Are You Hooked On Food? | Interview with Michael Moss

hey everyone and welcome to chef aj live i'm your host chef aj and this is where i introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that i think you should know about today's guest is pulitzer prize-winning author michael moss he is the new york times best-selling author of salt sugar and fat how the food giants hooked us and we're here today to talk about his new book which is called hook food free will and how the food experts exploit our addictions i am so honored to have him on the show please welcome michael moss hey great to be with you great you know it's interesting because it's only showing you and that's okay because you're the star of today's episode but that's cool like you can see me that's all that matters right yeah absolutely i i am so honored that you're taking the time to do this i know how busy you are and i want everyone to get not just hook but both of your books because you have made such a profound difference in my life with your book we were chatting a little bit before you came on and i was telling you that i have a lifelong struggle with obesity and food addiction even though now it may look like i'm slender which i am it was only because i finally stopped eating processed food and i think about all the time in my 20s and 30s telling doctors you know i think i have an addiction to sugar it's not normal i can't stop drinking dr pepper and coke slurpees and they kind of poo-pooed it and there's doctors still today that poo poo it so thank you for the work you've done that have given people like me and the people i work with you know a platform to show that we're not crazy we're not weak-willed it's the food yeah you know and and while i talk if you want to go into split screen mode because i'm sure your viewers want to be seeing you as well if they're just looking at yeah i usually don't wear makeup except it's a really important guy yes yes absolutely so so um yeah yeah no i mean i just tweeted this morning that you know if if you think that overeating is our fault um you know i'd highly encourage you to read um the latest book of mine i'll just show it to everybody so they so they know what the cover looks like it has this fantastic cover that random house did and it's actually how the food giants exploit our addiction because that's what we're talking about is that this is not our fault this is sort of the deliberate engineering and actions by these gigantic food companies who who know how to tap into our most basic biological instincts to get us to not just like their products but to want more and more of them so what efforts are actually taken by these food giants to hook us what what is it that they're doing yeah so and i should say too if we had had this conversation five years ago and you had suggested to me that oreos could be as addictive as heroin i would have thought you know are you kidding me but five years later doing the research for this book meeting the scientists that i met and getting the internal documents from the process food industry that i was able to has completely turned around and left me with little doubt that in many ways these food products we're calling ultra processed food or convenience food i like to call it fast groceries for reasons we'll talk about can be even more problematic than smoking alcohol heavier narcotics and the reason is and this is really key is that the food companies are tapping into our natural biological instincts that draw us to food which was never a problem until 50 years ago when the food industry changed the nature of our food to make eating an everyday thing and so and so how do they do that so they start with cheapness inexpensive right um knowing that we our forebears became hooked on inexpensive food as a matter of saving energy right if you're in a hunter-gatherer society it just makes sense that for dinner you're not going to chase down the impala if there's an aardvark sitting right there you can just pick up in and grab right and so the food companies have at their back in call these chemical laboratories that mix and match the ingredients for their formulas with one overarching goal which is to reduce the cost of their products knowing that if they can shave 10 cents off the price of a package of toaster breakfast pastries our brain our historic brand going way way way back we'll get really excited by that cost savings um we are instinctually in love with variety it's why humans were able to spread across the globe live in places and fall in love with food as weird as whale blubber right so walk into the grocery of the cereal aisle of the grocery store and what do you find 200 varieties of sugary starch cereal because the companies know we get really excited about variety and and just the third example of how they're getting us hooked on their products is calories you know we by nature love calories we have sensors in the gut possibly even in the mouth that tell us how much fuel how many calories there are in the food we're eating and for most of our existence you know getting as much fuel as possible was a really good thing putting on some body fat was a really great thing it enabled our brains to grow it enabled us to get through hard times it enabled us to have more babies and so what did the food companies do they're engineering these incredibly dense packages of food with tons of empty calories in them that get the brain so excited and we can talk about the stop brain versus the go brain that you basically lose you know your ability to exert your own free will over what you're eating how did you do the research for this book was it different than the research you did for your first book salt sugar and fat well it was really tough and i have to tell you um sorry i just dropped my book um i was thrown for a loop early on because i first i wanted to talk to these scientists who used to study drug addiction right and now they've switched over to study food addiction because of the perils and they're the ones you know who are coming up with this compelling evidence that that given the food environment that food can be even more problematic than us but but one of the first neuroscientists i spent time with was dana small she was up at mcgill which is kind of a pioneering school for neuroscience they've done some incredible things scientists at mcgill first kind of discovered how dopamine works in the brain and gets us excited and wanting foods um dana's now at yale but she was the first person [Music] you can't move your head or you'll blur the imagery right but dana being a self-professed chocoholic realized that she could put a square of chocolate on people's tongue it would melt as they lay quietly in the scanner and she could watch how their brains responded on that but then she did a really clever thing which is she kept feeding squares of chocolate to the subjects in her in her experiment until they got to the point where they hated it they didn't want any more and that was really that was really a moment for me when i realized that addiction is in our brain it's not just kind of the food products and the formulas some of that is on us um and in a way the food companies have made us kind of totally unwitting conspirators in their ability to kind of use what's in us to their advantage so that was the first thing i did was spend time with scientists who are really trying to sort this out you know you you talk about sugar fat and salt a lot in the book and are they all deleterious or some more deleterious than each other or is it the combination yeah so the first book i wrote was called about in fact sultry fat because um really smart people were telling me that you know those three ingredients is the unholy trinity if you will on which these processed food companies rely on to get us so excited about their products and you're absolutely right it's not in single combination that they're most effective put those things together and you know we get like the the double triple quadruple amount of excitement going into the brain i mean take a potato chip right it's got the salt on the surface the industry talks about salt as the flavor burst because it's typically the first thing that will hit the taste buds and send that signal of wow to the reward center um it's got lots of fat industry calls at the mouth feel the magic formula in snack foods is about 50 of the calories from oil mostly it's corn oil um and that gets picked up by a trigeminal nerve that goes also to the reward center of the brain a different pathway right but also i learned from nutritionists is that potato chips are also have a lot of sugar in them in the form of kind of simple potato starch that gets converted into glucose in the body and that's sending yet another signal to the brain through a different route including the gut when those potato chips land in the gut so you've got three paths of sort of excitement all going to the reward center of the brain and it's that combination i think that makes their products so potent you know you mentioned potato chips and i i recently listened to your interview on the food junkies podcast and you mentioned that you are somebody that can have potato chips in the house how did you get interested i don't think you've ever struggled with weight or food addiction yet you are really the leading voice in this field yeah look i mean and i and i say that's so with trepidation because i know that i'm an exception to the rule for so many people and i and i totally get how so many of us can't just eat a handful i mean look you know lay's potato juice back in the 60s came up with that slogan and bet you can't eat just one just kind of like taunting us with their ability to sort of drive us bonkers with their products so so i'm a journalist i'm an investigative journalist and oddly enough i was tormenting the pentagon um during the iraq war for failing to equip american soldiers with armor and then i was looking critically at the war on terrorism and how that was encouraging islamic militants in their recruitment efforts when i got in some trouble in algeria and i had to come home and one of my editors spotted this outbreak of salmonella and peanuts being manufactured in georgia on the alabama border and i went down and this was just such an eye-opener to me this was back in 2008 now where i really got a look at this trillion dollar processed food industry and how in some cases it was losing control of the food chain chain they were using these tainted peanuts in thousands of hundreds of products and they didn't even realize kind of you know it took them weeks and weeks to figure out whether they were they were coming that they were coming from this factory um but then i also sort of realized that what they were intentionally adding to their products the salt sugar fat was in some way much more problematic and in a way it went from one war in iraq to another war in this country because you know what the public health you know aspects of this are better than i do i mean that obesity were passed 42 even before the pandemic type 2 diabetes gout on and on and just kind of for other people because addiction sort of happens on the spectrum and i think a lot of us who who don't you know at one end sort of have eating disorders binging still are really troubled by our relationship with food and a lot of us are just kind of missing the beauty and the ritual of home-cooked meals with family which we used to have before we fell so hard for these convenience foods well you know one of the things i took notes on your book which i i didn't read but i listened to twice you said the hallmark of addiction is the speed within which the substance reaches the brain that's the definition of soda which is what i was addicted to in slurpees i mean that was pretty fast yeah so here's the deal with speed speed is um is one of the keystones of addiction scientists discovered that the bastar of substance hits the brain the more apt that brain is um to act compulsively impulsively on it right and so they they set about kind of measuring the speed of things that get into the brain addictive substances um and cigarettes can take as long as 10 seconds to kind of fully activate the brain alcohol and narcotics are kind of somewhat less than that depending on the substance but then they sat people down and they measured how fast we taste sweet so they put a little sugar on their tongue and ask people to push a button when they tasted the sweet um and they were pushing that button in less than one second about eight tenths of a second and the reason is that we are hardwired to be attracted to sweet and salt and fat right and so what happens is the sugar doesn't go straight to the brain you know it touches the taste but which sends the signal of sweetness to the brain and it happens so quickly um that i've started calling many of these products in the grocery stores fast groceries like fast food to kind of get at that point that this stuff is happening so quickly to us and the industry was so good at creating snack foods which we eat quickly and mindlessly again as a way of sort of exploiting our natural attraction to speed well you mentioned that the risk of addiction is as much about the method of delivery as the substance being delivered yeah no absolutely um the method of delivery but but but again sort of the speed being the the key of that right so and and the method of delivery with these fast groceries is you know you get the package you rip it open look i've met people i have gone to um you know group therapies pattern after alcoholic anonymous and i've seen people stand up and say hi i'm joseph i'm a food addict and i'm looking at them they're svelte and trim and i'm going what and then they show a picture of themselves and describe how they would drive to the grocery store and on the way home their car would become littered with packages as they were kind of mindlessly compulsively opening up these snackable conveniences and eating them while they were drawing home and driving home and so that the it's all about sort of the packaging the presentation the marketing the manufacturing the speed with which the the food itself sort of gets into the brain is all about speed so you know it we know that the sugar fat and salt and the processed foods are addictive at least for many people do you think that other things for some people like even animal products or dairy could have that same pull yeah i mean you know i think i think everybody's different um and and i should back up on the addiction i mean you know in my still kind of skeptical mode i went to the tobacco industry which for decades vehemently denied that smoking was addictive and then in the year 2000 they completely changed their mind philip morris was the first company to do so publicly acknowledged you're right smoking is addictive no ifs ands or buts about it and that same year the ceo of philip morris was asked in some legal proceedings to define addiction and he said addiction is a repetitive behavior that some people find difficult to quit and i think i was really struck by that because in the year 2000 philip morris was not only the largest tobacco manufacturer in north america it was the single largest manufacturer of processed foods because back in the 80s it had acquired general foods and then craft and then it purchased nabisco right the maker of oreos um and so i thought that definition was perfect um as framing not only people's trouble with cigarettes um but our trouble with many of the food products that they were selling in the grocery store and i'll tell you i met recently the general counsel former general counsel of philip morris the top lawyer steve parish who explained to me that he was one of those people who could take a cigarette out smoke it during a business meeting put the pack away and have no interest in smoking again until the next day but he said michael i can't go near a bag of our oreo cookies right because they were making or is that the oh oh [Music] this was another sort of brilliant moment when i realized that these insiders see of their of their products well you had mentioned that some of the creators of these processed foods like lunchables won't eat it won't allow their children to eat it so how how do they feel about other kids are eating it and becoming fat and sick i mean do they not have any conscience yeah i know and in fact and this was the first book i wrote right self-secret fat i i always laugh at this cover because the artist when he read the book he went into his grocery store and pulled out all of his favorite products right and rip the lettering out of the off the package friends and rearrange the lettering to really reflect kind of what's going on inside these products which was just sort of a brilliant act of of of artistry um yeah i think that well here's the other thing that surprised me is that how many of these insiders came to have misgivings about their life work and look you know i'm still not trying i'm still trying to not see this as this evil empire that intentionally set out to to make us ill on their products these are companies doing what all companies want to do which is to make as much product as possible but and make as much money as possible by selling as much product as possible but um and the in in defense of the people who invented these products a lot of them like lunchables were invented in a more innocent era before our dependence on them and maybe the companies even back then didn't know we would become so dependent on those products but they know now so they need to do better they do know now but as the former president of coca-cola explained to me you know when you're in the battle and the competition between these food giants for space on the shelf and space in our stomach is so fierce that's that's all they think about on the job is you know how are they going to nudge their competitor down the shelf a bit so they can have more shelf space and sell more product they're really not stepping back and looking at the at the bigger picture well how did they get away with advertising their products to children you know we cigarettes when i grew up you could you know there were billboards magazine tv commercials they stopped that you couldn't market them to children now to anybody but they specifically market their you know sugary cereals with the toys and little juice boxes saturday morning cartoons how how can they get away with that yeah hang on i'm just going to pick up a copy of hooked here because um because i want everybody to buy this i have to say not for me not for me but for you i mean if you ever had any doubt that that or any thoughts that you were the one at fault here or if you have any family members who like doubted you and the back of their heads were going oh come on isn't that just willpower and right a little more effort on your part i'm pretty sure that reading hooked will convince you otherwise as well as this conversation so i apologize but i just wanted to keep showing this to people because i i you know this conversation books like this i think are going to make a huge could make a huge difference in in in in people's lives the marketing to kids was such a cool for the food giants because memory is so powerful um you know weed and again that's one reason one way that food is even more problematic than drugs because the memories we form for what we eat happen at an incredibly young age possibly even while we're we're still in the womb um scientists talk about the adolescence bump when we create more memories that are longer lasting than at any other time in their life and what the food companies found and this is why coca-cola realized that if they could put a soda in the hands of a kid when they're in a ballpark with their parents the memory of that soda will forever get associated with that joyous moment and so the marketing by the food companies to kids was all about sort of implanting strengthening and associating the memories of their foods with you know great emotional moments in kids lives and i have to say it totally worked on me i mean i was a bit of a latchkey kid growing up i would come home right from elementary school let myself in the house and have a pop-tart for a snack i hadn't had a pop-tart in 40 years when i visited one of the kellogg's research and development factories in um and laboratories in battle creek michigan and they had messed up an assembly line of pop-tart dough and it was being dumped in this big vat and the aroma wafted across the factory floor and that took me back instantly to the time when i was a kid eating pop-tarts and you know what the same thing happened in the pandemic right we thought at least we were going to get away from vending machines at work with the pandemic but what happened for many people is that they turned their kitchen cupboards into vending machines because we went to the supermarket right and those memories came flooding back from our childhood and in the fear and the angst and the concern of the moment we reached for those childhood junk products snack products um like we'd never before and the snack food company sales soared and they're still higher than they were before yeah i remember the beginning of the pandemic when the costco line was around the block and you know like a lot of the food was sold out but the kale was still on the shelf the kale was on the shelf well the snacks were on the shelf too and i'll tell you a little insider trick the snack companies realize that when the yeast started running out and the flour right because we were like trying to do our own cooking they realized if they sent their own truck drivers into the store to keep the shelves stocked then they wouldn't ever run out of chips and candies and crackers and stuff so so you might also have noticed how the snack foods the fastest groceries um also didn't run out so we could have all we wanted of those and we wanted a lot how does the food how do they use variety to exploit us well so it's it's pretty simple in fact i've heard like old-time food engineers chemists complain to me that they don't really invent food anymore like they used to basically they're just coming up with kind of new colors on the package or a new added spice or a little bit of variety and so for them creating variety is all about creating a new flavor of potato chips right i mean there are dozens of potato chip flavors and shapes and sizes out there same in the cereal aisle same throughout the grocery store so they're using food engineers people who design the packaging the food itself to come up with kind of new ways of or just slight you know variations on the on the old theme knowing that that gets us excited does anybody in the food industry have they ever put a hit on you look i mean i suspect they wish i hadn't been born but um i also think and i know from talking to insiders that they think my reporting has been tough but fair and not only that but you know the reporting for self-trigger fat and the new book hooked is based on their own internal documents and interviews with their own people so they can't pick a bone with me without sort of picking a bone with themselves but it's kind of even it's even better than that in some ways because they're starting to awaken to the fact that they've made these things so powerful that we're losing control and they're starting to do things which kind of seem like they might be good but we can talk about how those things make it even more difficult to figure out what's good and bad in the grocery store they're doing things like adding protein to sugary cereal knowing that nutritionists have identified protein as something that maybe can slow down our appetite and make us feel fuller but if you're eating a bowl of like sugary starch and there's a little bit of protein there i don't think it's going to have that effect same pattern they're adding fiber to products knowing that we think fiber will slow us down but that's the fiber in fresh vegetables and the whole fruits not this sort of laboratory made fiber and untested fiber that's going into a lot of these processed processed food companies and then one of the things they're doing now which i think is potentially problematic is that they're responding to our concern about sugar by wandering through the grocery store and adding fake sweeteners to so many items not just soda in kind of combination um and there's some very disturbing animal signs only so don't take it too don't take it to heart yet but but the point is that that our brains and our metabolism you know may be responding to these fake sugars in a way that we really don't kind of fully appreciate and so we're in this mode now where the where the companies are you know seemingly acknowledging that their products are addictive and they're because they're they're taking steps to sort of help us deal with the cravings that they caused well i i hosted what was called the gi health summit and from what i understand from the doctors is these fake zero calorie sweeteners are actually worse for for causing cravings for our gut microbiome so to me it's just a new level of evil yeah i mean i certainly can't go that far because i haven't i haven't studied them but but if you think about it you know your tongue is tasting sugar right your brain is his taste is getting the signal of sugar but then the sugar doesn't arrive it's just kind of this fake thing arrives and goes to your gut you have to believe that some you know something crazy might happen to your metabolism and and and and health kind of kind of generally i mean if you're somebody i mean the best advice i've heard if you're somebody who just totally needs that diet soda to get through the day and to help you resist the pure sugar soda then you know it's it's it's probably worth doing that but but long term and just the notion that they would flood the market with these products without solid science being done looking at how it affects us is is just incredible to me and you know and that same point obesity began surging back in 1980 and it wasn't until two years ago 2019 that a scientist at the nih his name is kevin hall did the very first gold standard trial looking at whether these ultra processed foods actually cause weight gain we thought they did but there's causation and there's association took two groups of people put them in the eating laboratory for a couple weeks on very different diets and lo and behold the first evidence that in that case the ultra-processed foods caused weight gain it took 40 years for us to do that study in part because of the way that science is controlled by industry general or certainly influenced by general or how science doesn't always respond to you know our needs in terms of needing to know and in this case you know what we eat has never mattered more and how these companies manipulate us has never mattered more and yet there's so many questions i have have a journalist about the science of food still well the thing is i'm a chef and these food companies use more sugar fat and salt in their food than anyone ever would at home and they put it in foods where it doesn't even belong or is necessary like it's yes yeah you know and the reason they're doing that is is because they're using salt sugar fat for other reasons besides taste right so one of their challenges is making these products so they can sit in the warehouse and then on the grocery shelf and then in your kitchen cupboard for months right without spoiling and going bad and so you know salt sugar fat um combination one or the either can be acting as preservatives can be acting as as taste enhanced color providers you know i once went to kellogg's and said to look everybody's concerned about how we're getting so much salt and we now know that 75 of the salt in our diet comes from processed food not the salt shaker and the table why don't you cut back on salt and so they said come on in we won't just talk to you we're going to make you special versions of some of our biggest icons in the grocery store but in this case we're not going to add any salt at all and you're going to see what salt does for us right and so we started with the cheez-its right normally i could eat day in and day out without salt they stuck to the roof of our mouth because salt adds texture and solubility right then we went on to the frozen waffles put them in the toaster they came out looking and tasting like straw because salt adds the color and some of that taste but the clincher were the corn flakes right we put them in the bowl added some milk took a bite before i could say anything the chief spokeswoman for the company was sitting with me and she gets this look of horror on her face and she swallows and blurts out metal i taste metal m-e-t-a-l and i and i'm thinking yeah i didn't know corn flakes had salt in them but without the salt i thought one of my fillings had come out of my mouth was like sloshing sloshing around right and the chief technical officer he's sitting there and he kind of chuckles a little bit he goes that's you know not everybody will taste it but one of the beautiful things about salt for us is that it will mask some of the off notes they call them or bad taste that are inherent to some processed foods and that's when a light bulb went off in my head right and that's why i wrote self-triggered fat and hooked because i realized at that moment that these companies are more hooked on using salt sugar fat on making their foods inexpensive highly variable full of empty calories super fast than we are and so it raises a real question about whether now going forward they can play a meaningful role in in helping us to change our our eating habits it feels like they get us any way they can it's not just the salt sugar and fat and now the artificial sweeteners but what about all these natural flavors you read about i tried this beverage in i don't i'm not bashing the company it's called a lacroix soda i but i'm a very i'm person that's very sensitive to any kind of chemicals and i thought this is great it's a soda and it has no calories but on the label it said natural flavors and i drank one and i'm not kidding i drink 11 more there was some there's something about natural flavors and i looked into them and they said it could be an expressed anal gland of a beaver and all these things and i read a book by mark schatzger called the dorito effect that when i have natural flavors in a tea or whatever it does the same thing to me it makes me really excited and it makes me want to eat more and you they can put these in food yeah and again i go back to the philip morris definition of addiction where they say you know repetitive behavior that some people you know these substances don't affect all of us in the same way some people can smoke casually some people can drink casually some people can use heroin casually without being addicted kind of in the classic sense and don't get me wrong i'm not encouraging anybody to do any of those things but but if anybody hears you aj and goes well it doesn't affect me that way that's why because our vulnerability to these products can change from person to person hour to hour you know the time in our lives um natural flavoring is you know who knows kind of what's going on in in that sense one of the fascinating things that i find about soda water and this is sort of gets to the question of like what can we do now to get unhooked from these companies um yeah there you go you're holding up a bottle of cell search so in my house you know we're trying to drink less sugar so i have two boys who are like walking bliss points for sweetness right but they've managed to switch to plain seltzer bubbles um and i started wondering why how and it turns out the science on bubbles on effervescence is totally fascinating i mean researchers don't yet know even how we taste bubbles in the mouth it's so cool for them to be studying that but however we taste them or feel them um they're sending a signal of pleasure to the brain that's almost as powerful as sugar right just the bubbles themselves but here's the deal and again one of my sort of other kind of moments of enlightenment and writing about these crawling through the underbelly of this industry for 10 years now is that they didn't invent a lot of this stuff that's a problem for us salt sugar fat convenience cheapness calories they stole those things from us and are now using them against us to our disadvantage and so what did we have before sugary soda there was plain seltzer right there's a town in germany called seltzer where people would sit around for hundreds of years i think debating the merits of one plane seltzer versus another plane sales and so what my kids were doing by switching from soda to plain salsa they were turning the tables on the company companies reclaiming what was ours in the first place the plain seltzer and doing that in a way that oddly enough kind of empowered them i want to put in a plug not just for the book but the audio book because you know if you i don't think you didn't read it but you have such a wonderful voice you should read your own books no hardly because the audio person scott brick is a master of the business he's done some more than 700 he does big thriller books right all the famous authors and and he and he fell in love with salt sugar fat because he was having some health issues that were clearly tied to his proclivity toward eating junk and other stuff and so he was so into the first book salt sugar fat and he's red hooked again too so you're getting a reader there that's not only a pro but he's passionate now about what he eats and and about changing how he values food rather than letting these companies dictate how they want him to value their food well i love that i listened to it twice on audio one of the things that blew my mind and hooked was that you mentioned that there was a two-year-old child in saudi arabia that had gastric bypass surgery i'm wondering do you believe that not necessarily everyone but that most people that are overweight or obese suffer to some degree from food addiction um well yeah sure if you define addiction as a loss of control and again go back to the go back to philip morris which was the biggest food company at the time a repetitive behavior that some people find difficult to quit i mean food gain and weight gain and obesity can can happen very subtly i mean just day to day to day overeating in a way you don't really notice but that in and of itself is is a loss of control and so call it addiction or call it a very bad a very very bad habit um and yeah i think that's what we're talking about is sort of one group of us and and the rest of us have other issues um but certainly that one group of people who've who have found themselves being you know facing clinical obesity are looking at a loss of control over their over their eating habits well one of the things you also mentioned in hook and i i heard this because i actually interviewed sylvia tara once who you referenced is that once you look the way it really never disappears and the problem is is we don't necessarily know how vulnerable we are to these things until we try them not that i would ever try heroin or cocaine but i was telling you before we we came live it's like literally the first time i tried a coke slurpee with eight pumps of vanilla syrup i didn't stop until i was 43 years old and got a diagnosis of pre-colon cancer i did not know because there was no warning label like at least cigarettes there's a warning label there's no warning label on process yeah and you know in chapter in chapter four of hooked um it's called you know we by nature are drawn to eating i spend time with paleoanthropologists who walk me through how we changed um i mean believe in evolution or believe in creation it doesn't matter but over that time period we changed in significant ways that changed the way we relate to food and one of the things and the overarching goal of that was to put on body fat as we talked about before which was body fat was a really great thing we became kind of one of the fattest creatures in in in the mammal group because because body fat enabled us to do these really important things it was life-saving for us right well dial forward today in this food environment where the food companies have made overeating and everyday thing in body fat has grown to be this this huge public health concern right and so now suddenly body fat turns against his i had no idea until i read sylvia and i talked to her and other scientists about body fat its body fat is a living thinking diabolical if you will organ that communicates with the brain and other parts of the body and its sole mission in life is to keep you from messing with it so if you go on a diet or change your diet i should say to lose weight that body fat recognizes that will send to the signal to the brain causing you to be hungry where before you were not hungry and it will slow down your resting metabolism so you will burn less energy just sitting around um or sleeping and so so once you know once we acquire this extra body fat it becomes even more difficult um the aspect of dealing with that and losing it becomes even more difficult because our own body is working against us in ways that we can't even see and again this is so critical this is not about us this is not our fault right this is not about willpower um about free will this is about the companies putting us in this position where we've been robbed by our free will so i became vegan for ethical reasons 44 years ago and it's in september of 1977 there was no vegan processed food now it's exploding and do you think the the processed food industry is using their same evil tactics to infiltrate the market of vegans and keto and paleo because just because you put vegan on a label keto or paleo it's still the same processed crap yeah so i mean i you think you really make a really good point in fact there's a lot of tech people now that are coming up with true inventions of meatless dairy-less soilless sort of products that are that are really really interesting but there's a lot of elements that go into food and there's a lot of way that different ways that different people value food some people are concerned about the climate environmental impact of farming growing the products that go into that food others are concerned about animal welfare and so just shifting away to a non-meat product in and of itself is a really great thing for people who sort of prioritize that i think i think the point that you make though is that in the hands of the ultra processed food companies right something like all natural or organic or meatlessness can simply be tweaking their products in one way that still leaves up from a nutritional standpoint a product that still doesn't offer us very much in the way of good solid nutrition um so again that's another way that i think we have to be wary and thinking and careful when we're shocked because it's it's getting somewhat harder to tell the good quote unquote from the bad quote-unquote stuff in the store well so what can we do about this yeah so such a huge question i mean i'm a journalist i'm mostly trained to look at problems and and i you know i hope that um my first book but but especially the second book that's out now hooked is is that the information in this book about how i mean the subtitle right how the food giants exploit our addictions use us against ourselves hoping that that knowledge in and of itself becomes empowering for people um but with the addiction sort of component of this i think we have to even go a further step and and be careful to the point where we plan ahead and think ahead and so you know if if if your readers your watchers listeners are people who get a you know a craving for cookies at three o'clock in the afternoon um you know no matter what their strategy is whether it's to get up and stretch or call a friend or eat something else better for them like a handful of nuts the lesson from the world of drug addiction is they better be doing that at 2 55 because by 3 o'clock when that craving comes on it's going to overwhelm and excite the go part of their brain so much that the stop part of the brain where executive thinking happens and willpower is going to be put to sleep and won't have a chance to kind of catch up so i think that's one of the biggest lessons from that we can draw from drug addiction is that boy you have to you have to like plan ahead and anticipate and prepare for these moments of of losing control that's why i think environment is so important and i i just recommend people not to buy the stuff in the first place because i always say if it's in your house it's in your mouth yeah but you have to go shopping and you have to walk and you know we don't have to watch tv but we do in the advertisements i mean this is another way where food is more problematic i mean the food environment is such that it's like being an alcoholic and having to walk into a bar all day long and resist the temptation because whether it's advertising or your own memories for eating those lifelong memories from eating those products that can prompt to go brain you know out of thin air to to get you excited about eating a product or walking to the grocery store or opening a menu at so many restaurants um just that being confronted with those products all day long and even night is is what makes it really treacherous you know abstention is a key thing i mean i've it's that again sort of people have been able to draw from the world of drug addiction right and it's certainly effective um but it's hard when it comes to food and so i've met people who keep a really strict shopping list i mean there's just they don't let go of that when they go in the grocery store there's so many temptations um but sometimes they'll even go further i mean i i met a man in ottawa who lost 180 pounds in 13 months an incredible thing he was kind of fortunate to have the time and the resource to do that but then the real trouble began because his body was fighting so hard to put that weight back on and there were times he had to put locks on his kitchen cabinets there were times when he even got on an inter-city bus in order to avoid any potential contact with the trigger foods that he would lose control of and so so abstention is great but sticking to that is is takes a lot of effort on anybody's part right you can have groceries delivered now so you don't even have to go into a grocery store you know that could be a really good thing for people a few live viewers are asking if you're familiar with the book the pleasure track i'm not no tell me about it well we're going to send it to you because the doctors dr alan goldhamer dr douglas are fans of your work and dr goldhamer who does medically supervised therapeutic water only fasting in santa rosa asked if you've ever heard that what he does he it helps break the addictive cycle to sugar fat and salt by putting people on a fast that's so interesting and i suspect that sort of you know it's in the kind of the category of abstention but but in a way that we can handle right we just can't stop eating forever or we will die right i mean that's again one of the problematic things about food and so i do sort of love these various strategies looking at ways to kind of work abstention into our eating habits in a way that might you know that might kind of jolt us out of those patterns because again um you know physicians like that are working with people who have a lifelong history of letting these food companies dictate their eating habits and so changing those habits isn't going to happen easy or quickly um but but sort of methods like that i think could be potentially really great so what blew my mind is that you know philip morris bought up a bunch of processed food companies and now a bunch of processed food companies are buying up weight loss industries isn't there something am i the only one that's saying there's something wrong with this first thing for their product a lot of money addicting you to their product and then they take even more money for you selling you a diet strategy that's not going to work i mean this does this sounds like like dr joel furman wrote in a question saying isn't that like monsanto buying up all the organic farms for them to start using roundup i mean they have to pump you know i was so struck by that i wrote a whole chapter because back in the 60s none other than heinz which is one of the early users of high fructose corn syrup and and this discover is that they could make lots of varieties of frozen french fries so we could turn our kitchens into into drive-ins um bought none other than weight watchers um kind of knowing that we were did i say the 60s later than that actually but or more recent but um knowing that that was really a popular method that people were using in the irony of some of these companies you know who were doing things that were making us fat then turn around and selling as products that you know ostensibly could help us lose that weight i i certainly found probably you know interesting ironic whatever you want to call it and they weren't alone so some of the biggest food companies out there atkins got bought up by a food giant um the south beach diet became sort of a branding thing for for processed food and not only that but they went into the grocery store and began making diet versions of their products they would sit right next to each other on the shelf and they really weren't all that different than the full calorie version i did the math on some of them i was like could hardly notice a difference but it kind of made us feel better and so one week we might buy the lean pocket and then the next week if we were feeling more stressed or vulnerable we'd buy the hot pocket and move back and forth it's a little past tense now because i think even the food giants are realizing that dieting has worked out not so great for so many people that they've kind of even shifted away from even using the word dieting or weight loss so again we're kind of in this new era now where they're very acknowledging that not only are there are there are there ultra processed food products problematic but their their dieting methods are problematic too and so they're kind of moving beyond that even now is there any way to like do a class action lawsuit against them or against individuals like say howard moskowitz yeah well um um so one of the things that lawyers have looked at and i open hooked with the case of a teenager who sued mcdonald's for making her overweight this was back in 2000 2001 she got slaughtered in in court but she did get some help from attorneys who were able to beat tobacco and win that gigantic settlement from big tobacco back in the late 90s and by introducing kind of the the addiction element to her situation and the judge was really interested in that he said because he said look the companies can argue that you know we know what's in their products well to do is read the label but if there is some element to this that's addictive and we can't see that on the label that could certainly shed new light on this question of personal responsibility and i think that there's i think this was a chance that attorneys couldn't come along now and go after the food industry not just with an addiction claim but also with what ultimately led to the defeat of big tobacco and and big powerful reforms imposed on tobacco was going after them not for the health of smoking but for the cost of of treating people whose health was ruined by smoking that's what those big cases were about in the big settlement back in the 1990s and so i think somebody could make the argument that big food could be held accountable for the tremendous health cost of the deterioration to our health caused by their product overall well if there is one sign me up i'd love to be one of the plaintiffs because i i i'm like you i'm not as forgiving i feel there was some evil involved i understand that the business of business is business but when your business is hurting people i mean come on yeah and you know they're they're just that's why i sent this tweet out this morning right and and by the way if people want to reach me email me they can go to my website it's moss books dot u s moss books dot u s um i'm putting all the interviews i'm doing for hooked on there so it's a lot of fun following on i was on cbs this morning last week and morning joe on friday there's some really good ones coming up not not not uh this one especially that we're on now with aj but um um my email is on there too and people should feel free to reach out to me if i can for whatever reason and i will and and i and i will uh i will respond well i gotta say you've been on my bucket list i've interviewed probably over 500 people but i really appreciate this and i think if it wasn't for the pandemic you'd be so busy with all your speaking engagements so that's one bright spot so we have dr john mcdougall watching live he's a previous guest on this show a multiple best-selling author and he said are you familiar with the work of dr neil barnard who wrote the cheese trap where they showed that the casomorphine that this pro this protein in dairy is also addictive yeah and you know i am familiar with that and again i'm i'm not a nutritionist right and i'm not a scientist and so i have to defer to experts um and you know i do watch with some trepidation kind of the debate that's out there among people who view fat as the enemy or dairy is the enemy or sugar as the number one enemy and just from my vantage point what what i'm looking at is how the industry kind of uses those three salt sugar fat and then all of these other elements we've been talking about it's kind of equal opportunity tools or weapons if you have in their hands to get us to like their products so so sometimes i get the feeling that the processed food industry kind of loves it when we focus too much on one of their elements because they can do things to adjust to that right as we're seeing with meatless hamburgers now right they can even take the meat out of hamburgers and still deliver as fast food and so um so i love the scientists who are doing that work looking at those particular things um but but i but i'm not smart enough to sort of comment on it well dr john mcdougall also comments that you look trim and healthy and he wonders what your personal diet is yeah so um thank you for that especially because i just turned 65 which enabled me to get vaccinated in new york and so life is looking very optimistic here um you know my diet is also about sort of turning the tables on the food companies and looking for ways to um take back convenience so you know i am doing a lot of the cooking for the family now because my wife works for a big hospital system and she's been crazy busy for the last year as you can as you can imagine um and so you know when i walk into the spaghetti sauce aisle instead of buying a jar of pre-made pasta sauce which can have some brands the equivalent of a couple of oreo cookies worth of sugar or sweetness in them you know i'm buying that you know can of whole plum tomatoes and bringing it home and i have a spaghetti sauce recipe down to 93 seconds now granted the more it simmers the better it is but you don't even have to chop the onions for this recipe you just chop that sucker in half and put it in the sauce and the beautiful onion it just kind of dissolves into the sauce over time so my point being that for me personally i'm not abstaining from all processed food but because i'm able to again i can reach into a bag of potato chips and get away and get that hand out of there with just one handful i'm more about kind of turning the tables on them and using those products um to to my advantage rather than letting them take advantage of them and so i'm trying to do as much cooking as possible trying to cook from scratch i'm making food that i can tell what it is when i put it on the table one of the definitions of ultra processed food is you can't tell what went into this stuff it's so highly engineered you can't pronounce you can't pronounce it most of the time well you can't pronounce it but also just looking at it and tasting it and not only that but i've noticed too you don't even need to chew many of these products because they have so much oil in them that they just kind of melt in your mouth by design for that kind of mouth feel and i think that's one of the way to tell one of the ways to tell good food from bad in the grocery store is do i have to chew this and i think you're going to be and chewing is kind of a speed thing right it slows you down it gets the body ready for kind of what's coming um and so so i'm looking at cooking foods that we can chew and we can see and the process of cooking and engaging my kids in that process too and in a in a conversation about food not preaching to them that broccoli is good for you but just kind of you know talking to them about why broccoli doesn't have like the marketing and advertising like like tv dinners have and and that well it was from your work that i learned about this concept of vanishing calorie density which i found fascinating because the way i look at calorie density the work of dr barbara rolls is what i teach to people to lose weight that makes sense because we're eating foods that are high in fiber and water that we have to chew but with this vanishing calorie density i mean there's no chewing involved and so how does the brain even know you've eaten when you haven't even chewed well that was the trick they discovered and you have to love the language that the processed food industry uses when they're when they're talking to each other about maximizing the allure the product they know that when you put something like a cheese puff in your mouth you press the tongue to the roof it melts and it sends a signal to the brain which goes oh oh i guess the calories disappeared too i might as well keep eating and then they called that the banishing caloric density which to them was like a really great thing so dr doug lyle asks what are some of the most important points that you would like the world to know yeah so one it's not our fault um overeating is not a matter of free will we are designed by nature to be drawn to food and to overeat which used to be for most of our existence a really good thing and the problem is that these food companies in the last 50 years have changed the nature of our food to make overeating an everyday thing and while they have incredible power we still have the ability to decide what we want to eat and how much of it and i think in part by understanding exactly what they're doing to get us hooked in their products and using that to our advantage to turn the tables and take back these things that the companies took from us whether it's salt sugar fat or convenience or inexpensiveness or or calories or fuel or variety or color i think that's where our solution is going to lie long term um not for people who have overpowering cravings where abstention is the only thing that makes sense for them at that moment but for the rest of us and even for them hopefully at some point in their lives this sort of taking back control of these products changing how we value food rather than letting these companies dictate to us how we value food um that's where i think the revolution in this whole area lies and and so i thank everybody for for for buying hook and reading it because i think it'll it'll help not just you but all of your family and friends who who may be still uncertain about what causes overeating or what causes our trouble with food um to realize again that it's not us it's it's the companies any chance that will ever have a tax on these foods or a warning label that's what i'd like to see you know just it's they can sell them if they want but not make them so cheap that's part of the problem i think if it was a lot more expensive there might be fewer users just yeah i think this is a chance i think there was some effort as i recall in california to put a warning label on some on some foods some cities have actually put a sugar tax right on soda um and it does it does i think i i think the data that's coming in shows that it does work because look you know we love money as much as we we love you know um cheapness and and yummy junk food right so it does seem to work in the sense of nudging us to make better purchase decisions in the grocery store which which you know i i kind of love that i do yeah well everybody seriously please buy this book by if you have a red so i mean i want you to buy hook because it's out now but also if you haven't read salt sugar and fat it does it does set the stage a little bit for your next book and what is your next book after hook maybe a cookbook yeah well i don't think so i'm going to defer to you for that absolutely and i you know you've got some really great recipes i know so but speaking of recipes i'd love to close out by showing a little a little 60-second video where i do some cooking in my kitchen to illustrate kind of what we're talking about when we're talking about empty calories and snack foods and these snack foods having um having lots and lots of oil in them to sort of create that mouth feel in their textures and so i have just this little snippet i did in the same kitchen my kitchen behind us just a couple of weeks ago and i think i think people would get a kick out of it if you want to i'm going to show you that right now but i know i won't be able to come back to thank you so much for your time from the bottom of my heart your your work has helped so many it will continue to help so many people and and just like i said i i know i'm not crazy i don't it's not that i lack willpower that this is a biological disease that some people aren't vulnerable to it so they it's sort of like people that aren't alcoholics would might tell an alcoholic would just push yourself away from a bar there are people despite what we look like that really just these foods are just not for us and you have proven that this is real that food addiction at least for some of us is real so thank you so much for your work i really do appreciate it well thank you for those kind words so now we will play this video and just give me a second i've got to uh gotta share my screen that'll just be a minute share screen i practiced this all day yesterday you'd think i would it's for some reason you're showing up so why can't i get you know maybe um maybe maybe i'm nervous i'm so sorry i'm trying to no worries you want me to leave and then um yeah i know that sounds terrible yes i want you to leave let's see if it shares let's see did it share now yes but i did it okay perfect i practiced this this is only the second guest ever that i've been nervous for here we go one bag of fritos one lighter and one bonfire in the making i'm michael moss and what's in these well there's corn and ah there's corn oil that's why they're burning the oil makes these like jet fuel in the body too there's 1440 calories in this little bag people who climb icy mountains have a neat little trick they smash and sprinkle these on their food for the huge amounts of energy they need if you're at home not climbing mountains you probably want to avoid eating this whole bag and it's 1440 calories for one snack if you can hold back that is and for a lot of people that's a big if one bag well there we go let's see if i can stop something share i am not well thank you so much again i really appreciate it and and i wish you the very best in all your future books and if i can do anything to support you i would love to thank you same to you and thanks all of you for watching another episode of chef aj live please come back at 11 o'clock when we have a wonderful cooking demo with chef kelly williamson take care

Channel: CHEF AJ

Views: 17,476

Keywords: chef aj, chef aj recipe, plant based, plant based diet, diet, vegan, healthy, weight loss, food addiction, podcast, author, michael moss, are you hooked on food

Id: NfUGhvKsEUk

Length: 69min 26sec (4166 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021