Food Addiction is Solvable

not be putting into our bodies. At times, it could feel difficult to know what is the right decision when it comes to our eating habits. It's not our fault. This is not on us. These products are engineered in a way that's designed to get us to lose control. We live in an age where what we're consuming has changed beyond the necessity of survival, and in most ways those changes are intentional. We've grown up to see these food products as being full of cartoon characters and joy

and happiness. So, I mean, can you imagine there being like a march through the streets of Brooklyn protesting Oreo cookies. Michael Moss is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist and New York Times best selling author Our overdependence on process food, which has this incredible hidden cost, can be solved by

our reclaiming food for ourselves. I'm excited to talk to you because we're going to a place where people are trying to lose the quarantine fifteen after, you know, kind of eating whatever over the lockdown months, and people's relationship with food right now is probably at a very pivotal moment.

So one thing as someone who like I've struggled both with weight probably most of my life, and my relationship with food, and I also struggled with the idea of food addiction, as it feels impossible to be addicted to something that your body needs. And you talk about this

in your book Hook Yes. So being addicted to food was a really good thing for most of our existence, or forbears, putting on body fat was a really good thing because it enabled our brains to grow and enable to stink of your hard times and have more offspring, which is kind of what life is all about, right. But the problem is the nature of our food was changed so dramatically by the food companies in the last fifty years that's suddenly what was really good for us

became really problematic. How would you define addiction and why food can be addictive despite us having to eat to live. I spent time with evolutionary biologists for this book because I was really kind of trying to figure out is addiction really kind of the right word, and is it

really fair to compare you twinkies and or cookies? Was cigarettes and alcohol and even some drugs, And so spending time though with these biologists, I came full circle and now I'm convinced that in any way these food products are even more problematic. There is some predecedens to the

food industry called the tobacco industry. For decades it vehemently denied that smoking was addictive, right to put all its scientists who work on that, and it's it's lobbyists and it stops SEO officials and etc. Well, in two thousands, something really fascinating happened, which is that Philip Morris completely flipped around and said, Okay, you got us, smoking is in fact addictive or throwing in the towel on that.

What was so interesting about that for me is that Philip Morris at the time was also the single largest manufacturer of process food through its purchase of the old company General Foods, and then Craft and then Nabisco, which made Oreo cookies, And that same year, the CEO of the company was asked to define addiction in some legal proceedings and he says, well, addiction is a repetitive behavior

that some people find difficult to quit. And I thought that was so perfect a because it's in line with what scientists and experts think of as addiction these days. But I also loved the words some there because addiction happens on a spectrum, so it can affect us differently as people. It confect us different times of our lives, different times of the day. So I thought that definition by Philip Morris, arguably one of the biggest experts on

addiction in the world, was totally apted. So I used that throughout the book in terms of talking about addiction and looking at these products and what these companies do to maximize the seductive power of their product. Why is it that our brains and bodies are wired to crave certain foods if those foods aren't helpful to us. That's kind of one of the biggest mystery. He's still out there. I mean, there's some thought the brain looks at sugar

as calories for young growing bodies. And you know, when we were living on the planes and hunter gatherer societies, sugar was kind of a rare thing, and so you can kind of see how we might have gotten attracted to that sugar and how it thus excites the brain in a way that maybe even fats and salt and proteins certainly doesn't do. One of the powerful aspects of these products is memory. We begin developing memories for foods at a really young age, possibly even in the womb.

And that's why the soda companies, for example, know that if they can get a soda in the hands of a kid when he or she is with her parents at a ball game, that will forever more be associated with that joyous moment. And when they're older in life and they want some joy and comfort in their life, what do they turn to soda? Because it's they're kind

of in their memory. And that's where the companies also spent so much money in advertising in a marketing So part of what attracts us to food and creates our eating habits is in fact the habit, repetitive behavior of eating these products again and again deepens those memory channels in our brain. When you're talking about food memories, can you give me an earliest memory of food for you. I grew up in California, Fresno for my early teens,

in the Central Valley. I was a latchkey kid. My mom worked outside of the house, as did my dad. I would come home, let myself in the house and put a pop Tart in the toast drop. And this was after school, elementary school. That's kind of one of my earliest food memories. A few years ago, I went to the Kellogg's research and development facility way off in

the distance. In the factory, they had messed up a batch of pop Tarts and they were dumping this huge amount of raw dough into a dumpster, and the aroma came wafting across the factory floor and instantly took me back to those days. Because our power of smell is incredible. That's another big factor in these products and our love for food, but also just the memory those pop tarts had never left my brain. They were still in there after all that time. So I want to pivot a

little bit and talk about weight. It's rare to have a conversation about food. Food addiction, our relationships with food and not have it VERI into talking about weight. One of the things that I appreciated about your book is that you note that weight is not the only barometer for food related trouble in health. What are some of the other ones? So, yeah, you can't just look at

somebody and say because they're they're overweight. And in fact, there's even some science that's saying a little bit of overweight maybe actually a really good thing for us in terms of longevity and what have you. So so yeah, I think I'll bec is this really crude measure of health?

But I have to tell you one of the things I was just so struck by, and kind of the reporting that I did for this book was how body fat is an organ, you know, a thinking, plotting, diabolical organ that's doing everything it can to resist your efforts to cut back on it, so that if you go on a weight loss diet, your own body fat will be sending a signal to the brain telling it you're

hungry eat. It will also slow down your metabolism. You're resting metabolism, which is how much energy we burn just like sitting around or sort of even sleeping so you're burn less energy and what you're less of a threat to the fat and again, kind of evolutionarily, that kind of makes sense because gaining weight was a really good thing to do back in hunters, you know, gathers societies when when extra weight was sort of our protection and

a matter of life and life and death. And so it makes sense we would have this resistance then to losing that weight as as a protective mechanism. When you talk about fat being an organ, are you are you being metaphorical or do you? No? No? No, Literally, so body fat, the cells of the body, fat communicate with each other, they communicate with the rest of the body, just like other organs in the body. So it's a it's a it's an entity unto itself, and it's really

really smart diabolically. So, if you're trying to lose weight, what do you think is the best way to talk about our addiction to food and the problems that are having with processed food and with the ways in which companies make this food without demonizing people who are overweight and have maybe have struggles or maybe some of those people who are overweight and are perfectly content with where

they are. Yeah, I kind of worried about something else and using the word addiction, which is that we might cause people to feel hopeless. Because the word addiction is kind of so strong, it sort of implies that this is something that's out of my control. And I absolutely don't think that. I'm a journalist, and journalists are kind of especially investigative journalists, right, are kind of focused on,

you know, the problem and pointing out the problem. The part of me still believes that knowing all the tricks that these companies use when we walk into the grocery store or to many restaurants is in itself empowering and can you know, can help us regain control of our eating habits. But there are also I think some really

clear solutions here that I've come across. We, by nature love convenience, right, We love food that's inexpensive quote unquote, that that that cost the least amount of energy to get again, going back to a hunter gatherer societies when that was a really really good thing to do. So what did the food industry do back in the sixties, when both women and men were working outside of the home and increasing numbers. They came to us and said,

we'll solve your food problem. We'll make dinner. We'll make it convenient for you to come home at seven or eight o'clock at night and put dinner on the table in thirty minutes. Of course, the hidden price of that is what we're now dealing with in terms of our health problems. Right. But I think that now knowing that, there are ways that we can take back what the food industry took from us, even convenience. I mean, look, I have a spaghetti sauce recipe down now to ninety

three seconds. I kid you not granted, if it's simmers on the stove a little while, right, if my family's like more apt to eat it, But the actual working part of it, opening up a can of plum tomatoes and adding whatever like dried basil or spices might be round. And maybe if I you know, I have ten seconds sautang a little garlic and olive oil, that's ninety three seconds.

That is convenience to the max. But that's home cooking, yeah, which is a really powerful tool that we can use to change our eating habits and lessen our dependence on these processed food products. One of the interesting parts of your book is that you talk about the stomach, and you talk about the brain, and you talk about how, for the longest time, we thought that our stomachs were the driving force of our appetites, and you talk about how that is part of the story, but not all

of the story. Tell us more about the brain. One of the hallmarks of addictive substances is speed. Back in the nineties, scientists studying addiction realized that the fasterest substance hits the brain, the more apt the brain is to be seduced by that substance and act compulsively, impulsively by overeating or over consuming. Right. So typically smoking, for example, will fully engage the brain in ten seconds, and alcohol and drugs are kind of be a little bit less

than that. But it turns out there's nothing faster than kind of the essential ingredients in process food and their ability to hit the reward center of the brains get us excited and get us to act impulsively. There was this exquisite study done a few years ago where they sat people down and said, we want you to tell us how fast you taste sugar, so that they put a little sugar in their tongue, and those people were pushing the button indicating that they were tasting sweet in

less than one second. And it was really illuminating to me because kind of what these processed food products are all about. A speed from the manufacturing process to reduce the cost from the packaging that lets us open the package and get to the product really fast, to the speed with which these products, which are heavily based on salt, sugar, and fats, also reached the brave really fast. All about speed,

all about getting us to act impulsively and mindlessly. Which is another kind of characteristic of these processed food products is that by not thinking about them, we put ourselves, We turn ourselves over, we turn our will power over to the companies making these making these products. So I don't think we've talked as specifically about how the companies are actually doing this, whether it be the speed, whether it be nurturing our addiction, if you will, nurturing our

dependency on food, exploiting our dependency on food. How are the companies actually doing this. One of our natural attractions to food is cheapness. As I mentioned right, we love a box of pop tarts that cost ten cents this week less than it did last week. That gets us excited. We're much more apt to so to put that in the shopping cart. Okay, So the food companies have working

for them chemical laboratories called flavor houses. They're actually located in mostly in New Jersey, up and down the corridor, where they're kind of doing what you expect them to do. They're using chemicals, mixing and matching to imitate some of the natural flavorings and foods, which which processed food companies then can use to make their products. They're famous for

inventing pumpkin pie spice. That's scourge that spreads across the grocery store every fall right charge of the planet, all kinds of stuff from candy, the cookies too, who knows what right well, they're using as many as eighty different

chemical ingredients to create that pumpkin pie spice. But I spent some time with one of the flavor houses and they explain to me that their even bigger mission for the food companies is to constantly search for cheaper, less expensive combinations of these chemicals because they know, again going back to my favorite, the pop tarts, if they can knock ten cents off the price of that box of pop Tarts, we're going to be excited by that, and

they're gonna win in that compare editive marketplace called called the grocery store. They also have scientists psychologists who working working for them, who understand that many of us eat for emotional reasons, not for true hunger pains, right, so they spend a lot of time finding ways to push those emotional buttons with the pandemic. I remember one Twitter ad was for a couple of bags of chips that sort of advertised itself by they were foot long doritos.

As I recall if you had like two stick figures staying a safe six feet apart by measuring the distance with six bags of doritos. So, whether it's fear or comfort, or childhood memories or happiness, the companies know through their psychological marketing expertise, how to punch those buttons and get us to act. Let's talk about solutions. How do we how do we solve this? Like? What are what are some steps we could take to actually fix these problems?

Find anyway you possibly can to do as much cooking from scratch as you can, and I think your listeners would be amazed at sort of how they can change your attitude about about food. Um, there are just like so many people out there working on reinventing food, reinventing

our food environment with our health in mind. Some of those people, by the way, have switched sides, having informer executives at these big food process food companies, are now working on behalf of farmers growing carrots and figuring out like what's an exciting way to market carrots to kids? Um. And so it's kind of just like sitting back and going, well, how can we reclaim what we used to have here? And how hard would that be? I have a kitchen, I could cook my own food. I have a place

to go to get fresh produce, to get vegetables. I'm not dealing with a food desert. A lot of the convenience and the cheapness that comes with the processed foods is really affecting the people who have the least amount

of resources. How can we help them? Oh? Absolutely, So there are efforts underway, and they started in Philadelphia working with corners stores to help them sell fresh produce, which is a lot harder than you might than it might sound, because I'm at the coolers that they have are owned by the soda companies who don't want a bunch of broccoli and their coolers, so figure out sort of how to do that. So I love that aspect of it. If I was king for a day, I would put

a garden in every school in this country. Getting the kids excited about real food, getting their parents excited. But then making that real food available to those parents at a price that's affordable is going to mean rethinking the entire farm system, because so much of the farm says the vast majority of it is about making soybeans and field corn cheaper and cheaper as ingredients for processed food.

And if you could flip that around and help the agricultural system find ways to make broccoli less expensive and broccoli sweeter and more enticing and succulent to people and fresher, that's another essential thing that has to happen. How would

they do that? The groundwork is already there. I wrote a story a few years ago for The Times where I wrote about kids who'd left kind of the industrial soybean farm, went to the city, got dissolution, came back to the farm in the Midwest, but did want to continue that and they started growing, you know, produce vegetables and fruits and nuts, and one of the biggest things they needed was help with marketing because they didn't have the farmers markets that they had that they have in

Brooklyn and Portland and Seattle. So helping with marketing, But basically you need a Department of Agriculture that's oriented much more to our health and much less to industrial industrial farming. Is there an incentive for the Department of Agriculture to have us, you know, continue to be unhealthy and to eat things that are not nutritious. Is there an incentive that stops them from actually putting solutions that like you're talking about, which all seem very simple into action. Yeah.

I think it's just the you know, the corporate farming business has lobbyists who are incredibly powerful, and agriculture is a powerful economic engine in the country. So I think it's just that that synergy that's happened between the farmers growing ingredients for processed food and the officials at the Department of Agriculture working together on that, and it's just it's been really, really difficult to sort of affect some real meaningful change there. Are you optimistic about us being

able to turn this around? To break this type of addiction on processed foods. Yeah, there's just so many people working on so many different solutions to food and the food environment that I can't I can't help it but not be optimistic. A lot of people write about food as critics, and obviously you have found the lane and you stay in it. What made you want to write

about the food industry in this way? There have been an outbreak of salmonella and peanuts being manufactured in the southern United States, and I went down and took a look, and it opened this incredible window on this processed food industry because many of these big companies were using these tainted peanuts as ingredients in their food products, and they

had lost control of the food chain. So weeks and weeks were going by, people were falling sickle over the country and they couldn't figure out if those peanuts were in their products or not. So that's kind of the first thing that got me really really interested in this

industry and what it was doing to us. And then one of my best sources, who tests meat for E coal, I said to be you know, Michael, as tragic as these incidents of contamination or you should really look at what my industry is intentionally adding to its products over which it has absolute control. He was worried about all the salt going into process meat, but that led me to look at sugar and fats as well, and then more recently on the industry's ability to sort of use

our own basic instincts against us. What would you recommend to our listeners to help solve this problem. So it kind of depends where you are on the spectrum of losing control to these food products. Obviously, if you're binge eating, you're going to be dealing with professional helping. Is that

they're really really difficult thing to do with. I mean, if you're somebody who gets like that three pm craving for a cookie, one of the lessons that we've learned from the world of drug addiction is that that craving comes on so strong and wipes out your free will, your ability to sort of say no, that you pretty much have to find a way to get ahead of

the craving. So, whether your strategy is to get up its stretch or call a friend, or try to eat something else that's healthier, like a handful of nuts, you've pretty much need to be doing that at two fifty five in order to word off that three PM craving are losing control. It's not our fault, this is not on us. These products are engineered in a way that's designed to get us to lose control over our willpower, over our ability to say noes. And so that's what

they're engineered to do. And knowing that, I think is a really fundamental point here figuring out how we use individuals with strategies we can take to regain control. Do we need to take these companies to task, because there's one thing with Philip Morris where we did and that kind of resulted in kind of a shift in our attitudes towards smoking. At what point can we feel empowered to say, hey, you guys should stop doing this and

help us. Yeah. No, that's so interesting, askup because there is an attorney who used to work for one of the big food companies who came up with this idea of going after them the same way that we went after big tobacco, because if you remember, the state attorneys general sued big tobacco not because smoking was evil, but simply to recover the massive healthcare costs that they were encurring.

Treating people were getting sick cancer from smoking. Right, So this attorney came up with the same idea, why don't we go after a big food and get them to pay for this hidden cost, hidden hit, huge hidden hit to the state's healthcare budgets. And so he sent this exquisitive proposal out to seventeen I think it was a state attorneys general, and he got not a single response.

And you know, I asked him what he thought the problem was, and he said, you know, I think a lot of these issues go in cycles, and there's a moment, and tobacco in the nineties was just kind of a moment, especially when they started acknowledging that smoking was addictive. Food may not be in that moment right now, and so he was sort of a patient guy, thinking, well, maybe

in a few years we could try again. I think the other fundamental difference here, though, is that we've been led and we've grown up to see these food products as being full of cartoon characters and joy and happiness. So, I mean, can you imagine there being like a march through the streets of Brooklyn protesting Oreo cookies? I can't, And I think it's kind of for that reason that most of us still think when we walk into the grocery store, we're dealing with companies that are kind of

fundamentally there to help improve our health. And until we kind of come to grips with the reality that that is not the case with many of these companies and so many of these products, then I think that we as a society, you know, aren't quite ready yet to cause the kind of you know, the kind of momentous change that can really cause this industry to turn around or change its ways. Well, thanks so much for being at our show. Thank you so much for your time.

It's so fantastic. Michael Moss is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist and New York Times best selling author. His most recent book is called Hooked Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions. To learn more about the processed food industry, check out the links in our show notes. Next week, on Solvable, I'm talking with fashion designer, influencer and writer Gabby greg also known as Gabby Fresh, about improving our relationship with our bodies. That

is a great conversation. Definitely come back to that. Softball is produced by Jocelyn Frank, Research by David Jack, Booking by Lisa Dunn. Our managing producer is Sasha Matthias, and our executive producer is Mio LaBelle. I'm Ronald Young Jr. Thanks for listening.