Salt Sugar Fat - Michael Moss

[Music] [Music] you have Michael Moss on campus today my name is Sharon Kazmir and I'm the director of the food studies program here at Hofstra food studies is our newest minor on campus and we invite all students to investigate what the minor has to offer there are brochures in the back and you'll see that it's an interdisciplinary minor that draws in a lot of departments in the Hofstra College of Liberal Arts and Sciences but also in the in other schools including communication and allied health sciences and such so we invite you to think about food studies and to perhaps register for the food studies class it's being offered and fall of 2019 so if you're looking at your course schedule and find yourself needing an interdisciplinary studies course please by all means we have a wonderful course on offer so we have Michael Moss today and we want to welcome him to campus Michael is an investigative reporter who's worked at New York Newsday for almost ten years The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times for over a decade Michael won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on food safety issues in the beef industry his reporting on a government animal research center in Nebraska is featured in the new film eating animals Michael's book salt sugar fat how the food giants hooked us was number one on the New York Times bestseller list and he's at work on a new book that'll be out soon titled hooked food and free will Michael's work is a testament to the vital importance of investigative journalism and deep research in our everyday lives on behalf of the food studies program I welcome Hofstra University and thank all of you for being here and I just did say also that we have co-sponsors I forgot to say that philosophy sociology anthropology geography global studies so thank you to all those departments for collaborating and welcome to Michael Moss Thank You Sharon and it's um it's so fabulous to be here thank you for having me and congratulations for going through such a fantastic school I have a a rising junior who goes to school almost up on the Canadian border where spring comes one day before last classes so he's totally envious of you and I brought with me today my Prezi which has the Sherlock Holmes footprints because for me going inside the world of the food manufacturers it's like has been like a detective story so I'm kind of gonna walk you I'm kind of gonna walk you through that but but first I had a question did everybody have like a good healthy breakfast this morning [Music] did anybody not excellent well I'm glad I glad some of you didn't because even though I got this badge once from a group food activist group I'm not the food police in fact this is my normal breakfast which I had today so you're not going to learn a lot about nutrition from me you have professors here and yourselves know more about nutrition than I do but I hope we're gonna learn something about how the food corporations look at nutrition and look at you and do everything they can to get you to to love their love their products so we'll get started I'm going to talk into fast because I I'm really looking forward to your questions I don't want to use all of the time um in 2002 Nestle which at the time was the largest food manufacturer in the world paid two point six billion dollars for this brand arguably one of the least healthy items in the foot stirrups food story net and a poster child for let's say exuberant eating and five years later Nestle purchased this drink um to help it market to one of the grimmest aspects of the food system every year some two hundred thousand people in the US have their stomachs surgically shrunk to help them cope with cope with food and eating gorge on hot pockets you're gonna eat through a straw get them fat get up thin basically I'm reading from page 337 of salt sugar fat and it and I always laugh by the way when I see the cover because um Random House had a Russian artist in upstate New York read the book and then go into his grocery store to find all of his favorite products which he brought back to the studio and then he very carefully ripped out the letters and you can still see the with marks on them and rearrange the letters to reflect really what's going on inside these products and how salt sugar fat is so important to this company's so and and and I thought I'd tortured Nestle pretty well in the book so imagine my surprise when the book came out and I think it was maybe two summers later when I got a call from none other than the head of the research and development division of Nestle on this lovely campus and Lake Geneva what do you me to come over and give a talk to their R&D chiefs from around the world I mean this is a company with some 300 PhD scientists who have invented and nurture what they call their billionaire brands one of the one of the scientists joke to me that Nestle is like a Swiss bank that prints food they are so rich and I remember I and of course I had to pay my way over there being a journalist that's what you do and my my rising junior was a little worried about his college tuition so he said looked at I hope you're buying a one-way ticket cuz there's no way Nestle's gonna let you out of there once you're gonna lock you up and throw you in the Swiss dungeon but no the the head of our idea shirred me that they were actually trying to turn a corner and they needed to know all the bad things they had done in order to start doing some good things for people so I went and this is the room right before I talked to their research and development executives and I gave them kind of the full double-barreled 90-minute Michael Moss talk on salt sugar fat and how the food science with this and we don't have we don't have time for that full for that full show today but I can give you kind of the cliff notes of what I told the Nestle executives and I started out by by telling that I was actually fairly new to food in 2008 I was working for the New York Times I was in Algeria actually writing about terrorism when a couple of FBI agents showed up the nearest I was looking for me I had been traveling to Iraq tormenting the Pentagon for failing to equip American soldiers and Iraqi soldiers with armor and I got in some trouble in Algeria and was ordered home to find something new to do it I mentioned and I mentioned that part of my reporting career only to make the point that I went from one war to another I was having lunch with or a meeting with my editor up in the 14th floor lunch room at the time since she goes well and I was trying to picture some story about like us farm sales overseas or something related to their work I used to do she goes well Michael how do you feel about peanuts and I started laughing I go back to like tear gas sales and whoever she was no no no hear me out there's been an outbreak of Salmonella in peanuts made by a factory on the Georgia Alabama border we can't blame China for this one people as people are getting sick all over the country and parents this is even junk food parents are giving these peanuts to their kids up to you know as a healthy food so I went down and took a look and sure enough this kind of like window opened up on this trillion-dollar industry and it was clear in this sense in this case that they had lost track of their ingredient chain because weeks and weeks were going by after this outbreak and the large snack food companies who are using these peanuts in their products was still trying to figure out in fact if they were using these particular peanuts or not so they could initiate a recall and that reporting on peanuts um took me to Minneapolis where I met Stephanie Smith here who had a hamburger at her mom's house on Sunday supper and a week later she was in a forced coma which she came out of it paralyzed from the waist down and that sort of took me into the world of the mead industry where ecoli continues to be a a deadly and ravaging problem for them because they're intentionally losing track of their food chain in order to avoid costly recalls and I was having dinner with one of my best sources once in Seattle who tests food for pathogens for the meat industry and he said you know Michael is as tragic as these incidents of food contamination are you really should look at something my industry and use don't hear the process be intentionally adds to their products um in order for a well for lots of reasons and he was mostly concerned about salt and that got me looking at salt and then sugar and then fat as this as this unholy trinity on which the processed food industry relies on in getting us in keeping us hooked and and look I mean to be sure we've we've always known that eating you know too much of this stuff can make us unhealthy overweight what-have-you and there's been some other stuff that we have contributed to the situation um starting in the nineteen fifties really nineteen sixty the percentage of women working outside of the home dramatically increased which cut back or made it much more difficult for us to have you know meals at home cook from cooked by scratch in this plate right into sort of the whole convenience thing that the food companies were into there was also a moment in the 1980s when parents stopped saying to their kids stop snacking you don't snack in between meals I mean the French still think we're crazy like why would you want to ruin your appetite for one of the best moments of the day when family and friends get together for like a long slow meal and then there's one other sort of fact and we began snacking and huge amounts so that now on average um we're getting the equivalent of a fourth meal in just snacks that we have during the during the daytime and by the way you guys standing there's room to sit on the sides you're certainly welcome to come up and to hang out if you if you get tired of standing back there um and then the last thing is that and the food companies will point this out I said look you know it's not like we're forcing people to eat sweet stuff especially I mean we are born loving sweet taste in a way that they have found it to be especially fun to sort of run with and where's my victim I lost track of Alessandra there we are please come up we have little demonstration I haven't done this before but I wanted to demonstrate to you just how born we are with with a sweet taste so we've got we have 8 ounces of nice water and this nutrition student if I can open this is going to demonstrate to us just how much sweetness in drinks or what have your kids like and I know because when I was a kid I got to mix my own kool-aid with my own sugar and there is no way I stopped at their recommended about soap Alexandra Ella Center Alexandra so we're going to put into this class um a teaspoons of sugar it's only eight ounces of water but I've sex [Music] so we are now at the level I'm not gonna make you drink this we are now because we have somebody else we are now at the level we are now at the level that adults like and sweetness so keep going so now to get to the amount add more we're gonna get to the level the kids like the optimum amount of sweetness inter product one that's fine too yeah we've got 12 so I don't have to victimize you because it turns out we have a 10 year old in the audience who's gonna come up and try this drink you know it's not even dissolving enough so you're only probably getting like 6 teaspoons and I'm told you don't drink pure water normally so just try that see what you think oh it's pretty sweet so according to scientists who work for the cookie companies and you can sit down now I thank you so much pretty sweet the know you can set that to thank you I might call you back though or maybe not that is the average amount of sweetness that kids love right so we're born with that sweet taste and it's a it's it's a it's a really sort of important contest you know any kind of defense of the food companies because look one of their main defenses look we're only providing people with what they want we're not like charities or philanthropies they were we're we're we're we're um we're companies doing what all companies want to do and in fact I should say to that that that's my takeaway from them too which is that you know the this is not an evil empire that intentionally set out to make us unhealthy or otherwise ill from their products these are companies doing what all companies want to do which is make as much money as possible by selling as much product as possible the problem comes in there deep reliance on salt sugar fat to sell those products and I was incredibly lucky to come across this trove of documentation um that allowed me to identify key people in the food industry who I was able to meet and talk to and they're putting me at the table of the largest companies as they're formulating and marketing and making all kinds of decisions about their their their products and the overwhelming sense and that's what salt sugar fat is based on the documents and the interviews of their own people and the overwhelming sense you get from that material is that this is an industry that's striving to get us not just to like their products but to want more and you know as an investigative reporter I'm supposed to I supposed to follow the money and there's a lot of money to follow and in this world of food but I really fell in love with the language that the food companies use talking to each other about their efforts to get us to want more and more they talk about making food craveable snackable and here's my favorite word putting engineering they say mauritius and the food right i mean these are not these are not English majors these are bench chemists and marketing people using their own language to communicate with each other about about their work and one of the people I met who I fell in love with is Howard Moskowitz here he was he was trained in high math at Queens College and then experimental psychology at Harvard Howard was responsible for many of the biggest icons in the grocery store because he figured out ways to optimize their allure to get us to want more and more and he walked me through one of his recent creations which was a new flavor of soda for dr. pepper in which he started with some three or four thousand consumer taste tests around the country tasting 5060 formulas of sweetness each one just slightly different than the next and then took the data and threw it in his computer and did his high math regression analysis thing and out comes these bell curves like here except at the top of it is not like the dreaded middle C that some students get graded on um it's the perfect amount of sweetness not too little not too much and it was Howard Moskowitz who coined the term the Bliss point which you might have heard of which is how the industry described internally its efforts to optimize the sweetness in the products and and the problem isn't that they've perfected the Bliss point for things we we know and expect to be sweet like so at our ice cream or cookie the food companies have marched around the grocery store adding sugar to products that didn't used to be sweet before so now bread has added sugar and a Bliss point for sweetness um yogurts can still have as much sugar per serving as some of them as ice cream pasta sauce one of my favorite parts in the and in the grocery store to kind of marvel at there are some brands that have had the equivalent of a couple of Oreo cookies with the sweetness in a tiny half cup serving and what this has done is created and expectant seeing us that everything should be sweet so when you drag your ten-year-old over to the produce section and get them to try to eat more of those things we should all probably be eating more of and they get those those other those other tastes that Aristotle wrote about right the the bitter and the sour you're gonna get a rebellion on your hands and of course that explains my boys here for much older this now but this was our typical you know it's basically Halloween everyday in the in the grocery store with amazing kinds of sugar I mean one of the things they do is they don't just use sugar they use different kinds of sugar just in case we've started to get a little nervous and start reading the labels so who can guess how many kinds of sugar you can find on grocery store food labels anybody feeling brave today no hands come on somebody take a wild guess yes 14 very low 56 these are only some of the nice sugary things you'll find on the ingredient label in case you're in case you're poking around and of course it's not just sugar that they get excited about could we have our ten year old back up here it's so exciting to have a real customer I would like you these are fabulous by the way I bought two bags and my wife put it on your tongue don't even chew it and tell us what taste sensation you get immediately I'm putting on your tongue do you know your taste profiles what are you sweetness sour what's your tongue picking up sourness how much saltiness thank you so much you can sit down salt is so important then right so so chips have salt on the surface they also have they also have by design typically 50% of the calories come from fat because fat provides what the industry calls the mouthfeel it's what makes that chip melt in your mouth you almost don't even aptitude and frankly it makes it makes so much of the process food that's sold in the grocery store melt in your mouth so we don't even need to chew or use or use teeth in it at one point I forgot what this is oh yes let me touch the salt so we're gonna put you on the spot this is your soon to be SAT quiz here now you can do it from down there it's not a trick question and you can probably guess what the answer is just the way I formulated the question what's your guess so how many types of salt this the food industry used make fabricate that goes into process food you what 512 or 40 yeah exactly I mean of course right I'm gonna put the biggest number there it is forty kinds of result if you conclude kind of all the shapes and sizes of the salt crystals and the additives that they used for for various purposes and at one point in the reporting I did I went to the food companies and look I mean salt has become like this public enemy number one I was just on the phone with a older friend of mine just before coming here and he was having some heart issues and the doctor told him no more salt and he's like I mean he was a guy who craved those Costco rotisserie chickens which you're just like dripping with sodium right so becomes an issue as you as you get older but I went for the gummies look everybody's like wanting you to cut back on salt like what's the problem here why don't you just cut back on salt so they um said well the number of companies had helped me out but Kellogg's was the most fun they said come on in and we'll show you so this is me going into the secret Kellogg's R&D facility where they not only talk to me about salt but they sat me down to show me why salt is so important to them um they had made for me special versions of their products which they prepared without any salt at all and so we started with the we started with the Cheetos actually which normally I could eat day in and day out but without salt the versions that they made um we couldn't swallow them they stuck to the roof of our mouths because salt adds texture and solubility to their products we moved on to the frozen Eggo waffles is that their brand put him in the toaster and they came out looking and tasting like straw because salt adds color and also the taste um without which those those frozen waffles were really really horrible and then the funnest part was we moved to the cornflakes I even know cornflakes had salt in them but they do for a really good reason because we put it in the bowl out of some milk took a bite and before I could say anything the chief spokeswoman for the company who was sitting with me gets this look on her face she swallows and she blurts out metal I taste metal and et al and I was thinking yeah I see I thought one of the fillings in my mouth came out it was like sloshing around in my mouth I was getting so much metal taste and the chief technical officer who's in charge of kind of all things scientific for the company um starts chuckling a bit he says yeah not not everybody will get that taste sensation but one of the beautiful things about salt for us is that it will mask cover up some of the off notes bad tastes that are inherent to many processed foods in this case they were adding so many vitamins and minerals to the cereal to make it attractive to people that those things have a really heavy taste if you don't add enough salt to sort of cover that up and that light bulb went on in my head after that meeting and Kellogg's in fact I was driving back to the airport in Detroit they were out in Battle Creek Michigan and I'm I'm on the cell phone with my editors and you'll never believe what just happened I mean I'm now realizing that these companies are more hook than we are on using salt sugar pepper because they're using them not just for taste but they're using them as preservatives as masking agents as all these sort of industrial purposes which explains why safer salt the salt shaker on their table the amount of salt that you add and cooking your own food it's just a tiny at most kind of quarter of the amount of salt that goes into your diet the rest of it being the rest of it being processed foods so that was surprising number one surprise number two meeting these high-level executives at the largest companies who are willing to talk to me is that they don't eat their own they know better especially when they get into trouble um and one of the things they know is that they're using extraordinary science to make their their products better actually I need Alexandra vacuum Thank You silly and again falling in love sorry about the noise falling in love with the language that they use again um helped me understand the power I'm gonna torture you with is so please take one of these puffs items place it on your tongue and then just kind of press it against the roof of your mouth you don't even have it all right they are huge fact you're gonna get the whole bag just for that um and I think you'll notice the sensation and what happens to the cheese puffs I think you didn't really need to chew you could have just pressed and it would have it would have dissolved a little bit you're chewing you can't talk but you got that sensation of it sort of disappearing thank you you can disappear no please take that you're absolutely just what a nutrition major wants right so the food companies call that the banishing caloric density I'll say that again vanishing caloric density which is their understanding of what happens in your brain in your body when when the food disappears because it's melted because of all that great mouthfeel fat in it that sends a signal to your brain which normally would tell us we like slow down don't eat too much but in this case the signal is ah that food disappeared so did the calories Alexander you might as well eat that whole bag because I'm not getting any of the calories have vanished so I love that expression for them that's just that's just some of the kind of extraordinary science that they're using but it's not it's not just the science of salt sugar fat even though that's what what my book is called they have they have this incredible ability to sort of figure out the deepest emotions in us that drive us to eat to like their products into what more and more of them without even being hungry and I apologize for this oh that's uh Cheetos this slide wow that's really bad um I'll tell you what it is this is the very first or in the production line for what became a huge product Lunchables um because I was able to meet and spend I wish I had some to demonstrate with you you're getting you're getting oh you don't like it so you're an anomaly [Music] Lunchables was an I spent a whole chapter meeting and writing about the invention of the Lunchables in part because at one point the people inventing these and they had a problem they had like too much processed meat too much processed cheese they were refining trying to find a new way to sell it to people and they came out with this this idea of the Lunchables and at one point and they're thinking like there's like no way kids are going to eat these then they came up with the cold pizza Lunchables and cold hamburger taco called pancake Lunchables and the parents are and there's no way my kids are gonna eat these things but the kids loved them and it was the CEO of Oscar Mayer the subsidiary of General Foods and then Kraft who we're the Lunchables were invented said you know these are less about food than they are about you know the emotional power of Lunchables because they figured out that when kids go into the lunchroom and pull out their Lunchables out of their box it was wrapped and marketed so fabulously that they were the cat's meow of the of the lunchroom and so they came up with that slogan aimed at kids you know all day you got to do what they say but lunchtime is all yours and still on the marketing theme the other character in salt sugar fat who I love is this guy Jeff redone for 20 years he was um he was one of the fiercest warriors at this company he rose to become president of coca-cola for North America and South America and he walked me through cokes invention of the supersize me phenomena where you could walk into a restaurant and for the same price get as much coke as you could possibly drink the the warlike language that they use in talking about their fight with Pepsi where they talk about their customers not as their best customers but as heavy users people were drinking a couple of cokes a day and the incredible precise targeting they use to get kids to start drinking coke where they practice what they call up and down the street marketing which basically describes the their trucks going from corner store to corner store where they owned the racks that real estate the coolers in those stores on knowing that when a child like Tatyana here goes into a corner store for the first time with a little bit of her own spending money she will become what the industry calls brand loyal and not only kind of the marketing they do it in the grocery store to where they will put devices on on people's heads to measure their eye movements and so they and so they knew where we focus our attention when we walk into the aisles of the grocery store and so the grocery store is laid out in a way to get us to make impulsive decisions in kind of the perfect way that increases sales and so who can gas that's the college boy right there oh it's been some time isn't it my youngest son but who can guess this is staged obviously our normal chopping doesn't quite look like this but who can guess where they put the most sugary salty fattest products in the grocery aisle yes sir at eye level in the center of the aisle knowing that that's where from the devices they measure I move is that's where our attention goes and so if you want some god-awful things like like plain oatmeal or even the plain Cheerios you're going to have to look down or up high or at the end of the at the end of the aisle and then finally I'm telling the lovely people at Nestle that one of the remarkable discoveries from University of a journalist and I start the book with this moment because way back in 1999 um none other than the largest food companies get together for a secret meeting in Minneapolis at the old Pillsbury flour headquarters um where they've come together to talk about none other than obesity and one of their own gentlemen at Kraft gets up and he starts pleading with them to start doing something on behalf of consumers to lessen their reliance on salt sugar fat this is one of the slides that he shows the food company executives um showing the increase of obesity around the country over the years and he sits down he makes it he makes a very impassioned speech and he sits down and one of the one of the most powerful people in the room he was he was head of general General Mills at the time um gets up and and he's visibly sort of angry at the at the at this at this affront to to the companies by one of their own and he says look you know we care about consumers if you want to find like a low-salt item in the grocery store it's there we make low-fat products but there is no way we're going to mess around with the company jewels as they called them meaning salt sugar fat if that's going to do increase our sales because we are companies and that's what we do and by and large and I also mentioned an essay by the way to that one of the one of the fabulous moments for me to in reporting salt sugar fat was realizing the extent to which the processed food industry has interacted with the tobacco industry starting the late eighties the largest tobacco company in North America Philip Morris bought General Foods this old conglomerate Tarrytown New York and then Kraft and became a single largest manufacturer of processed food in North America through up through about the mid early to the mid 2000s and you can not only can you see through the documents sort of the tobacco managers conveying kind of their tricks and methods for selling tobacco cigarettes to people to the food people but at one point in about 2000 tobacco guys started to warn the food guys that they were going to end up having as much trouble of result sugar fat and obesity as the tobacco guys were having over smoking and cancer remember this was 2000 when they just had that huge settlement with the attorneys general and the tobacco companies that they pay more than two billion dollars in compensation to States for the health care cost um so those two things together as a journalist told me that that is certainly when the clock starts ticking on the companies because that's when they know from their own people that they are to some large extent culpable responsible for at that point obesity was maybe running I want to say like 30 percent it's up to a fraction of a percent below forty percent right there forty percent of American adults are are now obese meaning on average high person that might be at least 35 pounds overweight and obese seems kind of a bad measure you can be totally healthy and be obese but it's one of the best measures that we have of our losing control over our food over our eating so that was the cliff notes for the spiel I give to uh Nelson I sat down there was kind of some polite and then I spent a couple days swimming around in the research labs of Nestle where they were impressing upon me all the things that they do to they are doing to make their products better so they're they're putting the salt on their products only on the surface so they get a bigger bang for their salt book if you will and out on the inside they are they're switching to non-caloric sweeteners like stevia they were fiddling around with fat molecules in order to make increase the surface area of the molecule so we get more mouthfeel for the for the amount of actual fat we're getting and it all sounds really good when you talk to nutritionists and Alexander is gonna second me on this right the first thing that they think of when they think about a healthier diet and it's a bit of confession on my part because as much as I focus on salt sugar fat that's not what's on the first the top of their mind the top of their mind is getting us to eat more of this stuff am i right yes yes I'm right yeah if we can fill up half our plates with fruits and vegetables vegetables and fruits you know we're kind of more than halfway home to to having a healthier diet so I started to think about kind of all the ways that the food system might be changed going forward now because so many more people are caring about what they're putting in their bodies and this is a perfect opportunity now to kind of do what the food giant's haven't been able to do and in fact this is where you guys come in and there's some incredible stuff happening out there I mentioned Jeffrey Dunn coca-cola visit him he quit coca-cola and discussed and went to work or if one of the largest farms in the country that grows carrot so not only that but he took the marketing schemes that he used to coke to get us to drink coke to try to get us to drink carrots and so he started making these advertisements we're eating karates was suddenly fun because one of the things we figured out you can't preach to people about health and the food right that just doesn't work the government's been trying to do that for years and years now and we haven't increased our vegetable fruit intake so the idea is maybe we can have some fun with with advertising and do some advertising marketing in that part of the discovery store that has to do with produce the other the other person who switched sides was was the inventor of lunchable who went to work and helped the inventor somebody who came up with a with an incredibly cool new way of going of going after vending machines and created this machine that sells salads and he's got like a these are now at O'Hare Airport you might see them there'd a bunch of places around 7-eleven and switching sides the inventor of the Lunchables is using kind of the psychology that he Betty learned with Lunchables to help Luke as the owner of the farmer's fridge figure out ways to better market healthy stuff to us um they're also going a fleet s' after athletes and trying to get them to pitch less of this stuff sorry that's at Pepsi little blur and pitching more of this everybody knows and so there's a campaign underway because athletes and celebrities are so important to kids especially in in shaping their likes in their and their Dixon dislikes and then lo and behold even some produce growers are starting to create advertisements to pitch their products in a way that you never saw before because that's been one of the one of the hardest things about produce is that they don't get the advertising money that the rest of the grocery store does this is one of my favorite ads for broccoli rabe you you which Andy boy which grows broccoli raab in California so I love that ad because it says healthy without saying healthy right it says fierceness and strength and power which from a marketing perspective is I think more effective um and I even tried my own hand at this idea of marketing of marketing vegetables in fact I'm still stunned at the year times let me do this so I went to Madison Avenue and I looked for an advertising firm that I could talk into doing for me an entirely fictitious campaign for a vegetable and then giving out the punchline that it was actually broccoli um and then I wrote a strike actually took a while to find one because most of them were so busy working for the 90% of the grocery store that doesn't sell produce but they didn't have time but it didn't manage to find a company and they went to work and not only did they invent a marketing campaign for broccoli for me but they allowed me to film their genius at work when they were trying to figure out how to do this and I have just a couple of snippets from the video you can find on the New York Times website but here's the here's the first I hope you remember George so at one point um and they were so sweet because they were having so much fun and one of them came up to me and one of the people because thank you thank you I spend my whole career selling stuff that isn't healthy it's so much fun to be doing something finally that's good for people what else is that I mean it's easy to sell junk really hard to sell healthy stuff to people and at one point they go look you know Michael you haven't given us any money here advertising budget anything so we're gonna start really simple we're gonna do some social media and we're gonna pick a fight with like another item in the grocery store and then Craig you know they're gonna go out there Jesus so cheese puffs or potato chips or whatever and they go no no no no no you're forgetting you're forgetting your own chapter in salt sugar fat where you talk about the coca-cola Pepsi Wars which as you discovered were entirely bloodless because whenever Pepsi got Michael Jackson to do an ad for them and Coke came back with whatever ad the day that they had you know all boats rose in the soda aisle it brought attention to kind of all soda and help everyone so it was almost bloodless war year oversaw in the grocery store they had this energy thing going on so these guys decided to pick a fight with somebody else and in the grocery store how to change the visual communication the visual style of in culture sorry that falls off there you said is it a bro okay right so that's how advertising correct me from wrong but if that's how advertising gonna get their juices going or they crack like stupid jokes like that but the point he was making was that maybe we can have some fun to broccoli so they came up with this fictitious campaign just for me um doing all kinds of fun advertising for broccoli and they they dropped broccoli into volcanoes and they did this but mostly they picked a fight with none other than kale so you can imagine the calls I got from the Kail people they're still calling me going come on why are you picking on this well cuz the point is you know advertising campaign like this all boats will rise in the produce ha but here's but here's an interesting part for you guys so completely fictitious I did the story ran New York Times Magazine went away and then none other than some students sad I think this was yell got together they needed a little project and him that sound familiar to anybody and they took these broccoli kale advertisements and they put them up for real on billboards and stores in one of the biggest food deserts in the country which is New Haven you've got the rich school and an impoverished community where people weren't even getting fresh broccoli but there were a couple of outlets and they managed to do a little test where they doubled the sales of broccoli in a week using the advertising from that um from the advertising from an effect that was so cool and then lastly there's a few of the great things happening out there you know 90% of the farmland in this country is planted in soybeans and field corn as ingredients for the processed food industry the rest has all the other stuff that weakened APIs the vegetables and the fruits and the soybeans and this is a bunch of farmers in the Midwest of all places who are deciding to switch sides stop growing corn and soybeans and start growing things like micrograms and what have you knowing that there's actually a lot of profit to be made in growing fruits and vegetables even though they're harder um kids are starting to get it one of the poorest school districts in New York been Rochester did a whole year program on food where the kids dissected their favorite products figured out just what it is about them that kind of drove them crazy and again to get them to like the pro not just like the products but more and more this is one of the posters that that one of them came up because that color is real really important to the processed food industry the brighter more Neil on the color again think about your grocery store on the sciences the more apt we are to buy that product and to and to eat more of it they also yes it did this cool remix of their favorite products reformulated them to to make them still alluring and tasty but but but healthier for them too and I mention that only because maybe you guys are looking for some school projects where you can go to an elementary school and work with them but there was some there's some terrific curriculum that people are developing for younger kids to introduce them because one of things I wrote about insult sugar fat I forgot to mention is is the Mize of the home economic system classes right I mean teachers girls but also something some boys used to learn how to shop how to cook how to be mindful of food and the ho MEK teachers about in the 1980s started teaching us things that were more pressing at the time things like like teenage parenting or getting a job after high school um and so you don't have much food education going on in classes and lastly before I take your questions um it's really really encouraging to see this kind of attention to food happening all over the country I gave a talk recently in Saudi Arabia to doctors who were dealing with diabetes and there was not only are women allowed to go to college now in Saudi Arabia a new thing but they were coming up with ways to and there's a rampant kind of obesity diabetes problem in Saudi Arabia because they're getting hammered from all sides their own kind of cultural their own kind of cultural bars on women going to gyms and and all of the junk food coming in and so they're finding ways to sort of demonstrate to people just what is exactly in these in these products um and I'm so glad I talked fast because I'd love to have your questions now and if you want to keep in touch we have some more questions you know time for now feel free to email me that's a zero after my name and then she mail and thank you so much for being here so we have questions if you'd like to shout it out or come up to the mic either way ask their questions and let's invite students first it's always to give priority to students and keep it short and we'll get as many questions as possible come on and I think I was gonna say to ask about anything if you want to know about the New York Times journalism my own eating habits already told you about that the French press right feel free yes hi thank you so much for the talk I really enjoyed it and I'm wondering though we you know do you ever look at the role of government and the FDA that has no teeth and what we can do because I think they still subsidize the former super corny so I believe so so I'm just wondering that could have a big impact I did look at that and write about that and in some amazing ways the companies are more powerful than the government agencies is over there supposedly regulating them on our behalf and I and I looked at for example the checkoff systems at the USDA do part of Agriculture has to help the meat and the dairy and the cheese industry sort of market their products in the way the produce doesn't get marketed um I think I came away feeling that the prospects of getting a more aggressive regulatory environment where the government would actually look I mean we still don't have a suggested amount of sugar on the Nutrition Facts label of products even though food advocates have been trying to get that on the label with 30 almost 40 years now actually going back to the 30 years 1990 um so in lieu of kind of the government anybody's sort of thinking the government's can be more aggressive about that I'm more along the lines of thinking of ways that we can get the companies on their own for their own selfish interests to make and sell better food not just food that has less salt sugar and fat in it but the food that has more of the vegetables that we need so I think the prospects for that are much more interesting and encouraging than than having rules come down from the you anybody else a shy talk about the war in Iraq hi thank you so much for coming to speak I just had a question regarding um how you got all these big companies to speak to you candidly about like the truth about their products and why were so willing so here's the deal it's a secret but it's not it's in the book in the in the endnotes um when the tobacco companies settled with the state attorneys general and caved in on tobacco and agreed part of that agreement besides the two hundred and forty billion dollars that they repeated states was that they had to start releasing their internal documents and they went into an archive that's publicly available you can search it yourself now online in those dug and those darkest was not just the tobacco companies doing tobacco things but there was Philip Morris talking communicating with interacting with their food managers at Kraft and so suddenly I had this huge mountain of documents emails and white papers and sales pitches that were prepared internally thinking they would never see the light of day um and it was with those documents to them that I was able to sort of sit myself down at the largest companies and really understand what's going on but they also identified um key people in those industries who never talking to a reporter before but when I called them up and say look I've got this memo you wrote and it's really interesting but I think it's only half the story would you mind sitting down with me and and telling me the rest of the story and I think that I think that would really help besides besides being a good journalism being empathetic was fair feeling that so many of these guys have come to have misgivings about their life work um and to their defense they will argue look we invented these things at a more innocent era before women went went you know getting jobs out of the home and before you know we started snacking and and etc and the world changed in a way that made us more dependent on their products but they were all too willing to sort of bare their souls based on the documents and and my just being interested in them and so I'll check if that's not a screed I know you know like I say it's more of a detective story just they did it and and that's what I was interested in and that's what they were very willing to so to share are you welcome um how do you feel about the keto diet and internment and fast I knew I was gonna get a key to a Christian you better not have a GMO question for him so here's the deal so I'm not a nutritionist um most diets work and then fail if they're too extreme and we can't because we can't stay on them right but the science of nutrition is kind of still so undeveloped to use a polite word that I think if keto works for you and what if for whatever reason you want to be using it then more power to you but I would never I would never preach any particular diet to anybody low fat low sugar or anything I mean I am I am of the mind in my own diet of moderation meat you know eat some of the real fat real salt potato chips but but not too much but I'm lucky I'm a person who can open a bag of potato chips and not feel compelled to eat the whole thing and a lot of people are not in that situation so they need to sort of take some extreme measures drink diet soda for example in order to keep off the real thing that's kind of my nan might not answer to you thank you Hey yes thank you I wanna thank you very much I have read your book I found it very enlightening so I hope that was good yes it was comment by may you bring up salty snacks I don't think this is your book correctly there were studies that were done the crunchiness as a big aspect yeah in addition to the salt and yeah so forth and what research has suggested correctly from wrong that crunch here it is the brain responds positively to that almost at a hypnotic hallucinogenic extent and companies actually yeah no absolutely came from a study out of England looking at looking at or just slipped my mind what are the little chips that are in a kid's cylinder can they were looking Pringles and they did some studies showing that the more noise the Pringle made when you ate it the more apt you were to eat more of those Pringles and frito-lay discovered this too they have in their lab out in Texas a machine that simulates that a jaw chewing and they test chips to perfect the amount of pressure and noise that the chip makes knowing exactly that that the more noise it makes more rapid so they're using color they usually they're using smell oh my god when I went to Kellogg to talk about salt they were whipping up a batch of pop-tarts that had gone bad so it's a huge amount of stuff and they were dumping it in a dumpster and the smell walked it across the factory and took me back to my days as a latchkey kid when I would come home from elementary school and pop a pop-tart into the toaster just and that smell I had not a pop-tart in 40s on years brought me warm instantly right back to that moment so your memory for food which I'm writing about in the next book is also incredibly incredibly powerful so one that's coming from me usually be somebody not known as if food manufactured but they had a product the toothpaste called aim toothpaste campaign that kids like to brush were they what they found out later is because aim was infused with sugar that was my kids like the brush with egg yolks well the company's used to argue that sugar actually wasn't even bad for calories I mean the reason sugar isn't on your Nutrition Facts box now in terms of recommended amount is that the science has been really slow and associated sugar with heart disease and other health problems and for the longest time the only thing that food activists could argue is that sugar cause calories but the cavities but the food companies actually argued and even tried to push back on the on the cavities yes I first of all I just I think one of the reasons that you're able to do this so well is that you don't have a moralistic attitude thank you you know you're not saying oh my god these are evil people we got to destroy them you're just laying the story out I think that's really really good I have a bunch of questions I'll just focus on one what about water we you know used to be able to just drink water now there are so many different kinds of water and they are infused with this there where does water come in if it does yeah so Jeff Dunn who loved Coca Cola before he left he tried to he tried to talk the company into selling more water I mean that's what's sort of so fascinating about into the food studies program here which is it looks food from all different perspectives so what I think of water first thing I think about well first thing I think about is how you know nurses and elementary schools that are getting hammered by obesity even at a young age are not encouraging their kids to drink fruit chew their which has just as much sugar in it no soda they're encouraging them to drink plain water so that's the first thing I think of in terms of water the second thing is plastic bottles I mean I didn't bring my portable water or bottle today but but normally I would because that's certainly the environmental component of bottled water is is one that's sort of on the table when we think about when we think about food and in terms of the flavored waters and that just goes back to what the food companies do and do really well they call it line extensions um where they make one potato chip plain potatoes and then they come up with salt and pepper potato chips and barbecue and if you look in the store now there's probably ten different varieties of potato chips and what that does is give them more space more real estate on the grocery store shelf so it increases their sales and if they can come up with different flavored waters that translates into more space on the water shelf in the grocery store and increase the sales so that's why you're starting to see all these flavored water is out there beyond plain but again I mean if you're somebody who's trying to wean yourself off of soda I mean we're using SodaStream in my house now because besides besides smell and noise and color the bubbles and soda is actually one of the more powerful things besides the sugar and so sell sir um is one of those things that can wean kids off of off of soda and if that's what you need in your house you know and colored and you need colored water then more power to you but that's that's where the companies are coming from in terms of that variety it translates into into sales for them it's a fake kind of variety hello I thanks for speaking to us so I vist I recently visited Mexico and then it was surprising for me to find that I can I can only find coca-cola not pack T there and then so now like coca-cola is part of their like like food counters so I'm just wondering if you have any like Inc size to this whole like you can kind of think Jeff done for that frankly because he is still president of coca-cola when Coke moved into Latin America and South America in fact Jeff had his enlightenment when he went to Brazil and went into one of the favelas which is sort of a lower-income but emerging middle class community in Brazil it was either wasn't Rio was it was the other city and yes well and his marketing guys are taking Minard all excited cos are showing him how they designed a smaller coke which was more affordable and more storable in these tiny homes in the favelas as their way of getting this emerging middle class to use and what coca-cola and Jeff says he just heard a voice in the sky that's and that's actually when he had his turn the kwid and switch sides and what have you so so the coke came from aggressive marketing by the coca-cola company in knowing that especially targeting sort of younger people knowing that when a young person and that's why in fact Jeff's dad worked for coca-cola as a marketing person and he discovered that if you put coke in stadiums where kids are going with their parents to see a ballgame and having one of the most exciting thrilling times of the life and if you could put a coke in their hands at that moment that's going to implant in there and their memory banks in a way that no amount of sort of other advertising can do so that just kind of speaks to the genius of of coke being able to market to people and lo and behold I think Mexico has the second highest obesity rate in the world after the United States thank you thank you first of all sometimes you go to the grocery store and there is things like low-fat low-sugar and all this but the price is double interesting or gluten-free yeah so you know I think there's some quotient going into that which which you know it's depends how excited you are about buying something and they can they can really surprise I mean the other price issue in the grocery store though which is maybe even bigger is that you know a pint of fresh blueberries especially off season will cost as much as a four cheese three-meat two-pound frozen pizza and so if you're a parent meaning to do well by your family with a limited budget what are you gonna do with that money you're gonna buy a kit so they can you know you know feed the whole family or a basket of blueberries and so eating well in the grocery store typically and doing so in a way that sort of excites your family and it keeps them eating well week after week it's typically more expensive than it is to get crap because the produce section is is one of the more expensive parts of the grocery store partly because of our agricultural system where most of our land and most of our resources of the growing ingredients - - highly processed foods and not nuts and fruits and vegetables you yeah bombers I did some work he's gay okay and people in the offices walk around in chef dough walk around him she has told surely high things time and actually got into the factory where they were manufacturing key lime pie okay and impression I got from the staff they've all really thought they were doing something healthy and good was clear yeah they trained themselves to believe that this was to menu was delicious you know but getting the one or two people at the top you have that kind of an impression of people walking around an you factoring in the labs and yeah yeah I think people look they're making food not cigarettes oh by the way one of the fascinating things and looking at the relationship between philip morris and craft and subsidiaries that they hated each other the food people hated the tobacco companies because they were creating death you know sticks and the tobacco companies sneered at the food people because they they didn't have as much control of the grocery store as the tobacco guys did so it was a really really interesting relationship but the food people could look i mean there's nothing inherently bad about potato chips right it's the amount and it's our over dependency so right right right so there's always been kind of this blurry fine line between getting people to like your product and to want more and more to the point where you get cravings and you can't stop eating and i spent a whole chapter in the book writing about this delicious moment at crap when it decides on its own to start reformulating its products cut back on salt sugar fat to help people um reduce their calorie intake and it works really well but but you know in that run up the scientists there who formulate the products were just kind of like they didn't know what to think because they spent their whole lives maximizing the allure of their products and suddenly the company was telling them you know we're gonna put caps on the amount of salt shakers out that you can use and it all worked well except for one thing which is you can't do that unilaterally so when they put their less salt sugar fat cookies on the shelf you know other companies swooped in with their more salt sugar fat cookies sales that crap went down and they almost have to immediately scrap the healthier sort of program so so in one sense I don't even fault them for believing in their in their own product and they like Nestle now believe that cutting back on salt sugar fat is a really great thing to do and they're proud of the work that they're doing um the problem again is that they're clueless when it comes to the real change which is figure out a way to stuff a hot pocket with broccoli and broccoli rabe because those are much more expensive ingredients to deal with so so you you I do see this attitude there and some of them just don't kind of know a lot about nutrition they know about they know about flavor and about yummy-ness but but not the rest of it so so I think you'll get yes companies are like legally allowed to make their calorie like list like 20 to 30 points like off and it actually is have any other margins of error that companies are allowed their ingredients that people don't realize I think that's a good point and um I didn't realize it as much as 20% on calories that's right it's like 20 calories yeah right yeah I think I don't know I'm guessing that's probably true or everything you see on the Nutrition Facts box it's a certain wiggle room and that if you were actually going and test those items um you would actually see um something different than the bottle or you know what's on the box it's like an average for all of the product on certain days yeah but I want to say one thing and I'm a little heretical in this but I've come full circle I mean I love the nutrition facts box don't get me wrong but I've started to think that it could be a little bit of a trap especially these days the companies are finding ways to lower certain ingredients to get us to lower our guard right you can see this in history too and then 80s we were all concerned about sugar and so they lowered sugar and they increase the soldier to fell I'm sorry the fatter that's all because they have to maximize the allure right they're not gonna like cut back by now the 90s was more about fat they came out with low fat but they started added sugar and salt and then now people are more concerned about salt so they increase the sugar in the pen so they're really good at playing around with the nutrient components of their foods and a part of me just says if we pay too much attention to the nutrition facts box and think about food too much as nutritional components right that kind of plays right into their hands because we're forgetting to ask the question well but is this food real I mean okay it's got like some reasonable levels of salt sugar fat but what else does it have does it like real fiber and does it have like real things that unprocessed food I have you know hasn't so that I think ultimately is maybe a better way of thinking about food and not getting even hung up over calories because if you're reading eating real foods and cooking as much as you can yourself and watching the snacking you know it's harder to get too many calories it's a it's a beautiful thing you don't have to think about that stuff and in shaping your own time so what do the manufacturers eat you said they don't eat their product yeah well the Lunchables the Lunchables inventor his is actually his daughter had refused to give Lunchables their kids so they have you know they're making enough money that they have personal trainers so they're getting lots of exercise for example and they're eating what we've just talked about real foods whole foods cooking from scratch you know one person in the family they have enough income that one person can shop and cook from scratch cook real foods themselves so they're they're avoiding kind of the convenience they're able to avoid the convenience of and that's basically the the chief technical officer of crap but somebody who comes to mind he used to run for exercise and keep his weight down on that he blew out his knee and he was one of the people who would come home after work and open a bag of chips and couldn't resist eating the whole thing and so he went cold turkey basically no more snacks for me Beck even stopped drinking alcohol for and wine which he loved as a way of reducing the calories he was getting because he was he wasn't able to run or do any sort of exercise anything so they're they're eating the way that more and more people are wanting to eat either can't afford it or don't yet know better about it's at the very class to buy it in the in the food system those are highly paid executives making products for for most of us who don't have as much as much money or resources

Channel: Hofstra University

Views: 12,078

Rating: 4.8992805 out of 5

Keywords: Hofstra, University

Id: c13hXuBbj9o

Length: 75min 35sec (4535 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2019