
How the Food Industry Engineers the Need to Eat - saidajigumi
http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2015/12/10/food-industry-michael-moss
======
dahart
> The food companies have marched around the grocery store, adding sweetness,
> engineering bliss points to products that didn’t used to be sweet.

This is why is now _really_ hard to cut refined sugar out of your diet,
because they put it in _everything_.

> It is no secret that the rise in obesity in America has something to do with
> food. But how much?

Those first two sentences seriously made me laugh out loud. What are the other
possible factors? One might say a more sedentary lifestyle, except I've heard
that rates of exercise and outdoor activity have been going up. (I'll see if I
can dig up a reference.) But maybe more important is that fact that you can
sit in a chair all day and not gain weight if you simply control your calorie
intake to match you activity level... Which is the only thing that needs to
happen regardless of what you do during the day, inside or outside, lazy or
active. Maybe that intro was trying not to come out and blame the food
industry for the whole thing in the first 10 words, or leave the reader
hanging so they don't stop there, but the probability that out obesity
epidemic isn't 100% due to diet is zero.

~~~
vonmoltke
The problem is in conflating weight with overall health, which most media
reporting does. _Weight_ is primarily controlled by the quantity of food you
eat (it is _not_ "100% due to diet" because there do exist conditions that
cause people to carry too much weight even with a "normal" diet), but to
assume all problems are purely a result of weight is reductionist and
incorrect.

Being obese is neither necessary nor sufficient to develop metabolic and other
health problems. Those problems arise from lack of activity, diet composition,
and other factors beyond simply weight. Those problems are also the core
plague of the "obesity epidemic", so it would behoove society not to focus so
narrowly on weight and to focus on overall health (of which weight is a
component).

~~~
adrianN
That's like saying "smoking is neither necessary nor sufficient to develop
lung cancer".

~~~
vonmoltke
Which is also true, but the statements are not equivalent.

Tobacco use (and actually, all forms of smoke inhalation) has a specific,
acute mechanism whereby use increases the chances of lung cancer and other
respiratory problems. We do not have that kind of causal link for obesity-
related diseases. There is a _correlation_ between weight and several so-
called lifestyle diseases, but the causal link is fuzzy.

That lack of causation is why reducing the obesity problem to a simple matter
of weight control is a bad idea. There are other mechanisms at play,
particularly related to body composition, that appear to be sensitive to diet
composition and activity levels. Telling people they can be sedentary as long
as they don't eat too much (which is basically what the original post I was
replying to was saying) is dangerous.

------
jimbokun
I really, truely do not like the taste of sugar in my bread, pasta sauce, and
yogurt. (I like the yogurt to taste yogurty, then add something sweet to it,
like a banana or chocolate chips.)

But it's maddening going through package after package of bread, trying to
find one without lots of added sugar. Free market capitalism is often
advertised as just giving people what they want, but there are lots of cases
like this where what people want and what is available to buy don't match up.

I really hope what the article says about food company profits dropping
because people are buying less processed foods. Maybe it will become easier to
buy food that tastes like something other than salt, sugar, and fat.

~~~
noam87
I've been wondering for years no why nobody offers sweetener-free pops. I just
want something bubbly with a hint of flavor, but without the sweetness: like
lemon-flavored club soda for example.

I have a hard time believing there's no market for this.

~~~
nvarsj
Like LaCroix?
[http://www.lacroixwater.com/flavors/](http://www.lacroixwater.com/flavors/)

They sold it all over the place in Chicago when I lived there.

------
newscracker
I would recommend a couple of documentaries in this context about sugar.

1\. The Botany of Desire [1]

See the part about selective breeding of apples that are sweet, where
varieties with other tastes are either discarded or used for making apple
cider vinegar.

2\. That Sugar Film [2]

This goes into detail on the amount of sugar (or high fructose corn syrup)
added to all kinds of foods that people would consider as normal and
"healthy". It's really shocking how invisible such things are to consumers.

[1]:
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1421383/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1421383/)

[2]: [http://thatsugarfilm.com/](http://thatsugarfilm.com/)

~~~
gregmac
Fed Up [1] is another to add to the list, available on Netflix.

[1] [http://fedupmovie.com/](http://fedupmovie.com/)

------
massysett
Someone was on the America's Test Kitchen podcast discussing artificial
flavors. He said that on the one hand the chemists and food scientists have
been making their flavors better so that artificially flavored things are more
irresistible than ever--potato chips, corn chips, etc. On the other hand, on
the fresh side, the scientists engineer the food so it is easier to ship and
can stay on the shelf longer, making it less flavorful. Bad confluence.

------
arthurgibson
The Salt,Sugar,Fat book is great. Sections on Coke's tactics to get everyone
hooked in 3rd world countries and the government cheese program are
disturbing.

------
tetraodonpuffer
due to some health issues that have me on an extremely low sodium (500mg/day
or less) no caffeine (including things like chocolate/cocoa) diet some years
back I had to switch to eating basically 100% unprocessed unseasoned food and
never eating out, it was quite amazing how at the beginning it felt that food
had nearly no taste, but nowadays many things that before required a lot of
seasoning have a lot of salty/sweet tastes of their own.

Lately for example I have found that corn can be nearly too sweet to eat, I
mean, plain steamed sweet corn, some varieties are extremely extremely sweet
to my tastebuds; when reading that every year corn is engineered to be sweeter
and sweeter I can definitely see why, it honestly tastes as sweet as ice-cream
did when I still ate it.

Plain carrots are fairly sweet tasting, some brands more than others, but a
lot more than I had expected; plain potatoes are salty, not too strong, but
definitely noticeable, things like clementines / tangerines / mandarins /
pomegranates taste way absolutely amazing, much much much better than any
dessert I had when I was still eating processed food.

As much as I theoretically now could eat oil and sugar (there was a period of
time where they really did not sit well with me) I honestly don't miss them,
especially the sugar / syrups which nowadays taste way way too strong.

I doubt anybody nowadays would want to eat 100% unprocessed as honestly it can
be a bit of a drag having to cook from scratch every meal starting from
unprocessed ingredients and not adding any salt etc., not to mention it
definitely will impact your career to not be able to go out to eat with
coworkers, but if you find yourself concerned about having to have a lot of
processed food for taste reasons, when you are on vacation it might be a
worthwhile investment for you to try to eat this way for a few weeks to
"reset" your tastebuds a bit.

It's amazing just how one can go from eating 5000mg of sodium a day and foods
tasting "normal" to 500mg and after a period of adaptation them tasting
"normal" as well, same deal for sugar.

(edit) and btw, as another interesting n=1 datapoint, although that was not
the reason for the low sodium, going from 5-6000mg/day to 400-500mg/day my bp
went from 135/85 to 105/65 over a few years, without really changing how I
felt, and without taking any medications, that was surprising as I always
thought that bp would not vary _that_ much just due to diet.

~~~
kuschku
Well, in my family we always cooked everything ourselves. Everything. No tin
can food, ever.

When my mum, due to medical condition, had to switch to low iodine diet, we
could just switch our salt we used, and it was easy to adapt.

But I can say, you’re right – I hate corn. Literally, I can’t deal with the
annoying sweetness of it. It’s horrible.

Carrots are the perfect level of sweetness, we used to grow them ourselves,
but don’t do that anymore.

But, still, doing this myself without having any medical need myself, I
obviously still add nutella to my pancakes, or so on.

To me it’s just surprising how many people in this thread don’t make their
food on their own. Even if you just boil a pot of potatoes and put some onions
in the frying pan in a bit of olive oil, you can quickly make some neat food.
Or scrambled eggs with Bratkartoffeln and bacon, or noodles with your own
sauce, and so on. Making your meals yourself is so easy, and quick.

I’m literally disgusted by the whole Soylent movement. NO! instead of spending
less time for food, just spend less time for work! Unionize, damn.

~~~
kaybe
Uhm, is Bratkartoffeln an English word now or is that just a slip? (Just
curios, I like those adapted words.. übercool.)

~~~
kuschku
I don’t know – I was just too lazy to translate it, and then I usually pretend
that the German word would be english. Most readers never notice anyway.

~~~
kaybe
Haha, true that. Grüße nach Kiel aus Heidelberg. :)

------
adamwong246
I do think this is an unfair characterization of food manufacturers. In a real
sense, they only make what WE want to eat. And we only buy, for the most part,
what we WANT to eat. So there's a arms race that's been building ever since
food became an industry. When one brand of bread adds sugar to their recipe,
consumers love it and all the other brands must follow suit. Breaking this
cycle will just as hard as breaking the industrial inertia towards fossil
fuels.

Opting out of this is hard, expensive and against our natural desires. Or, to
reiterate my other post, "Soylent, FTW."

~~~
Jtsummers
> they only make what WE want to eat

This is the same justification for every consumable. If people didn't want X,
companies wouldn't make X.

Calling companies out for increasing our _desire_ for their products,
especially when that desire goes against our better interests (mental and
physical health, in particular), is not unfair, it's smart. It gets people
thinking about what they're doing and why so they can make better decisions,
even when all the advertisement (obvious or not) is directing them away from
what they should be doing.

------
cowpig
> did his high math regression analysis thing, put the data in the computer,
> and out comes this bell shaped curve where the perfect amount of sweetness,
> not too little, not too much, is at the very top of the curve

What is High Math, exactly?

------
mrfusion
I bought scan of chili the other day. 16 grams of sugar! I was stunned.

------
adamwong246
Soylent, FTW

~~~
fluxquanta
Have they fixed their backlog issue? I canceled my order after they pushed the
delivery date back two months three separate times.

~~~
adamwong246
it's much much faster. It's not perfect but I usually get my soylent in about
a week.

------
wyldfire
On HN, "engineers" is usually a plural noun. This took a few re-reads to
parse.

~~~
dionidium
It's a Garden Path Sentence:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence)

------
swagv
Is it 2013 all over again?

This book is old news.

------
necessity
So they're guilty of making too good a product? Too tasty a food? lol

------
CharlesMerriam2
I'm not quite understanding this story on HackerNews. What platform does it
run on? How do I hack it?

~~~
DanBC
What do you think is on topic for HN? Why do you think that?

See dang's reply here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8348200](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8348200)

~~~
leereeves
I've seen people say they stopped visiting Hacker News because it includes so
much non-programming/startup content.

~~~
DanBC
Do you have any evidence that the ratio has changed?

~~~
leereeves
No, I'm not that interested. I like the non-programming/startup content.

But every post from the beginning is still available. It wouldn't be too hard
to write an app to research that question if you are.

A fairly recent archive:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10002791](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10002791)

