Authors: Michael Moss
Nestlé also sells food for pets—Purina being yet another one of its Billionaire Brands—and its scientists have done compelling work on that front, too. Teaming up with researchers at Cargill, they corralled a group of compounds called isoflavones—derived from soy germ meal—into a new product called Fit & Trim. The aim is to make dogs more frisky or at least to speed up their metabolism enough to fight an emerging health crisis among canines.
“Obesity is not just for humans,” as Nestlé said in a report. “Up to 40 percent of dogs in developed countries are overweight or obese.”
The research center was all very impressive and state-of-the-art, down to the coffee bar with sleek machines serving Nespresso (the biggest Billionaire Brand of all), but ultimately it was disappointing. By the end of my visit, I came to realize that if Nestlé was going to save the world from obesity or any of the other ill effects of processed foods, it wasn’t going to be in our lifetimes. The food that people bought in the grocery store was so perfectly engineered to compel overconsumption that Nestlé’s scientists, for all their spectacular technology and deep knowledge of food science, were finding it impossible to come up with viable solutions.
Chief among the disappointments I saw at Nestlé was the quest to turn fiber into a cure for overeating. In its “digestion lab,” Nestlé has a refrigerator-sized masticator machine that simulates chewing and digesting—tubes running every which way and computer programming to replicate the gastrointestinal tracts of children, adults, even dogs. One of the lab’s scientists, Alfrun Erkner, walked me through their efforts to create the illusion of satiety, the sensation of feeling full. Nestlé has been laboring to create a yogurt that makes you feel full, with minimal calories. But to generate this feeling, the scientists have to stuff this yogurt with
so much fiber that even the masticator on its highest setting had trouble getting it down. “People want a magic bullet,” Erkner told me. “And it would
be nice if we had a pill that would let people eat as much as they want, without putting on weight. But that’s not what we can do.”
Nestlé had also stumbled in pursuing an even more coveted industry holy grail—a food that would cause you to
lose
weight, not just avoid getting fat. It was a drink called Enviga, and it was produced in collaboration with another formidable player in processed foods, Coca-Cola. Released in 2007, Enviga combined green tea, caffeine, and two artificial sweeteners and was billed, on its label, as a
“calorie burner.” The more Enviga you drank, the more weight you would lose. In fact, the drink was a sitting duck for the activist lawyers at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
They took one look at the underlying science and hauled Nestlé and Coca-Cola to court for deceptive business practices. Using Nestlé’s own data, the consumer group estimated that you would need to drink nearly 180 cans in order to lose one pound. And that was the best-case scenario. Some of the people in the study actually burned calories
more slowly
after drinking Enviga, which would appear to cause them to
gain
weight, not lose it.
An outcry arose from nutrition experts, sales collapsed, and in 2009 Nestlé and Coke settled a separate advertising case brought by two dozen states by agreeing to halt any weight-loss claims. Two years later, Nestlé officials were still sheepish about that venture, although they maintained that, technically speaking, in the best circumstances, the drink
did
speed up the human metabolism, if only a little. “We were a bit premature on Enviga,” the company’s chief technology officer, Werner Bauer, told me. “We should have first discussed, more publicly, the concept of energy burning. We put it on the market almost as a surprise. People didn’t believe it.”
As challenging as the science of nutrition might be, the future of salt, sugar, and fat in Nestlé’s hands started looking disconcerting when I moved further down the shore of Lake Geneva, to the town of Vevey, where Nestlé has its corporate headquarters. On clear days, the lobby frames the spectacular lake with the majestic Alps in the background, and a grand staircase rises through the building in a double-helix shape, like a
strand of DNA. Here, Nestlé was not waiting for its researchers to cue up another miracle drink or fibrous wonder. It was hard at work contradicting itself on the most critical issue of all: obesity.
Here, Nestlé was marketing food products that fatten us up—and then selling other food products that treat those of us who go too far.
On one side of the spectrum, Nestlé was churning out epic quantities of a food that was
arguably one of the unhealthiest items in the grocery store—and a major contributor to the obesity epidemic. It’s a frozen, microwavable snack called the Hot Pocket, which Nestlé acquired in 2002 for $2.6 billion and now counts as a prestigious member of its
Billionaire Brands Treasury. In its promotional literature, Nestlé describes the Hot Pocket as a “fully enrobed sandwich that allows you to eat on the go with no mess!” But it’s food on the go that comes with a price. The Pepperoni & Three Cheese Calzone version of the Hot Pocket that I picked up at my local grocery store, for instance, contained well over one hundred ingredients, including salt, sugar, and fat in several configurations along with six permutations of cheese, from “imitation mozzarella” to “imitation cheddar.” A single, eight-ounce calzone delivered 10 grams of saturated fat and 1,500 milligrams of sodium—close to my daily limit for each. It also had nearly six teaspoons of sugar, 600 calories, and, for the retailer’s convenience, enough preservatives for a shelf life of 420 days.
*
Nestlé, in response to my questions, said it had acquired Hot Pockets to meet the needs of millennials, especially young males, “as they led the way towards more casual, less formal meals”; that it was improving the product’s nutritional profile and planned to discontinue the calzone; and that it now offered a dozen versions of its alternative brand, Lean Pockets, with whole grain crusts and lighter loads of salt, sugar, and fat.
But on the other end of the spectrum, Nestlé was busy covering its bases in a way not even I could have imagined. In 2007, the company acquired the medical nutrition business developed by the pharmaceutical
firm Novartis, giving Nestlé the means to pursue a solution to one of the grimmest aspects of overeating.
Every year, two hundred thousand obese people in the United States—including kids as young as nine—have their stomachs surgically shrunk to help them cut back on eating. Known as gastric bypass surgery, the procedure itself has inherent surgical risks, but the darkest aspect comes later, when the patients are back home—and find, of course, that the cravings for the rich processed foods that led them to overeat in the first place have not gone away. In the most dire cases, people keep eating so much they burst the surgical bands and require emergency care. But even under the best circumstances, they struggle to get enough of the nutrients we need to survive.
This is where Nestlé comes in. It has begun marketing a line of liquid foods, including a product called Peptamen, which is ingested through a tube, and another, called Optifast, that the surgical patients can drink in coping with their smaller stomachs.
“Many of these people are malnourished,” said Hilary Green, a Nestlé scientist. “Their nutrients are not balanced. And they crave food. By nature, they tend to be more hungry, more often. So the challenge is satisfying that without burdening the stomach.”
On my last day at Nestlé, I had lunch with the president of the company’s new health science unit, Luis Cantarell. We started off talking about the lack of obesity in Switzerland, which he attributed in part to the country’s fondness for outdoor activity, which segued into a discussion about his own personal strategy to stay fit: He resists eating too much pasta, works hard on getting more vegetables, never has meat in the evening, and prefers fish as a source of protein. He told me that
the only indulgence he permits himself is a glass of wine.
Quickly, however, our conversation turned to the company’s line of formula foods for overeaters, like Peptamen. As bleak as these products might seem, Cantarell said, they are paving the way for a grand merging of food and pharmacy in the not-too-distant future. He envisions—quite excitedly—the prospect of drug-like foods, or food-like drugs, that could upend the traditional approach to medical care, in which expensive drugs are used to treat the scourges of overeating: diabetes, obesity, high blood
pressure. “Health care costs are going through the roof, and pharmacological drugs are not the most efficient solutions for chronic medical diseases,” he said. “We have the possibility of developing personalized nutrition in a scientific approach, using clinical trials and all the things pharma people do when it comes to developing drugs. Nestlé, with its long tradition, could be an actor in breaking the paradigm.”
O
n my way back to the airport in Geneva, I couldn’t shake the image of teenagers gorging on Hot Pockets, only to end up drinking Peptamen through a tube for the rest of their lives. But to be fair, Nestlé had taken some bold steps to reduce the loads of salt, sugar, and fat across its portfolio of foods. Additionally, like other manufacturers, it sold slimmed-down, lower-salt, lower-fat versions of its mainline products, for people with the discipline to curb their intake of calories. Even at that, however, Nestlé is not the World Health Organization—which, as it happens, is headquartered just down the road in Geneva. It’s a company, doing what companies do: making money.
It had taken me three and a half years of prying into the food industry’s operations to come to terms with the full range of institutional forces that compel even the best companies to churn out foods that undermine a healthy diet. Most critical, of course, is the deep dependence the industry has on salt, sugar, and fat. Almost every one of the hundreds of people I interviewed in the course of writing this book—bench chemists, nutrition scientists, behavioral biologists, food technicians, marketing executives, package designers, chief executives, lobbyists—made the point that companies won’t be giving these three up, in any real way, without a major fight. Salt, sugar, and fat are the foundation of processed food, and the overriding question the companies have in determining the formulations of their products is how much they need of each to achieve the maximum allure.
It’s simply not in the nature of these companies to care about the consumer
in an empathetic way. They are preoccupied with other matters, like crushing their rivals, beating them to the punch. The most amazing thing about the secret 1999 meeting of food company CEOs to discuss obesity was that they got together at all. The grocery store, after all, is littered with the results of their war to outsell one another by arming their products with more salt, sugar, and fat. Witness what happened when Post started coating its cereal with sugar: Rivals came out with versions that went as high as 70 percent. Or look at what happened when Hershey introduced its mega-chocolate cookie in 2003: Kraft responded by rolling out a slew of fattier, sweeter Oreos.
Besides being fiercely competitive, food companies are also deeply obligated toward their shareholders. When companies like Campbell say they will not compromise on taste in lowering the salt, sugar, or fat content of their products, they’re not thinking about the consumer’s welfare; they’re thinking about consumption and sales. As well they should, if they’re going to survive. Making money is the sole reason they exist—or so says Wall Street, which is there, at every turn, to remind them of this. Indeed, some experts believe that Wall Street was one of the chief causes of the obesity epidemic when, in the early 1980s, investors shifted their money from stodgy blue chip companies to the high-flying technology industry and other sectors that promised quicker returns.
“This put special pressures on food companies,” said Marion Nestle, author and former nutrition advisor in the Department of Health and Human Services. “They were already trying to sell their products in an environment in which there were twice as many calories as anybody needed. Now, they had to grow their profits every ninety days. The result was that food companies had to seek new ways to market their foods. And they did that by making larger portions, by making food available absolutely everywhere, by making food as convenient as it could be, and by creating a social environment in which it was okay to eat all day long, in more places, in larger portions.”
There is one final factor in the food industry’s single-minded pursuit of sales above consumer welfare. In the heat of competition, they look past the health impact of their products. The soda industry has been particularly
adept in the department of willful blindness. In 2012, I invited myself to
its annual confab with Wall Street investors, where the main topic was the ongoing downturn in sales of soda and how companies were mitigating this by promoting other drinks. Among the new drinks generating excitement: Pure Leaf, a healthy-sounding tea with four teaspoons of sugar per serving; and Crave, a chocolate milk with ten teaspoons of sugar per serving, along with a half-day’s quotient of saturated fat. The meeting started off with the chief financial officer of the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Martin Ellen, who was asked about New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposal to ban the sale of mega-sized soft drinks, which he had labeled a menace to public health. Ellen drew laughs when he started off by calling the initiative “
Your
mayor’s proposal”—the hundred or so attendees knew that his company was based in Texas, where no one elected to office would dream of floating such an idea. “If we put aside the matter of choice, and the government’s role in our lives, and focus just on the issue of obesity and the soft drink industry, the data doesn’t support it,” he continued. “Ninety-three percent of our caloric intake comes from foods and drinks other than sugary beverages. And while the industry has been making some inroads over the years, obesity has been going up. Less soft drinks are being consumed, but we are not getting healthier. It is unfair to demonize this industry.”