is clear from the research at Monell: People love sugar, especially kids. And up to a certain point—the bliss point—the more sugar there is, the better.
    We may not yet know all the twists and turns that sugar takes in racing from our mouths to our brains, but the end results are not in dispute. Sugar has few peers in its ability to create cravings, and as the public gradually came to understand this power, sugar turned into a political problem for the manufacturers of processed food—a problem for which they would turn, once again, to Monell for help.
    The money that the big food companies give to Monell accords them one special privilege: These corporate sponsors can ask the center’s scientists to conduct special studies just for them. A dozen times or so each year, companies bring vexing problems to Monell, like why the texture of starch is perceived so differently by people, or what causes the terrible aftertaste in infant formula, and Monell’s scientists will put their PhD brains to work in solving these puzzles. In the 1980s, however, a group of Monell funders asked for help with a more pressing matter: They needed assistance in defending themselves from public attack.
    Sugar was coming under heavy fire from several directions. The Food and Drug Administration had taken it up as part of an effort to examine the safety of all food additives. The report it commissioned didn’t recommend regulatory action, but it did contain several warnings: Dental decaywas rampant, sugar was possibly tied to heart disease, and consumers had all but lost control of its use. Getting rid of the sugar bowl at home would barely help to cut back on consumption, the report said, as more than two-thirds of the sugar in America’s diet was now coming from processed foods.
    At the same time, a select committee of U.S. senators—including George McGovern, Bob Dole, Walter Mondale, Ted Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey—caused a stir by releasing the federal government’s first official guideline on how Americans should shape their diet. The committee had started out looking at hunger and poverty but quickly turned its attention to heart disease and other illnesses that experts were linking to diet.“I testified that Americans should eat less food; less meat; less fat, particularly saturated fat; less cholesterol; less sugar; more unsaturated fat, fruits, vegetables and cereal products,” an adviser to the Agriculture Department, Mark Hegsted, wrote in an account of the proceedings.On top of that, Michael Jacobson, an MIT-trained protégé of the consumer advocacy superstar Ralph Nader, was lighting a fire under the Federal Trade Commission. Jacobson’s group, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, had gathered twelve thousand signatures from health professionals in urging the agency to ban the advertising of sugary foods on children’s television.
    The headlines from these and other attacks on the processed food industry had led to a surge in consumer awareness and concern. A federal survey found that three in four shoppers were reading and acting on the nutritional information provided on labels; half of these consumers said that they studied the labels to avoid certain additives, including salt, sugar, fats, and artificial colors.