Big Food and the One-Two Punch

Recent posts have looked at years of accumulated evidence that at least some individuals, in some segments of the food industry, have possessed full awareness and intention when it came to making their products more capable of grabbing a person on a physical dependency level. Before they got hooked on some snack or bevvy, most people never even knew it was possible. Even those who admitted the possibility were not able to avoid or escape a condition that very much resembled addiction.

But which kind? The two main contenders are substance addiction and behavioral addiction. Unlike some other influencers, who specialize in only one type, Big Food not only produces the substance but helps to form and mold the behavior. The industry learned that people who want to be pretty and popular, and that includes minor children and teens, will drink whatever the advertising specialists tell them to drink.

In “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food” Michael Moss dissected a report written by psychologist Ernest Dichter, way back in 1957, in aid of helping Frito-Lay sell more potato chips. Dichter is quoted here:

While people like and enjoy potato chips, they feel guilty about liking them… Unconsciously, people expect to be punished for “letting themselves go” and enjoying them.

And then Moss goes on to say:

Dichter listed seven “fears and resistances” to the chips: “You can’t stop eating them; they’re fattening; they’re not good for you; they’re greasy and messy to eat; they’re too expensive; it’s hard to store the leftovers; and they’re bad for children.” He spent the rest of his memo laying out his prescriptions, which in time would become widely used not just by Frito-Lay but also by the entire industry.

It is obvious why, to sell potato chips, a company needs a psychologist on board. He explained to the executives that the potential customers were anxious about losing control. (Spoiler alert: this was a euphemism, a roundabout way of saying they were afraid of getting hooked.)

Dichter suggested — drum roll, please — smaller packages! This would subliminally convince the customer, “See? Just a few harmless little tater fragments here. Nothing to be concerned about.” And then the customer’s subconscious accepts that rationalization. Apparently, common sense does not step in to say, “That’s ridiculous, because after snarfing down the first package, you can just go ahead and buy a second package.” Sometimes the subconscious is not as smart as we might wish.

Psychologists are sensitive to the nuances of language. Instead of “fried,” he directed them to describe the chips as toasted. For some convoluted mental/emotional reason, that sold more chips too.

Fast forward to 2011

In that year, a study was published that included more than 120,000 adult subjects of both sexes. Researchers virtually stalked these people back as far as 1986. Every four years, the average adult gains just over three pounds, and that tends to add up noticeably. Moss related how…

[…] the top contributors to weight gain included red meat and processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages and potatoes, including mashed and French fries. But the largest weight-inducing food was the potato chip…

“The starch is readily absorbed,” Eric Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the study’s authors, told me. “More quickly even than a similar amount of sugar. The starch, in turn, causes the glucose levels in the blood to spike” — which can result in a craving for more.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food,” NYTimes.com, 02/20/13
Image by Kojach/CC BY 2.0

They Knew It Was Bad

Corporations do bad things, like purposely trying to enhance the addictive features of their products. Having learned that they can get away with just about anything, they no longer try as hard to conceal their misdeeds. But some pretenses remain strong.

The high officials in companies acknowledge their profession as a game, or a war; and tell people, including themselves, that they are challenging and battling each other. Maybe they honestly believe it. In reality, if the food business is a game, we the customers are the pawns. If it is a war, we the consumers are the casualties.

Bigwigs got each other’s backs

In “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food” Michael Moss described how, in the 1980s, at least one Frito-Lay executive openly said that “people get addicted to salt.” Remember Howard Moskowitz, who discovered the “bliss point“? Well, in 1968, along came cravings expert Dwight Riskey, and the industry was there for it. Moss wrote,

He had also done work on the bliss point, showing how a product’s allure is contextual, shaped partly by the other foods a person is eating, and that it changes as people age.

It’s that pesky multifactorialism again! As soon as you think you got something pinned down, along comes a variable and messes everything up. On the bright side, this was the type of data a company needed, in order to figure out that they should put more energy into hooking younger customers, because the older generation was dying off. Tomorrow’s young people are not going to like the same products that today’s mature adults like. So take that into consideration, when building tomorrow’s factories, workforces and investment strategies.

Vanishing caloric density

The executives knew what to do, and kicked it into gear. Moss notes that Frito-Lay alone had a staff of 500 highly trained technicians, psychologists and chemists. They had scent experts, crunchicians, and mouth-feel-ologists. They spent $30 million a year on projects like the invention of the artificial mouth machine “to test and perfect the chips, discovering things like the perfect break point: people like a chip that snaps with about four pounds of pressure per square inch.”

Moss also quotes from the book published for industry bosses by food scientist Steven Witherly. In Why Humans Like Junk Food, he praised a particular snack as a “marvelously constructed food,” and specified particular features to prove his case:

But the one he focused on most was the puff’s uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density,” Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it… you can just keep eating it forever.”

So, goodbye to any misplaced belief in the notion that brains are smart!

Source: “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food,” NYTimes.com, 02/20/13
Image by Montgomery County/CC BY-SA 2.0

One Food Addiction Factor, Continued Yet Again

That one factor is the industry’s way of purposefully engineering food to be addictive, or “addictive.” Quotation marks are appropriate, but it is also okay not to use them. Experts are still trying to figure it out, because the subject of this series of posts is: how to even know what people are talking about when using those words.

Is food addictive in the same sense as heroin and cocaine? Or in some other way? Or in more than one way? And if so, what are the government, the medical establishment, the businesses, and the people supposed to do about it?

Picking up from last time

These particular miscreants, the captains of Big Food — as described by Michael Moss in an impressive 2013 article — have dirt on their hands either way. If pathological overeating is a substance addiction, they manufacture the substance, and even tinker with it to make it more addictive. If pathological overeating is a behavioral addiction, they spend unimaginable fortunes to convince people to behave in a specific way, i.e., buy the stuff.

So it is pretty important to wonder if the industry really does addict people on purpose, because that is a gangster move, with the word not being meant in any hip, positive sense. Does a cartel knowingly lure millions of people to a life of obesity, sub-optimal health, and yes, maybe even addiction? Because if so, shouldn’t we be aware of the extent of the wrongness, and maybe think about what could be done to change the prognosis?

Self-justification

In “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food” Moss conveyed the attitude shared by most executives, which we will paraphrase here: The consumer is king, it’s our job to sell them what they want. When they walk out of the store with a bag of chips, it’s not as if we held a gun to their head. A corporation has a responsibility to its shareholders. Commerce is a tough game, and sometimes parties have to compromise to get along. One company officer gave the reporter this pragmatic quotation: “And I do believe it’s easy to rationalize anything.”

Ramping up the uses of psychology

A corollary of the “consumer is king” rule is that kids are consumers, so their roles, as princes and princesses, must be brought to the fore, strengthened, and utilized. Moss recounts the legendary saga of how, back in 1999, the promoters of one product found the key by offering plenty of choices. Moss wrote,

In what would prove to be their greatest achievement of all, the Lunchables team would delve into adolescent psychology to discover that it wasn’t the food in the trays that excited the kids; it was the feeling of power it brought to their lives. As Bob Eckert, then the C.E.O. of Kraft, put it: “Lunchables aren’t about lunch. It’s about kids being able to put together what they want to eat, anytime, anywhere.”

And for the younger crowd, there was a customized strategy:

Saturday-morning cartoons started carrying an ad that offered a different message: “All day, you gotta do what they say,” the ads said. “But lunchtime is all yours.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food,” NYTimes.com, 02/20/13
Image by Donnie Ray Jones/CC BY 2.0

One Food Addiction Factor, Continued Twice

We were talking about a very comprehensive New York Times piece that blew the lid off a few mysteries. In the course of four years’ research, Michael Moss listened to a massive number of sources with firsthand knowledge of how Big Food operates. What he found was a conscious effort “to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive.” Coincidentally, most of those products also happen to be nutritionally void or close to it; and are consciously engineered to encourage abuse.

In “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food” Moss reported on a top-level meeting of Big Food bigwigs, where sensitive matters were discussed. In reporting on it later, he was “struck by how prescient the organizers of the sit-down had been.” They were well aware that public concern about childhood obesity was coming at them like an asteroid hurtling toward a planet. The industry’s top echelon saw the future, and chose not to care.

The writer stops short of claiming that consumers are powerless, but they are “extremely vulnerable to the intensity of these companies’ industrial formulations and selling campaigns.” He indicts labs, marketing meetings, and retail grocery outlets:

I talked to more than 300 people in or formerly employed by the processed-food industry, from scientists to marketers to C.E.O.’s. Some were willing whistle-blowers, while others spoke reluctantly when presented with some of the thousands of pages of secret memos that I obtained from inside the food industry’s operations.

A particularly revelatory and pertinent story was that of Howard Moskowitz, a consultant with a degree in experimental psychology, and wizard-like capabilities in product optimization. He had learned a lot from studying soldiers on behalf of the U.S. government, which needed to provide tons of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) in cans for soldiers in the field. Moskowitz told the interviewer,

They liked flavorful foods like turkey tetrazzini, but only at first; they quickly grew tired of them. On the other hand, mundane foods like white bread would never get them too excited, but they could eat lots and lots of it without feeling they’d had enough.

The writer went back to commenting on his subject:

Moskowitz’s data […] is tremendously fine-grained, showing how different people and groups of people feel about a strong vanilla taste versus weak, various aspects of aroma and the powerful sensory force that food scientists call “mouth feel.”

The researcher also specialized in every other possible oral sensation, including dryness, gumminess, and moisture release. Then, there is weird stuff in people’s heads. They love Dr Pepper’s distinctive flavor, for instance, but too much of it colors the drink a little darker, and that seems to be off-putting. All this is related to sensory-specific satiety — “the tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which responds by depressing your desire to have more.”

Sensory-specific satiety also became a guiding principle for the processed-food industry. The biggest hits — be they Coca-Cola or Doritos — owe their success to complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating.

Let’s not forget to give Moskowitz the credit for discovering the “bliss point” — the proportion of sugar in any recipe, at which the consumer will start saying “yech.” He showed the reporter how his computer compiles every possible combination of variables in a product, and from that information, devises precise experimental batches. Then, focus groups of humans are recruited to taste the range of offerings.

Of course, not everything that can be done should be done. Human oversight is necessary to prevent the creation of a formula that is 80% salt, for example. Moscowitz engineered Prego spaghetti sauce into a stellar market position by loading it up with plenty of salt, and so much sugar, a person might as well just go ahead and serve Oreos instead.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food,” NYTimes.com, 02/20/13
Image by Andrew Dobos/CC BY 2.0

One Food Addiction Factor, Continued

The last post introduced Dr. Gene-Jack Wang, who in 2010 expressed some very pessimistic and prophetic thoughts about the trend toward purposefully making food more addictive. A couple of years later, The New York Times published a piece by Michael Moss, titled “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food.” The reporter, Michael Moss, had obtained quite a bit of detailed information about a private meeting of 11 bonus-level executives from Nestlé, Kraft, Nabisco, General Mills, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Mars — the usual suspects. Moss wrote,

Their stature was defined by their skill in fighting one another for what they called “stomach share” — the amount of digestive space that any one company’s brand can grab from the competition.

But on this occasion the big guys laid down their differences and put their heads together to hash out what was becoming a high-stakes pain in the posterior for them all. It was a single-item agenda — how to deal with the emerging obesity epidemic.

They were catching heat from all directions. Everybody was on their case — university researchers, the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, segments of the public, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and even, to their dismay, the agriculture secretary, who had previously been a standup guy.

Jumping the track

There were rumors of a sugar tax and other notions that were anathema to Big Food. To even discuss possible alleviations would involve the bigwigs in talks about technical aspects of production about which they knew little and cared less. Still, the room did contain an outlier or two. A Kraft vice president showed over a hundred slides detailing current obesity statistics. Moss was blown away, remarking, “The meeting was remarkable, first, for the insider admissions of guilt.”

More surprises came from James Behnke, a high-ranking officer at Pillsbury. Lately, he had been hanging out with food-science experts who had nothing good to say, and who painted…

[…] an increasingly grim picture of the public’s ability to cope with the industry’s formulations — from the body’s fragile controls on overeating to the hidden power of some processed foods to make people feel hungrier still.

He was creeped out by pictures of children with obesity-related diseases that they really should not know anything about at their tender age. Behnke and a few others high up in the chain of command had the uneasy feeling that maybe the products they created and sold might be just a bit much.

Some of the execs felt the industry should admit that things could be better, and advocated using the talents of their own and other scientists to “gain a deeper understanding of what was driving Americans to overeat.” It sounded good, and starting a plethora of research projects would at least buy them some time. Also, it was decided that to improve the optics of the situation, the advertising wing of the industry should gin up some kind of formalized recognition of the importance of nutritional information.

But other captains of industry put very little credence in the consumers’ alleged desire for better nutrition information, or even better ingredients. They professed to believe that customers only want stuff that tastes good, and besides, the dummies don’t care what’s in it. In the area of improving public image and information, things kind of fell apart.

(To be continued…)

Source: “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food,” NYTimes.com, 02/20/13
Image by Boston Public Library/CC BY 2.0

One Food Addiction Factor

The goal here is to tease out a few of the complications and nuances involved in defining what people call food addiction (FA). In some cases, they themselves may not even have a very clear picture of what they mean by that phrase. Or they might believe two opposite things at the same time, a phenomenon called cognitive dissonance that appears to be increasing daily.

It seems important to mention these details, especially in an area where the empowered deciders might pass legislation about difficulties that legislation can’t fix, wasting a lot of everybody’s time and money, while worsening the health situation of the entire populace.

In this particular discussion, we have given the example of two possible models — looking at FA as substance addiction, or as a behavioral addiction. But the possibilities do not end at two. What happens when calculations include the society in which these factors are embedded, and which supports them? What if, for instance, the only food available contains addictive substances that were put there on purpose? Along with the double whammy of both the willingness and the ability to also induce behavioral addiction?

The deliberation factor

Not surprisingly, the ingredients of many processed foods inevitably supply a major addiction incentive. Dr. Pretlow has referenced Gene-Jack Wang, M.D., who in 2010 broadcast some disturbing assertions. In the background was all the very convincing work that had been done before that, to prove that “demon drugs” are all-powerful. This belief was supported by masses of lab work with rodents, the gist of which was described by journalist Sarah Klein:

When the researchers applied an electric shock to the rats’ feet in the presence of the food, the rats in the first two groups were frightened away from eating. But the obese rats were not…

In previous studies, rats have exhibited similar brain changes when given unlimited access to cocaine or heroin. And rats have similarly ignored punishment to continue consuming cocaine…

Then, Klein talks to and about Dr. Wang:

Coca leaves have been used since ancient times, he points out, but people learned to purify or alter cocaine to deliver it more efficiently to their brains… This made the drug more addictive.

According to Wang, food has evolved in a similar way. “We purify our food,” he says. “Our ancestors ate whole grains, but we’re eating white bread. American Indians ate corn; we eat corn syrup.”

The ingredients in purified modern food cause people to “eat unconsciously and unnecessarily,” and will also prompt an animal to “eat like a drug abuser,” says Wang…

“We make our food very similar to cocaine now.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Fatty foods may cause cocaine-like addiction,'” CNN.com, 03/30/10
Image by woodleywonderworks/CC BY 2.0

Food Addiction and the Foundations of Discussion

Childhood Obesity News has mentioned how it is difficult to talk about some topics because the first principles have not been agreed on. One of the basic principles that it seems must be agreed on, is this: When people bring science into their arguments, it seems important to recognize that different things may share similarities, but may also have differences.

Consequently, among various populations, diverse conditions obtain. A woman who gets pregnant after a year of specialized treatment, for instance, is a very different physical specimen from a 13-year-old boy. If somebody wants to draw an academically acceptable conclusion by comparing them, or test a medicine on them, or even sell them a product, their differences need to be taken into account. Different results occur among individuals and groups. A whole field, demographics, exists to apportion populations into meaningful groups.

Those multifactorial blues

In the hope of ending childhood obesity, experts need to agree on some basics — like exactly what is meant by the rather unspecific term food addiction, or FA. Are we talking about actual, measurable effects on the body, that can be charted like a patient’s vital signs in the steps to a fatal overdose? Or should the inquiry move into the area of the psyche, in an effort to discover what brought the person to this situation in the first place?

The class of all obese children includes many subcategories. For instance, as Dr. Pretlow once wrote in “Addiction Model Intervention for Obesity in Young People,”

[N]ot only do obese young people have difficulty resisting “certain” problem foods […] but also have difficulty with snacking/grazing on whatever foods are available and consuming excessive food amounts at meals, again involving whatever foods are available.

In that short passage, three different processes are involved: classic “demon drug” attachment to a problem food or several of them; indiscriminate attachment to anything edible; and eating big meals. How many generalizations can be made that include all of those? And then, how many more eating patterns have been observed, whether widespread or quirky? It is something to think about.

Subfactors

Dr. Pretlow goes on to say, “Our studies have shown that problem foods, snacking, and excessive food amounts all respond to withdrawal and abstinence.” The point of using this for an example is, if different interest groups are to discuss solutions for a problem like food addiction, it helps if they are talking about the same things — or at the very least, are aware and conscious that they are talking about different things. A Town Hall meeting about FA will attract people who have not turned to the same page of the dictionary.

Because we are humans, there are a lot of variables. There are people who see it as a societal problem, and others who see it as an individual problem, and still others who admit to both, along with the possibility that other factors could also intervene, including ones we have not even thought of yet. Also, there are people who do not make a connection at all, between food addiction and childhood obesity.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Image by Tadson Bussey/CC BY-ND 2.0

Lessons From Viet Vets

In the immediate postwar period, a subset of Vietnam veterans blew some people’s minds. This was half a century ago, and every few years the story gets recycled. Here is how it started. While the war was still going on, two American officials went over there and came back distraught about the number of active duty heroin users and addicts. What would happen when they returned to the States and to civilian life?

This anxiety seemed justified. At home, among standard American addicts who had received treatment, the relapse rate was around 90%. And this did not include the hard cases who had never even gone into any kind of treatment. With an expected tsunami of junkie vets, the future looked very dark.

In 2012, Alix Spiegel covered it retrospectively for NPR, relating how the government had hired psychiatric researcher Lee Robins to figure out what was going on. As personnel was scheduled for return to America, the military started testing everybody for heroin, and about one in five identified themselves as addicts. They were kept in-country to detox, but fears were great about what would happen once they were back on American soil. Robins kept track of them, and Spiegel wrote:

According to her research, the number of soldiers who continued their heroin addiction once they returned to the U.S. was shockingly low… [O]ne big theory about why the rates of heroin relapse were so low on return to the U.S. has to do with the fact that the soldiers, after being treated for their physical addiction in Vietnam, returned to a place radically different from the environment where their addiction took hold of them.

The writer also consulted psychologist David Neal, who shared with others the view that veteran addicts were different, because they had not become users in their own familiar environments. The fact that American troops in Southeast Asia caught a habit was a combination of crazy availability, and the unfamiliar, uncongenial environment. Neal said,

People, when they perform a behavior a lot — especially in the same environment, same sort of physical setting — outsource the control of the behavior to the environment.

To sum up, there are two kinds of risks, both having to do with geography:

— People who get hooked in their own environment, go somewhere else to recover, and then return home, are in danger of sliding back into addiction. They will probably do better in a new environment with none of the old associations.

— People who get hooked in a strange environment, recover, and then return home, are in danger of sliding back into addiction if they go to the strange place again. They will probably do better by not returning there, or anywhere like it.

The whole point here is to think about all these matters in the light of food addiction (FA), and what exactly that is agreed upon to mean, and by whom. So, here is the interesting part. Those two categories of people both can and do exist, under any definition of FA, and indeed any other addiction. It seems that the desire to fit into a scene can be universally dangerous. This may be what David Neal meant by saying that people “outsource the control of the behavior to the environment.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “What Vietnam Taught Us About Breaking Bad Habits,” NPR.org, 01/02/12
Image by Claudia Liebram/CC BY 2.0