Authors: Michael Moss
T
he notion that some foods behave like narcotics goes back at least twenty years in scientific circles.
One of Breslin’s favorite papers was published in
1991, the same year as the saltshaker study. It was written by a professor of psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati named Stephen Woods, who compared eating to taking narcotics. Both, he wrote, pose a considerable challenge to the body’s fundamental goal of staying on an even keel. This balancing trick is known as homeostasis, and eating, like doing drugs, throws things out of whack. “Ultimately whatever you eat ends up in your blood, and our body wants the blood levels of everything—from carbon dioxide to oxygen to salt and potassium and lipids and glucose—to be constant,” Breslin said. “Probably our bodies would be happiest if we could never eat and just somehow magically be able to have some intravenous drip or something that would maintain those things constantly. When you eat, you’re pushing all kinds of stuff into your blood, which goes against the concept of homeostasis, so your body basically responds to that by saying, ‘Holy smokes, what are you doing to me? I have to deal with this now.’ You have to get yourself back to some constant homeostatic level. Insulin is one of the things you release to push sugar out of the blood and into the cells. This is exactly what happens when you take drugs. When you inject heroin into your body, your body says, ‘Holy cow, what have you done to me?’ It has to try and metabolize these things, and there’s all kinds of coping mechanisms for that.”
The blood gets especially besieged when processed food is ingested, flooding the system with its heavy loads of salt, sugar, and fat. But where the links between eating and drugs get really interesting is in the brain. There, narcotics and food—especially food that is high in salt, sugar, and fat—act much alike. Once ingested, they race along the same pathways, using the same neurological circuitry to reach the brain’s pleasure zones, those areas that reward us with enjoyable feelings for doing the right thing by our bodies. Or, as the case may be, for doing what the brain has been led to believe is the right thing.
One of the most intriguing accounts of salt’s effect on the brain appeared in a 2008 paper by researchers at the University of Iowa entitled, “Salt Craving: The Psychobiology of Pathogenic Sodium Intake.” In lay terms, this translates to the craving people get for salt at levels so high it
causes disease. The authors reviewed all the brain scanning and other scientific investigations that had been done on salt to date, and they concluded that salt could be lumped with other things in life that become problematic when overdone. Salt, the authors concluded, was similar in this way to “sex, voluntary exercise, fats, carbohydrates and chocolate, in its possessing addictive qualities.”
For obvious reasons, the word
addiction
is a particularly touchy subject among food manufacturers. They prefer saying a product is crave-able, likable, snack-able, or almost anything other than saying it is addictive. For them, the term
addiction
conjures images of strung-out junkies who hold up 7-Elevens at gunpoint for the money they need for another fix. Addiction also raises barbed legal issues that industry is loath to engage. In reality, processed food is so inexpensive and easy to procure that no one need rob a convenience store for a fix—never mind the fact that the convenience store itself, in this case, is the dealer of the fix.
In 2006 a law firm whose clients included both tobacco and food manufacturers produced a remarkable treatise on the legal fights the processed food industry might face if people tried to hold them accountable for the obesity epidemic. The authors conclude that the food industry overall is in good shape legally, that the strategy used in suing tobacco manufacturers wouldn’t work nearly as well on food manufacturers. But a large section of the report is devoted to the subject of addiction, and the authors labor to identify a strategy that companies could use to persuade a jury that food isn’t addictive. In the end, they don’t deny there are parallels between overeating and drug abuse. They argue, instead, that the word
addiction
traditionally has had defining qualities, such as the severely painful symptoms of withdrawal, that are not readily applicable to the desire for food. “Labeling the perceived overconsumption of chocolate, for example, as ‘chocolate addiction,’ even if this practice is associated with high levels of comfort (emotional) eating and somewhat unstable eating patterns, risks trivializing serious addictions,” they write.
Paul Breslin frames the question of addiction a little differently. When people abuse drugs long enough, he noted, the motivation to take more
drugs becomes less a matter of wanting the benefit of the drug—the high—and more a matter of wanting to avoid the awful feeling generated by the craving itself. Similarly, when people start feeling hungry, they are not seeking the primary benefit of food, the calories needed to keep them alive. Rather, they are responding to the body’s signal that it does not ever want to be put in the position of
needing
to eat. Most people in America never feel true hunger pain, the gut-wrenching result of being starved for nutrition. Consider how often people say they feel hungry during a single day, Breslin said.
“With few exceptions, we can go a day without food or water with no problems whatsoever. The body has enough calories. But people who fast for a day feel awful. Your body comes to expect that we will feed it, and it has all these mechanisms in place so if you don’t do it, then you start to feel awful. Ultimately you end up feeding yourself in order to feel okay.”
This notion that we eat not so much for pleasure as we do to ward off an awful feeling, reminded me of the work done by Howard Moskowitz, the legendary food scientist who engineered the new flavor for Dr Pepper. In the study he dubbed “Crave It,” he found that
people are drawn to foods that are heavily salty, sweet, or fatty for reasons other than hunger. They are drawn to these foods by emotional cues and the wish to avoid the lousy feeling that the body generates as a way to defend against starvation. The fear of hunger is deeply rooted, and food manufacturers know well how to push the buttons that evoke this fear. (A particularly stark example of this comes from the Mars company in promoting its Snickers candy bar, which won applause from the advertising industry with this slogan:
“Don’t let hunger happen to you.”)
As bad as the word
addiction
may be, however, the food industry has another problem when it comes to salt—one that could prove to be more problematic. In assessing the industry’s culpability for the epidemic of overeating, scientists have come up with evidence that the
manner
in which people have come to crave salt, rather than the craving itself, is far more damning.
As it turns out, the manufacturers of processed foods have been creating a desire for salt where none existed before.
Babies love sugar the instant they are born. Simple experiments have demonstrated this, by eliciting smiles with a droplet of sugary water. But babies do
not
like salt. They don’t like it at all until they are six months or more into their lives, and even then, they have to be coaxed.
This idea that salt is being pressed upon America’s kids comes from the scientists at Monell, who have been pushing hard to pinpoint the genesis of our taste for salt. They wanted to know what caused kids to like salt, if it wasn’t a natural thing for them to do. So they followed sixty-one children, starting at infancy. First, they surveyed their parents to learn how much salt the kids got in their diets, and the kids fell neatly into two camps: One group was eating what their parents ate, salty cereal and crackers and bread made by food manufacturers, while the other got baby foods that had little or no salt, like fresh fruits and vegetables.
Then the Monell researchers tested the kids to see if there was any difference in how much the two groups liked salt.
The results were published in 2012 in the
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
, and they kicked up quite a stir among regulators and food industry officials. To test the kids’ fondness for salt, the Monell investigators, led by Leslie Stein, gave them solutions of varying salinity to sip, starting when they were two months old. At that age, all the kids either rejected the salty solutions or were indifferent to them. At six months, however, when they were tested again, the kids split into two groups. Those who had been given fruit and vegetables to eat still preferred plain water to the salty solutions. But those who had been fed foods that were salty now liked the salty solutions.
Over time, the two groups—the salted and the unsalted—grew even more disparate. “Mothers reported that preschool-age children who had been introduced to starchy table food by six months of age were more likely to lick salt from the surface of foods,” the study said. “There was also a trend for these children to be more likely to eat plain salt.”
Of course, the kids didn’t have to resort to the shaker. By preschool, the salted kids were getting foods from throughout the grocery store that were loaded with salt—potato chips, bacon, soup, ham, hot dogs, French fries, pizza, crackers.
When the study was released, Gary Beauchamp, the center’s director and a co-author, talked about its significance. These were kids being studied, he stressed. Kids who were
not born
liking salt. They have to be taught to like the taste of salt, and when they are, salt has a deep and lasting effect on their eating habits.
“Our data would suggest that if one wants to reduce salt in the population as a whole,” Beauchamp said, “then it’s important to start early, because infants and children are very vulnerable.”
With this revelation, the industry’s heavy use of salt moves from the realm of merely satisfying America’s craving for salt to creating a craving where none exists.
A
s it happened, I wasn’t the only one who needed help from the experts at Monell to understand the powers of salt. In 2005, when Washington put a scare into the industry by urging people to slash their intake of salt to less than a teaspoon each day, some of the largest food companies convened a group they called the Salt Consortium to figure out a way to deal with this threat to their industry. The group kept its existence confidential for fear of generating unwanted attention, but I learned about it from food company officials who also divulged that they had chosen none other than Monell to gather the facts to help them out of their predicament.
The group’s goal was to learn precisely what made salt so alluring, so that they might find ways to reduce its presence in their products. As with sugar and fat, the industry has a strict bottom line on reducing salt: This effort can’t hurt their sales in any way. Their products, with less salt, have to be just as alluring as they are in full-salt mode.
But the more the industry looked at salt, the more it realized that the consumer was only part of the problem. The manufacturers themselves
were utterly, inexorably hooked on the stuff. Each year, food companies use an amount of salt that is every bit as staggering as it sounds:
5 billion pounds.
And that’s because, for them, the salty taste that drives people to keep eating popcorn until the bag is empty is just the start of salt’s powers.
Manufacturers view salt as perhaps the most magical of the three pillars of processed foods, for all the things it can do beyond exciting the taste buds. In the world of processed foods, salt is the great fixer. It corrects myriad problems that arise as a matter of course in the factory. Cornflakes, for example, taste metallic without it. Crackers are bitter and soggy and stick to the roof of your mouth. Ham turns so rubbery it can bounce. Some of salt’s power has nothing to do with the food at all. In commercial bread making, salt keeps the huge, fast-spinning machinery from gumming up and the factory line from backing up: Salt slows down the rising process so that the ovens can keep up with the pace.
Among all the miracles that salt performs for the processed food industry, perhaps the most essential involves a plague that the industry calls “warmed-over-flavor,” whose acronym, WOF, is pronounced something like the dog’s bark. WOF is caused by the oxidation of the fats in meat, which gives meat the taste of cardboard or, as some in the industry describe it, damp dog hair, when the meat is reheated after being precooked and added to soups or boxed meals. “Once warmed-over-flavor gets going, you are pretty well dead in the water,” said Susan Brewer, a professor of food science in the University of Illinois’s College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Science. “People can smell or taste it at very low levels. At my cafeteria, they will make a rib roast, and serve the leftovers the next day as roast beef sandwiches, and they taste nasty. That’s the warmed-over-flavor. People get very sensitive to its taste.”
This is where salt comes in. Once WOF sets in, salt becomes a convenient antidote for the processed food industry, which is heavily reliant on reheated meats. One of the most effective cures for WOF is an infusion of fresh spices, especially rosemary, which has antioxidants to counteract the meat’s deterioration. But fresh herbs are costly. So manufacturers more
typically make sure they have lots of salt in their formulas. The cardboard or dog-hair taste is still there, but it is overpowered by the salt.
To make matters worse for consumers, salt is not the only way that food manufacturers pump sodium into America’s bloodstream. Companies are adding sodium in the form of other food additives, completely aside from the salt they pour into their foods. They do this through the dozens of sodium-based compounds that are added to processed food to delay the onset of bacterial decay, to bind ingredients, and to blend mixtures that otherwise come unglued, like the protein and fat molecules in processed cheese. With names like sodium citrate, sodium phosphate, and sodium acid pyrophosphate, these compounds have become essential components in processed foods, making them look and taste attractive and last longer on the shelf. Together, these compounds contribute less sodium than salt, but the grocery store nonetheless has become filled with products dependent on them. The same Hungry Man turkey dinner that listed salt nine times among its various components also had nine other references to various sodium compounds.