From NYTimes journalist and author of the book "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us
," Michael Moss (source link):I managed to come across a trove of internal documents that enabled me to get insiders to talk. And when they did, what it showed was that salt, sugar, fat are the three pillars, the Holy Grail, if you will, on which the food industry survives. And through their research, they know that when they hit the perfect amounts of each of those ingredients, they’ll send us over the moon, products will fly off the shelves, we’ll eat more, we’ll buy more—and being companies, of course, that they will make more money.
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The other thing I think that really shocked me was when I get to salt in the book, which is how dependent and how hooked the food companies are on salt, because it’s a miracle ingredient for them. It lets them avoid using more costly ingredients like spices and herbs, and of course has this thing they called "flavor bursts," which just gets you so excited about eating snack foods, especially.
In short: food companies are working very hard to figure out which manufactured chemicals they can put in food that will essentially force you to eat more of it. They don't care how bad it is for you, they just want to put it in the right combination so you have the insatiable urge to keep coming back--even if it makes you sick.
This next one is a doozy...
From food industry journalist and author of "Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal
," Melanie Warner (source):You know, one of the things with processed food that I found while doing this book, is not only that it has an abundance of the things that Michael was talking about—salt, sugar, fat—it’s also what it’s lacking, which, it turns out, is naturally occurring nutrition, in many cases. So that’s vitamins and minerals and fiber and things like antioxidants.
So, you take something like cereal—you know, you walk down the cereal aisle, and you’re bombarded with health messages: It’s high in vitamin D, a good source of calcium, fiber, antioxidants. You see these things all over the package. And one of the things—one of the questions I asked myself when I was starting to work on this book was: Why is it nearly impossible to find a box of cereal in the cereal aisle without vitamins, added vitamins and minerals, in the ingredient list?
And it turns out, because most cereal has very little inherent nutrition. And this is in part because of processing. The processing of food is very intensive. It’s very—it’s very technical, and with cereal, can be very damaging to naturally occurring nutrients, especially vitamins and oftentimes fiber. So, what manufacturers do is they add back in vitamins. So, essentially, you see all these wonderful claims on the package, but essentially—and you look at the panel, and you’re getting 35 percent and 40 percent of your recommended daily allowance of these vitamins, but they’re essentially added in like a vitamin pill, which many people maybe are already taking in the morning.
And I was really surprised to learn where some of these vitamins come from. I never really thought about it in much detail, as probably most people don’t. But it turns out that they’re—these vitamins are not coming from the foods that contain them. Like vitamin C does not come from an orange, and vitamin A does not come from a carrot. It’s very far from that. They come from things that really aren’t actually foods. Vitamin D, for instance, was probably the most shocking. It comes from sheep grease, so actually the grease that comes from sheep wool. You have giant barges and container ships that go from Australia and New Zealand over to China, where most of—a lot of our vitamins are produced. About 50 percent of global vitamin production comes from China inside these huge factories, very industrial processes. A lot of vitamins are actually chemical processes.
In short: because all the indigenous nutritional value is pounded out of it during the processing of the food, they have to put the nutrition back in. But it's too expensive to get that nutrition from the places we'd naturally get it from so they pull it from weird-ass places like grease from sheep wool.
It really makes you wonder what would happen if they didn't bother processing the food in the first place--would be it be more or less healthy? More or less expensive for us to buy or them to make? What if all of these decades of mankind bending nature to our will is actually making us less healthy?
On a side note, when I was getting the link to Michael Moss's book on Amazon, here's what I saw:
Yep--Amazon advertising free shipping on a product seriously heavy in two of the three ingredients mentioned in Moss's book's title. OH, BIG BUSINESS!! Why do you want to kill us?? >_<
