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Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us QUOTES

Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us QUOTES

1 " The selling of food matters as much as the food itself… if not more. "

― Michael Moss , Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

2 " Each year, food companies use an amount of salt that is every bit as staggering as it sounds: 5 billion pounds. "

― Michael Moss , Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

3 " Some candy bars had more protein than many cereals. [Jean] Mayer dubbed them "sugar-coated vitamin pills" and wrote, "I contend that these cereals containing over 50% sugar should be labeled imitation cereal or cereal confections, and they should be sold in the candy section rather than in the cereal section. "

― Michael Moss , Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

4 " Thus, the sweetened breakfast was born, as was a core industry strategy that food processors would deploy forevermore...Just swap out the problem component for another that wasn't, at the moment, as high on the list of concerns. "

― Michael Moss , Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

5 " If she [Mrs. Homemaker] didn't know how much she needed convenience, it was up to inventors like Clausi to show her the way. "

― Michael Moss , Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

6 " ...we eat not so much for pleasure as we do to ward off an awful feeling...The fear of hunger is deeply rooted, and food manufacturers know well how to push the buttons that evoke this fear. "

― Michael Moss , Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

7 " Some of the largest companies are now using brain scans to study how we react neurologically to certain foods, especially to sugar. They've discovered that the brain lights up for sugar the same way it does for cocaine. "

― Michael Moss , Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

8 " They may have salt, sugar, and fat on their side, but we, ultimately, have the power to make choices. After all, we decide what to buy. We decide how much to eat. "

― Michael Moss , Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

9 " Many of the Prego sauces—whether cheesy, chunky, or light—have one feature in common: The largest ingredient, after tomatoes, is sugar. A mere half cup of Prego Traditional, for instance, has more than two teaspoons of sugar, as much as two-plus Oreo cookies, a tube of Go-Gurt, or some of the Pepperidge Farm Apple Turnovers that Campbell also makes. "

― Michael Moss , Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

10 " Inevitably, the manufacturers of processed food argue that they have allowed us to become the people we want to be, fast and busy, no longer slaves to the stove. But in their hands, the salt, sugar, and fat they have used to propel this social transformation are not nutrients as much as weapons—weapons they deploy, certainly, to defeat their competitors but also to keep us coming back for more. "

― Michael Moss , Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

11 " If sugar is the methamphetamine of processed food ingredients, with its high-speed, blunt assault on our brains, then fat is the opiate, a smooth operator whose effects are less obvious but no less powerful. A "

― Michael Moss , Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

12 " the sweeter the industry made its food, the sweeter kids liked their food to be. "

― Michael Moss , Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

13 " When consumers tried to improve their health by shifting to skim milk, Congress set up a scheme for the powerful dairy industry through which it has quietly turned all that unwanted, surplus fat into huge sales of cheese—not cheese to be eaten before or after dinner as a delicacy, but cheese that is slipped into our food as an alluring but unnecessary extra ingredient. The toll, thirty years later: The average American now consumes as much as thirty-three pounds of cheese a year. "

― Michael Moss , Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

14 " Using high math and computations, he engineers them, with one goal in mind: to create the biggest crave. “People say, ‘I crave chocolate,’ ” Moskowitz told me. “But why do we crave chocolate, or chips? And how do you get people to crave these and other foods? "

― Michael Moss , Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

15 " In a key--but commonly overlooked--aspect of obesity, weight gain can be caused by the slightest increases in consumption, if it continues day in and day out. "

― Michael Moss , Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

16 " proponent of the view that the processed food industry should be seen as a public health menace: “As a culture, we’ve become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing. And we could make a claim that the toll taken on the public health by a poor diet rivals that taken by tobacco. "

― Michael Moss , Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

17 " In her most recent project, she tested 356 children, ages five to ten, who were brought to Monell to determine their “bliss point” for sugar31. The bliss point is the precise amount of sweetness—no more, no less—that makes food and drink most enjoyable. She was finishing up this project in the fall of 2010 when she agreed to show me some of the methods she had developed. Before we got started, I did a little research on the term bliss point itself. Its origins are murky, having some roots in economic theory. In relation to sugar, however, the term appears to have been coined in the 1970s by a Boston mathematician named Joseph Balintfy, who used computer modeling to predict eating behavior. The concept has obsessed the food industry ever since. "

― Michael Moss , Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

18 " So the dentist took a trip to his local supermarkets, brought seventy-eight brands of cereal back to his lab, and proceeded to measure the sugar content of each with damning precision. A third of the brands had sugar levels between 10 percent and 25 percent. Another third ranged up to an alarming 50 percent, and eleven climbed even higher still—with one cereal, Super Orange Crisps, packing a sugar load of 70.8 percent. When each cereal brand was cross-referenced with TV advertising records, the sweetest brands were found to be the ones most heavily marketed to kids during Saturday morning cartoons. "

― Michael Moss , Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

19 " Well, that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That’s what they want. If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you’re sort of trapped. "

― Michael Moss , Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

20 " The notion that some foods behave like narcotics goes back at least twenty years in scientific circles. "

― Michael Moss , Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us