Authors: Michael Moss
We don’t even have to eat sugar to feel its allure. Pizza will do, or any other refined starch, which the body converts to sugar—starting right in the mouth, with an enzyme called amylase. “The faster the starch becomes sugar, the quicker our brain gets the reward for it,” Reed said. “We like the highly refined things because they bring us immediate pleasure, associated with high sugar, but obviously there are consequences. It’s sort of like if you drink alcohol really fast, you get drunk really fast. When you break down sugar really fast your body gets flooded with sugar more than it can handle, whereas with a whole grain it is more gradual and you can digest it in a more orderly fashion.”
In the testing that Mennella conducted to calculate Tatyana’s bliss point for sugar, the six-year-old worked her way through two dozen puddings, each prepared to a different level of sweetness. The puddings were presented to her in pairs, from which she would choose the one she liked more. Each of her choices dictated what pudding pair would come next, and slowly Tatyana moved toward the level of sweetness she preferred most of all. When Mennella got the results, it was plain to see that there was no way Tatyana would ever have fed Big Bird a twig of broccoli over a Krimpet,
a Kreamie, or anything else from the TastyKake line. Tatyana’s bliss point for the pudding was 24 percent sugar, twice the level of sweetness that most adults can handle in pudding. As far as children go, she was on the lower side; some go as high as 36 percent.
“What we find is that the foods that are targeted to children, the cereals and the beverages, they are way up,” Mennella said. “Tatyana’s favorite cereal is Cinnamon Crunch, and what we’ll do, we’ll measure the level of sweetness that the child prefers in the laboratory with a sucrose solution and it matches the sugar content of the most preferred cereal. There are individual differences, but as a group, in every culture that has been studied around the world, children prefer more intense sweetness than adults.”
Beyond the basic biology, there are three other aspects of sugar that seem to make it attractive to children, Mennella said. One, the sweet taste is their signal for foods that are rich in energy, and since kids are growing so fast, their bodies crave foods that provide quick fuel. Two, as humans, we didn’t evolve in an environment that had lots of intensely sweet foods, which probably heightens the excitement we feel when we eat sugar. And finally, sugar makes children feel good. “It’s an analgesic,” Mennella said. “It will reduce crying in a newborn baby. A young child can keep their hand in a cold water bath longer if a sweet taste is in their mouth.”
These are huge, powerful concepts—concepts that are crucial to understanding why so much of the grocery store food is sweet, and why we feel so drawn to sugar. We need energy, and Cinnamon Crunch delivers it quickly. We’ve been intimate with sweet taste since we were born, and yet our ancestors had nothing as thrilling as Coke. Sugar will even make us feel better, and who doesn’t want that?
Mennella has become convinced that our bliss point for sugar—and all foods, for that matter—is shaped by our earliest experiences. But as babies grow into youngsters, the opportunity for food companies to influence our taste grows as well. For Mennella, this is troubling. It’s not that food companies are teaching children to like sweetness; rather, they are teaching children what foods should taste like. And increasingly, this curriculum has been all about sugar.
“What basic research and taste in children is shedding light on—and why the foods that they’re making for children are so high in sugar and salt—is they are manipulating or exploiting the biology of the child,” she said. “I think that anyone who makes a product for a child has to take responsibility because what they are doing is teaching the child the level of sweetness or saltiness the food should be.
“They’re not just providing a source of calories for a child,” she added. “They’re impacting the
health
of that child.”
T
his much is clear from the research at Monell: People love sugar, especially kids. And up to a certain point—the bliss point—the more sugar there is, the better.
We may not yet know all the twists and turns that sugar takes in racing from our mouths to our brains, but the end results are not in dispute. Sugar has few peers in its ability to create cravings, and as the public gradually came to understand this power, sugar turned into a political problem for the manufacturers of processed food—a problem for which they would turn, once again, to Monell for help.
The money that the big food companies give to Monell accords them one special privilege: These corporate sponsors can ask the center’s scientists to conduct special studies just for them. A dozen times or so each year, companies bring vexing problems to Monell, like why the texture of starch is perceived so differently by people, or what causes the terrible aftertaste in infant formula, and Monell’s scientists will put their PhD brains to work in solving these puzzles. In the 1980s, however, a group of Monell funders asked for help with a more pressing matter: They needed assistance in defending themselves from public attack.
Sugar was coming under heavy fire from several directions. The Food and Drug Administration had taken it up as part of an effort to examine the safety of all food additives. The report it commissioned didn’t recommend regulatory action, but it did contain several warnings: Dental decay
was rampant, sugar was possibly tied to heart disease, and consumers had all but lost control of its use. Getting rid of the sugar bowl at home would barely help to cut back on consumption, the report said, as more than two-thirds of the sugar in America’s diet was now coming from processed foods.
At the same time, a select committee of U.S. senators—including George McGovern, Bob Dole, Walter Mondale, Ted Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey—caused a stir by releasing the federal government’s first official guideline on how Americans should shape their diet. The committee had started out looking at hunger and poverty but quickly turned its attention to heart disease and other illnesses that experts were linking to diet.
“I testified that Americans should eat less food; less meat; less fat, particularly saturated fat; less cholesterol; less sugar; more unsaturated fat, fruits, vegetables and cereal products,” an adviser to the Agriculture Department, Mark Hegsted, wrote in an account of the proceedings.
On top of that, Michael Jacobson, an MIT-trained protégé of the consumer advocacy superstar Ralph Nader, was lighting a fire under the Federal Trade Commission. Jacobson’s group, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, had gathered twelve thousand signatures from health professionals in urging the agency to ban the advertising of sugary foods on children’s television.
The headlines from these and other attacks on the processed food industry had led to a surge in consumer awareness and concern. A federal survey found that three in four shoppers were reading and acting on the nutritional information provided on labels; half of these consumers said that they studied the labels to avoid certain additives, including salt, sugar, fats, and artificial colors. Even more troubling than that for the processed food industry, there was a growing public sentiment that its use of sugar, as well as colors, flavors, and other additives, was causing hyperactivity in children and overeating by adults.
“It was coming from the general public, and there are always voices, activist voices, that say this is fact, that sugar causes over-activity,” recalled Al Clausi, who retired in 1987 as a senior vice president and chief research officer for General Foods. “That was one
of the folklore. That and flavors make you eat more of something that otherwise you wouldn’t.” With Clausi as the leader, officials from Kellogg and General Mills formed a group called the Flavor Benefits Committee, and they asked Monell to conduct research that would help quiet the nay-sayers, putting sugar and other food additives in a more favorable light by emphasizing their nutritional benefits.
Monell was an obvious choice for the industry. With limited funds from the government, the center had begun soliciting monies from food companies, keeping them apprised of research that would interest them. In a 1978 letter to Clausi, Monell’s former director, Morley Kare, thanked General Foods for its latest check and suggested that center scientists conduct a seminar for product developers at the company. “We currently are emphasizing the growth of our program on taste and nutrition,” Kare wrote. “A study with adolescents is being planned, focusing on their desire for high concentrations of sweeteners, saltiness and, evidently, the flavor and texture of fat.”
By 1985, there were nine scientists at the center working on the industry’s Flavor Benefits project, and some of their findings were things the industry could relish only in private. One discovery would have been a morale booster in food company labs where technicians had qualms about their employers’ heavy reliance on sugar: Monell helped to establish that sugar is inherently loved by newborn babies. This enabled companies to argue, at least, that sugar was not something “artificial” they were thrusting upon an unsuspecting public. Rather, sugar was sinless, if not entirely wholesome. “Sweet was very important to us,” Clausi said. “And when Monell found that of all the basic flavors, sweet is the only one a neonate shows a preference for, that said to us, ‘Hey, there is something
natural
we are dealing with. This is not something we created out of whole cloth.’ ”
Monell, on behalf of the food manufacturers, also dug into the question of whether sugar causes people to overeat, and in this area the scientists made some troubling discoveries. For instance, it wasn’t enough for food to have an attractive taste, they found. To be really enticing, these products had to be loaded with sugar and fat. Only these two ingredients,
along with salt, seemed to have the power to excite the brain about eating. With this in mind, Monell turned to an item on the grocery shelf that was starting to have perhaps more impact on the American diet than anything else the food industry sold: soda, which people were starting to drink in unprecedented amounts.
Much of the work on soda at Monell was undertaken by one of the center’s brightest scientists, Michael Tordoff, who had earned his doctoral degree at the University of California at Los Angeles in one of science’s most challenging disciplines, a division of behavioral science called physiological psychology. (This is the field of research that looks at things like the role of the hippocampus in learning and memory.) Tordoff had already shown that he was capable of work that could open some interesting doors for the food industry. With a colleague, he invented a sweet compound dubbed Charmitrol, which could work in opposite ways, both of them potentially lucrative. The animal studies he performed indicated that the compound could cause people to eat larger amounts of food. Or, applied differently, it could cause them to eat less. “It made fat rats thin and thin rats fat,” he told me. Two companies licensed the substance from Monell but turned up neurological hazards that nixed its commercial utility.
In turning to soda, Tordoff wanted to examine how soda might affect the appetite, and right off the bat he made a startling discovery. Sweetened drinks made his rats
more
hungry, not less. At first, this appeared to indict diet sodas, because he had used saccharine, the artificial sweetener, instead of sugar to sweeten the drinks. He got the same result when he used gum sweetened with saccharine. But then he turned to testing people, and this time he used regular soda made with high-fructose corn syrup.
In the fall of 1987, Tordoff recruited thirty people from nearby universities. They were all screened for obvious disqualifications—like if they were pregnant or dieting—and then they were put to work. Each week, for nine weeks, the thirty participants came to Monell to be questioned and weighed and were sent home with twenty-eight bottles of soda that had been specially crafted for this experiment by two of Monell’s corporate
sponsors, with instructions to keep careful track of what they drank. Experiments like this face a significant challenge: The scientists must rely on ordinary people to be very scientific, and people are people. They forget, they fudge, they obfuscate, all of which messes with the results. To boost their compliance—and forthrightness—the participants were told, “We could determine what you have eaten from analysis of urine samples,” which was actually untrue in this trial, the published study noted.
Monell doled out five thousand bottles of the specially formulated sodas, in three distinct phases.
“For three weeks we gave them nothing,” Tordoff said. “Three weeks they got 40 ounces a day of diet soda. And for three weeks they got 40 ounces a day of regular soda.” The diet soda turned out to be something of a wash, or at best a small help in losing weight. Men lost about a quarter pound when drinking the diet soda. For women, there was no statistically significant change.
The most significant finding came with the regular soda, which was sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup. With regular soda, both sexes gained weight: an average of nearly a pound and a half in just three weeks. At that rate, a person would put on 26 pounds in a year. “It might have been a big relief for the diet soda industry, but it was not good news for the makers of corn syrup,” Tordoff said. (Or for table sugar, since most nutrition experts agree that when it comes to gaining weight, there appears to be little difference between sweeteners derived from corn and those drawn from cane or beets.)
This was one of the first studies to establish that sugary soda was likely a heavy contributor to obesity, which was just beginning to surge into the epidemic it is today. Until then, scientists had surmised this might be the case but lacked proof. Just like Brooklyn professor Sclafani’s studies two decades earlier had shown that sugary foods would compel rats to overeat, Tordoff’s experiment emboldened other scientists to look more closely at the effects that sweet drinks can have on one’s appetite. Julie Mennella says that one of the big risks in letting children drink soda is that it leads them to expect—and want—more sweetness in all of their drinks. In her view, soda has moved the bliss point higher across the spectrum of
drinks—from vitamin waters to sport ades—that is gaining popularity even as soda consumption begins to taper off. “There is no evidence that this is going to affect the level of sweetness they like in a pudding,” she said. “But it teaches children that hey, when you drink a carbonated beverage, this is how sweet it should be.”