How we're addicted to junk food

Book review of Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions

As an entree to Michael Moss’s excellent new book, try this experiment. Imagine or place two bowls in front of you: One with potato chips; the other with whole walnuts. Make sure they are both good quality brands and fresh from a never-opened bag. Sample a walnut first. Enjoy how its initial slightly bitter crunch transforms into something soft, buttery, faintly woodsy. Next munch a potato chip. Its flavour is less complex than the walnut’s, but every chip instantly delivers an intense combination of salt, sugar and fat. They are so crispy you can hear them snap between your teeth, and then they miraculously dissolve into nothingness on your tongue, making you want another. And another. And another.

Now ask yourself which is more likely to make you fat. From a purely nutritional perspective the answer is easy: The walnuts. According to the nutrition labels helpfully provided on both packages, an ounce of walnuts contains 186 calories, 25 per cent more than the 150 calories delivered by an ounce of potato chips. To be sure, walnuts pack more protein and fibre and less salt, but if weight gain is your worry, you should eat the potato chips.

Obviously, it is preposterous to consider potato chips less fattening than walnuts — because potato chips are among the most addictive foods on the planet, along with French fries, pizza, cheeseburgers and Oreos. Too many of us can’t help eating too much of this stuff. And that’s the chief motivation for Hooked, which is in many ways a sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist’s 2013 tour de force, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. That book exposed how multinational food companies churn out processed foods that are both cheap and alluring. Hooked  asks how food manufacturers manipulate these foods to addict us, helping along a national crisis in which 40 per cent of Americans are obese.

No one questions that the nutritional quality of foods has health consequences, but Hooked redirects our attention to the arguably more important question of quantity. To do so, Mr Moss first focuses necessarily on the brain, the true fountainhead of addiction, which he defines (using the words of a Philip Morris CEO) as “a repetitive behaviour that some people find difficult to quit.”

Without going into much detail, Mr Moss describes how foods can be engineered to trigger the brain’s “on switch” (mostly the neurotransmitter, dopamine) and inhibit its “off switch” (a region called the prefrontal cortex). These switches and the instincts that turn them on and off have deep evolutionary origins that likely helped our ancestors survive and thrive when food was scarce.

Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions

Author: Michael Moss

Publisher: Random House

Price: $28; Pages: 304

And, wow, are the hard-wired instincts to eat these foods powerful — more so than those that push us toward addictive drugs like heroin and nicotine. We find out how Big Food innovates to manipulate and intensify these addiction-inducing sensations. We also learn how multinational food companies, in gastro-Orwellian fashion, hook us by expertly tapping into our memories and combining sensations and ingredients rarely seen together in nature like sugar and fat, brittle and soft, sweet and salty. None of us are immune.

According to Mr Moss, Big Food is relentlessly and cynically striving to maximise their “share of stomach,” industry parlance for how much of the food we eat they can supply. Beyond hunting for genes that predispose us to particular cravings or quantifying exactly how much sugar our brains prefer, these corporate peddlers perniciously play with serving sizes on nutrition labels to deceive us into thinking we are making healthy choices.

Perhaps most cunningly, Big Food has also acquired many major brands of processed diet foods like Weight Watchers and Lean Cuisine. One has to admit it’s clever to make money helping us get fat and then profit from our efforts (usually futile) to lose weight.

Who is at fault? No one is forced to eat at McDonald’s or drink Dr Pepper. But Mr Moss’s argument is that free will is an illusion, at least for certain foods. To stay healthy in our current, modern food system, consumers have to overcome instincts and make choices over which we have little control.

Hooked can also help us pay more attention to the relationship between food quantity and quality. Over the last few decades modern, westernised attitudes toward food have increasingly focused on nutrition labels that inform us how many grams of saturated fat, fibre and other stuff are in the foods we buy. These labels can make many highly processed foods seem deceptively harmless. Yet how many people overeat unprocessed wholesome foods?

Nutritionist perspectives on food combined with the challenges of losing weight also generate confusion over the relative merits of alternative diets, sometimes promoting new kinds of disordered eating as we Google the glycemic index of muffins or bananas, and worry about whether chocolate, eggs or peanuts are “good” or “bad.”

I’ve done my share of Googling and fretting, but I’m done with this. One doesn’t need a degree in nutrition science to recognise that just about every traditional, non-processed diet from every culture on the planet that isn’t loaded with junk food is probably generally healthy. What’s more, like those walnuts, those diets are tastier too.

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