So it sounds as if he believes that natural foods that contain it, such as cheese, cream and red meat, are devils incarnate.
The problem here is that Moss doesn't even reference this discussion, merely damning fat in a generic way.
For instance, a recent review of scientific studies on fat, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, concluded that "there is no convincing evidence that saturated fat causes heart disease". In both the US and UK, the characterisation of saturated fat as a dietary antichrist is being challenged, not by the junk food industry, which makes a mint from spewing out supposedly healthy low-fat products, but by nutritionists and scientists. But the nutrition debate is evolving, and this book is behind the curve. Food campaigners on both sides of the Atlantic have been saying as much for decades. There's nothing earth-shatteringly new in Moss's assertion that sugar, salt and fat are the unholy trinity of bad food. Without salt, he observes, "processed food companies cease to exist". Sugar, with its "high-speed, blunt assault on our brains", is the "methamphetamine of processed food ingredients", he believes, while fat is the opiate, "a smooth operator whose effects are less obvious, but no less powerful". Their job is to establish the necessary "bliss point", the precise amount of sugar, fat or salt guaranteed to "send consumers over the moon". By deliberately manipulating three key ingredients – salt, sugar and fat – that act much like drugs, racing along the same pathways and neural circuitry to reach the brain's pleasure zones, the food and drink industry has created an elastic formula for a never-ending procession of lucrative products.Īs Moss explains, the exact formulations of addictive junk foods (and drinks) are not accidental but calculated and perfected by scientists "who know very well what they are doing". How do the food giants do it? Moss's central thesis is that junk food is a legalised type of narcotic. What he uncovered is chilling: a hard-working industry composed of well-paid, smart, personable professionals, all keenly focused on keeping us hooked on ever more ingenious junk foods an industry that thinks of us not as customers, or even consumers, but as potential "heavy users". He interviewed hundreds of current and former food industry insiders – chemists, nutrition scientists, behavioural biologists, food technologists, marketing executives, package designers, chief executives and lobbyists.
New York Times journalist Michael Moss spent three-and-a-half years working out how big food companies get away with churning out products that undermine the health of those who eat them.
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