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The food industry isn’t your friend. Between sodas, snacks, and slices of bread, the average American consumes 26 spoonfuls of refined sugar every single day, while your body only needs the equivalent of one teaspoon of sugar in order to operate your entire bloodstream. Americans consume an average of 156 lbs of sugar each year. That’s an increase of 47 lbs per person in just 20 years.
Why are we eating so much sugar? Sugar makes food taste good, and food companies need to sell food. The problem is it is being consumed in such excess.
Years ago, food businesses made profits by offering high-quality food that earned the long-term loyalty of customers. If the butcher sold you a bad piece of meat, you would stop shopping there and let everyone in town know about it. If the greengrocer sold you rotten vegetables, you wouldn’t go back. The food industry used to be run by people that took pride in their products. The butcher knew his beef, lamb, and pork; the greengrocer knew his fruits and vegetables and the farmers that supplied them. The food industry was personal, but as food became bigger and bigger business, the focus moved from quality to profit.
Today’s food industry is run by accountants. The numbers they love most - costs - are the ones they can control: lower costs mean higher profits. One way to cut costs is to get a better deal from suppliers by buying in larger quantities.
Businesses can also cut costs by using cheaper ingredients. To an accountant, buying cheap and selling high is a recipe for success. In the early 1980’s, high-fructose corn syrup replaced sugar in Pepsi and Coke because it was cheaper. Soft drink companies could supersize their eight-ounce bottles and offer 64 oz for the same price. That’s great value. Or is it?
Not really. High-fructose corn syrup, like table sugar, is highly addictive (as addictive as cocaine in fact). Your body gets used to it and starts to crave it. A sweet tooth may be good for business, but it’s not good for health and wellbeing. Refined sugar and carbohydrates flip all kinds of metabolic switches that turn on fat storage and open unhealthy inflammatory pathways and people suddenly discover that they are pre-diabetic.
Moss wrote an amazing expose on the efforts the food industry was making to optimize the taste, smell, feel, and addictive qualities of junk food. Howard Moskovitz, a Harvard Ph.D. dramatically advanced individual consumption by engineering food that had a very specific sensory-specific satiety. In layperson’s terms, this is the tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which then responds by depressing your desire to have more. Intentionally mundane foods - like white bread - will never get you too excited, but you can eat lots and lots of it without feeling you’ve had enough. In essence, Moskovitz manipulated our brain’s response to food so that its salt and fat content create a constant craving. It gives us a particular crunch and taste that makes us want to keep eating. However, no matter how much we consume, we never feel satisfied.
Sugar is not evil. We were born with a preference for sweets, and our taste buds prefer sugar because we can safely digest it and it supports our body functions. Breast milk is sweet because we need a concentrated fuel to develop our bodies and grow our brains. Our brains connect sugar with pleasure because that relationship has allowed us to survive.