Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (51 page)

On one side of the spectrum, Nestlé was churning out epic quantities of a food that was
arguably one of the unhealthiest items in the grocery store—and a major contributor to the obesity epidemic. It’s a frozen, microwavable snack called the Hot Pocket, which Nestlé acquired in 2002 for $2.6 billion and now counts as a prestigious member of its
Billionaire Brands Treasury. In its promotional literature, Nestlé describes the Hot Pocket as a “fully enrobed sandwich that allows you to eat on the go with no mess!” But it’s food on the go that comes with a price. The Pepperoni & Three Cheese Calzone version of the Hot Pocket that I picked up at my local grocery store, for instance, contained well over one hundred ingredients, including salt, sugar, and fat in several configurations along with six permutations of cheese, from “imitation mozzarella” to “imitation cheddar.” A single, eight-ounce calzone delivered 10 grams of saturated fat and 1,500 milligrams of sodium—close to my daily limit for each. It also had nearly six teaspoons of sugar, 600 calories, and, for the retailer’s convenience, enough preservatives for a shelf life of 420 days.
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Nestlé, in response to my questions, said it had acquired Hot Pockets to meet the needs of millennials, especially young males, “as they led the way towards more casual, less formal meals”; that it was improving the product’s nutritional profile and planned to discontinue the calzone; and that it now offered a dozen versions of its alternative brand, Lean Pockets, with whole grain crusts and lighter loads of salt, sugar, and fat.

But on the other end of the spectrum, Nestlé was busy covering its bases in a way not even I could have imagined. In 2007, the company acquired the medical nutrition business developed by the pharmaceutical
firm Novartis, giving Nestlé the means to pursue a solution to one of the grimmest aspects of overeating.
Every year, two hundred thousand obese people in the United States—including kids as young as nine—have their stomachs surgically shrunk to help them cut back on eating. Known as gastric bypass surgery, the procedure itself has inherent surgical risks, but the darkest aspect comes later, when the patients are back home—and find, of course, that the cravings for the rich processed foods that led them to overeat in the first place have not gone away. In the most dire cases, people keep eating so much they burst the surgical bands and require emergency care. But even under the best circumstances, they struggle to get enough of the nutrients we need to survive.

This is where Nestlé comes in. It has begun marketing a line of liquid foods, including a product called Peptamen, which is ingested through a tube, and another, called Optifast, that the surgical patients can drink in coping with their smaller stomachs.
“Many of these people are malnourished,” said Hilary Green, a Nestlé scientist. “Their nutrients are not balanced. And they crave food. By nature, they tend to be more hungry, more often. So the challenge is satisfying that without burdening the stomach.”

On my last day at Nestlé, I had lunch with the president of the company’s new health science unit, Luis Cantarell. We started off talking about the lack of obesity in Switzerland, which he attributed in part to the country’s fondness for outdoor activity, which segued into a discussion about his own personal strategy to stay fit: He resists eating too much pasta, works hard on getting more vegetables, never has meat in the evening, and prefers fish as a source of protein. He told me that
the only indulgence he permits himself is a glass of wine.

Quickly, however, our conversation turned to the company’s line of formula foods for overeaters, like Peptamen. As bleak as these products might seem, Cantarell said, they are paving the way for a grand merging of food and pharmacy in the not-too-distant future. He envisions—quite excitedly—the prospect of drug-like foods, or food-like drugs, that could upend the traditional approach to medical care, in which expensive drugs are used to treat the scourges of overeating: diabetes, obesity, high blood
pressure. “Health care costs are going through the roof, and pharmacological drugs are not the most efficient solutions for chronic medical diseases,” he said. “We have the possibility of developing personalized nutrition in a scientific approach, using clinical trials and all the things pharma people do when it comes to developing drugs. Nestlé, with its long tradition, could be an actor in breaking the paradigm.”

O
n my way back to the airport in Geneva, I couldn’t shake the image of teenagers gorging on Hot Pockets, only to end up drinking Peptamen through a tube for the rest of their lives. But to be fair, Nestlé had taken some bold steps to reduce the loads of salt, sugar, and fat across its portfolio of foods. Additionally, like other manufacturers, it sold slimmed-down, lower-salt, lower-fat versions of its mainline products, for people with the discipline to curb their intake of calories. Even at that, however, Nestlé is not the World Health Organization—which, as it happens, is headquartered just down the road in Geneva. It’s a company, doing what companies do: making money.

It had taken me three and a half years of prying into the food industry’s operations to come to terms with the full range of institutional forces that compel even the best companies to churn out foods that undermine a healthy diet. Most critical, of course, is the deep dependence the industry has on salt, sugar, and fat. Almost every one of the hundreds of people I interviewed in the course of writing this book—bench chemists, nutrition scientists, behavioral biologists, food technicians, marketing executives, package designers, chief executives, lobbyists—made the point that companies won’t be giving these three up, in any real way, without a major fight. Salt, sugar, and fat are the foundation of processed food, and the overriding question the companies have in determining the formulations of their products is how much they need of each to achieve the maximum allure.

It’s simply not in the nature of these companies to care about the consumer
in an empathetic way. They are preoccupied with other matters, like crushing their rivals, beating them to the punch. The most amazing thing about the secret 1999 meeting of food company CEOs to discuss obesity was that they got together at all. The grocery store, after all, is littered with the results of their war to outsell one another by arming their products with more salt, sugar, and fat. Witness what happened when Post started coating its cereal with sugar: Rivals came out with versions that went as high as 70 percent. Or look at what happened when Hershey introduced its mega-chocolate cookie in 2003: Kraft responded by rolling out a slew of fattier, sweeter Oreos.

Besides being fiercely competitive, food companies are also deeply obligated toward their shareholders. When companies like Campbell say they will not compromise on taste in lowering the salt, sugar, or fat content of their products, they’re not thinking about the consumer’s welfare; they’re thinking about consumption and sales. As well they should, if they’re going to survive. Making money is the sole reason they exist—or so says Wall Street, which is there, at every turn, to remind them of this. Indeed, some experts believe that Wall Street was one of the chief causes of the obesity epidemic when, in the early 1980s, investors shifted their money from stodgy blue chip companies to the high-flying technology industry and other sectors that promised quicker returns.
“This put special pressures on food companies,” said Marion Nestle, author and former nutrition advisor in the Department of Health and Human Services. “They were already trying to sell their products in an environment in which there were twice as many calories as anybody needed. Now, they had to grow their profits every ninety days. The result was that food companies had to seek new ways to market their foods. And they did that by making larger portions, by making food available absolutely everywhere, by making food as convenient as it could be, and by creating a social environment in which it was okay to eat all day long, in more places, in larger portions.”

There is one final factor in the food industry’s single-minded pursuit of sales above consumer welfare. In the heat of competition, they look past the health impact of their products. The soda industry has been particularly
adept in the department of willful blindness. In 2012, I invited myself to
its annual confab with Wall Street investors, where the main topic was the ongoing downturn in sales of soda and how companies were mitigating this by promoting other drinks. Among the new drinks generating excitement: Pure Leaf, a healthy-sounding tea with four teaspoons of sugar per serving; and Crave, a chocolate milk with ten teaspoons of sugar per serving, along with a half-day’s quotient of saturated fat. The meeting started off with the chief financial officer of the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Martin Ellen, who was asked about New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposal to ban the sale of mega-sized soft drinks, which he had labeled a menace to public health. Ellen drew laughs when he started off by calling the initiative “
Your
mayor’s proposal”—the hundred or so attendees knew that his company was based in Texas, where no one elected to office would dream of floating such an idea. “If we put aside the matter of choice, and the government’s role in our lives, and focus just on the issue of obesity and the soft drink industry, the data doesn’t support it,” he continued. “Ninety-three percent of our caloric intake comes from foods and drinks other than sugary beverages. And while the industry has been making some inroads over the years, obesity has been going up. Less soft drinks are being consumed, but we are not getting healthier. It is unfair to demonize this industry.”

Nutritionists, of course, beg to differ on that.

But so does Jeffrey Dunn, who used to attend these meetings as Coke’s president for North and South America. When Dunn looks at the data, he sees soda as a leading cause of obesity. The trend lines, in fact, are a perfect match. Soda consumption took off in the 1980s, and while it has dropped in recent years, the intake of other sugary drinks, like sports ades and vitamin waters and chocolate milk, has risen sharply. By that measure, no one should expect that people—as Dr Pepper’s Ellen put it—would be “getting healthier.”

Given these proclivities on the part of food companies—competitive, beholden to Wall Street, and in utter denial about their culpability—an intervention by Washington would certainly seem to be in order. Oddly
enough, one of the industry people I met who was receptive to federal regulation was the former CEO of Philip Morris, Geoffrey Bible. “I feel like
a bit of a wimp on this,” he began. “I don’t like regulation, because I don’t like big government. I think we all should be allowed within reason to exercise our rights and freedom of judgment.” But then we discussed how the growing public anger toward tobacco companies caused Philip Morris to embrace regulation, and how his food managers at Kraft in 2003 unilaterally launched a set of anti-obesity initiatives only to face increased competition from their rivals. If nothing else, placing some federal limits on salt, sugar, and fat would put the food manufacturers in the same boat. “Regulation may well be the best way,” Bible said, finally. “You would get industry unity on some of these issues, which is very important. But it has to be reasonable.”

Some regulatory ideas have cropped up in the last few years, but most of them do not seem reasonable or terribly smart. Like the bill introduced in the Florida legislature by a Republican state senator that would bar people from spending food stamps on items like candy, chips, and soda. That’s all America needs: more division based on wealth. Others have pushed for a “fat tax” on soda, but again, why punish the consumer? It would be more sensible to tax salt, sugar, and fat
before
they’re added to processed foods. Except for one problem: The companies would surely just pass the cost on to consumers. The bigger challenge lies in closing the price gap between processed and fresh foods so that blueberries could better compete, as a quick snack, with a Snickers bar.

The industry has a different view of food economics: It is their products that make eating affordable. In 2012, an industry group launched a publicity campaign that raises the specter of a planet with nine billion people to argue for a continued reliance on processed foods. In this scenario, salt, sugar, and fat are not demons, but rather safe, reliable, and cheap ways to deliver necessary calories. But even some industry insiders have an alternative view: They argue that the low cost of processed foods has been thwarting the development of healthier ways of feeding the world.

“We’re hooked on inexpensive food, just like we’re hooked on cheap
energy,” said James Behnke, the former Pillsbury executive. “The real question is this price sensitivity and, unfortunately, the growing disparity of income between the haves and have-nots. It costs more money to eat fresher, healthier foods. And so, there is a huge economic issue involved in the obesity problem. It falls most heavily on those who have the fewest resources and probably the least understanding or knowledge of what they are doing.”

That industry veterans would talk, in this fashion, was one of the more striking revelations in my research for this book. Indeed, I met many intelligent, well-intentioned people—former and current insiders—who are working to beat their industry at its own game. On a personal level, I found that many of the executives I talked to go out of their way to avoid their own products. It got so that I couldn’t resist asking everyone I spoke with about their eating habits: John Ruff from Kraft, who gave up sweet drinks and fatty snacks; Luis Cantarell from Nestlé, who eats fish for dinner; Bob Lin from Frito-Lay, who avoids potato chips, along with most everything that is heavily processed; Howard Moskowitz, the soft drink engineering whiz who declines to drink soda. Geoffrey Bible not only stopped smoking his company’s cigarettes; when he oversaw Kraft, he worked just as hard at avoiding anything that would send his cholesterol surging. “I was a bit of a fitness freak,” he told me. “Played squash, ran fifteen to twenty miles a week.”

But most of us can’t simply stop eating processed foods. We are still scrambling to get out the door in the morning in one piece, or to please picky eaters, or to put a decent dinner on the table without getting fired for leaving the office early. Many of us have taste buds that are still jacked up for big doses of salt, sugar, and fat. For pleasure or convenience, we need our Frosted Mini-Wheats and our salt and vinegar potato chips, not to mention a few Oreos, to get us through the day.