The Industry As an Agent of Addiction

As ill-behaved and ruthlessly acquisitive as corporations can be, it would still be wrong to blame them for things that are not their fault. There are ways of getting on the food addiction (FA) bandwagon that can lead to trouble. For instance, the public starts to demand better legal protection. But as H. Ziauddeen and P. C. Fletcher noted in “Is food addiction a valid and useful concept?,”

Enforcing the relevant legislation is not always straightforward with drugs that are clearly identified and is likely to be far more problematic with foods.

In other words, to try and police Big Food about this would open up a can of worms or a hornet’s nest or some undesirable result; because there is too much room for legal charges to be challenged; because there are too many unanswered questions about whether FA is even “a thing.”

This is an example, drawn from the pages of Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, of the misunderstandings that need to be straightened out before blame can be apportioned:

We perceive the necessity, and at the same time the difficulty, to clearly separate known causes of overeating, which without knowledge of the underlying process (e.g. leptin deficiency, hypothalamic tumor) could be labeled as an addictive behavior.

No sooner is one question answered, than another one pops up. This is one reason why it is so important to figure out the whole food addiction puzzle. As in any meaningful debate, there are different points of view, and hopefully all parties realize that sometimes even the most reasonable-looking course may turn out to be a false path. It hurts, but it happens.

The implications of all this are quite staggering, especially when extended into the FA realm. When everybody has limited amounts of time, money, patience, and other resources, why risk traveling at 80 MPH in the wrong direction?

The ever-popular list format

Every so often someone publishes a list with a provocative title like “10 Foods That Are More Addictive Or As Addictive As Drugs.” In one such roster, compiled by Oliver Taylor in 2018, soda, potato chips, and cookies were well represented. Rats prefer chocolate cookies filled with frosting to rice cakes, and that’s a fact. Wheat is on this list too, touted as “an addictive food that no one seems to notice.” (Years later, the harmfulness of wheat is still hotly debated.) Sugar, of course, coffee, ice cream, cheese — all the usual suspects.

People can get addicted to meat, apparently, because of a natural stimulant. Taylor says,

Hypoxanthine even has the same properties as caffeine. Older meat contains more hypoxanthine, which is why some people exhibit withdrawal symptoms and a serious craving for this type of food if they do not eat it for a while… Meat contains other addictive substances like guanylic and inosinic acids…

Stay tuned for more about the “substance addiction versus behavioral addiction” debate, and how it relates to childhood obesity.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Is food addiction a valid and useful concept? — NCBI,” NIH.gov, January 2013
Source: “’Eating addiction’, rather than ‘food addiction’, better captures addictive-like eating behavior,” ScienceDirect.com, November 2014
Source: “10 Foods That Are More Addictive Or As Addictive As Drugs,” Listverse.com, 08/26/18
Image by rebelxtned/CC BY-ND 2.0

The Unpleasant Secrets of Coke

A paper with a dozen authors, published a few years ago, said,

Certain foods have rewarding and reinforcing properties; for example, high sugar-high fat combinations are rewarding for rodents and humans alike.

And sure, in the olden days, from a survival perspective, it was good and necessary to chow down on every energy-dense calorie-packed morsel you could find. But now we are stuck with bodies full of evolutionary anachronisms. Unlike our ancient ancestors, most people today do not cope with feast/famine cycles, nor are they up and moving for most of their waking hours.

Here we are in an obesogenic environment with a lot of obesogenic habits, and more to eat in a day than our great-grandpas had in a week. Now,

[…] formulations of processed foods have been designed to maximize palatability and reward… Such properties are not confined to simple taste (sweetness, saltiness) but encompass more complex blends of taste, flavor, smell, texture and even the sounds produced by preparation or consumption.

In the previous post, the last remark was about how potato chips so adroitly get their hooks into people. Let’s move on, to how a beverage that pairs superbly with chips is also quite addictive, and how the bosses of Big Food discuss these matters that are of the urgent individual and societal importance.

A very high-ranking officer explained a lot of things to Michael Moss for his piece in The New York Times, “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food.” For readers who are not familiar with corporate-speak, “control as much market share as possible” translates to “make as much money as possible.” In an effort to do this,

Coke extended its aggressive marketing to especially poor or vulnerable areas of the U.S., like New Orleans — where people were drinking twice as much Coke as the national average — or Rome, Ga., where the per capita intake was nearly three Cokes a day. In Coke’s headquarters in Atlanta, the biggest consumers were referred to as “heavy users.”

Okay, no surprises there. In hot weather, people like cold fizzy soda. And Atlanta is the HQ of Coke. But in the next part Moss directly quoted the executive, about the two crucial elements in the financial calculations — drinks and drinkers:

“How many drinkers do I have? And how many drinks do they drink? If you lost one of those heavy users, if somebody just decided to stop drinking Coke, how many drinkers would you have to get, at low velocity, to make up for that heavy user? The answer is a lot. It’s more efficient to get my existing users to drink more.”

Let’s replay that last bit. “It’s more efficient to get my existing users to drink more.” Is that cynical, or what? In other words, addicting people is good business. A smaller number of dedicated users will bring in more revenue than a larger number of casual users, and the money guys know it.

Certainly, it is still important to advertise to attract new customers. But old customers should never be taken for granted. They can be cultivated into super-customers, who might spend more than they should, harm their own health, and step past the bounds of decency in other ways. A hooked person is not just a steady customer, but one who, over time, is likely to consume even greater quantities of the product during each fiscal year.

And the language. “My users,” he calls Coke drinkers. With the implication that he owns us.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “’Eating addiction’, rather than ‘food addiction’, better captures addictive-like eating behavior,” ScienceDirect.com, November 2014
Source: “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food,” NYTimes.com, 02/20/13
Image by Kate Ter Haar/CC BY 2.0

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