Book #47: Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss

This book was really dang interesting. Moss delves into the processed food industry and focuses on how they use three main ingredients--sugar, salt, and fat--to get us addicted to eating their food so that we buy more and more of it. Moss basically is claiming that this processed food industry is responsible for the obesity epidemic, by putting in almost endless amounts of each of these things in their foods, camouflaging them so we don't notice how unhealthy they are for us, and then deceiving and misleading us about what is inside them to convince us to eat more and more. All these food industry companies want to do is to make food that is so good and alluring that it's impossible for us to put it down and stop eating it, and with a few exceptions, they don't really care that much if it ends up being absolutely terrible for your body. Of course, most foods (like soda or potato chips) are not meant to be healthy, and the food industry isn't trying to pretend otherwise--but people love them so much because of their ingredients that are calibrated to be as satisfying as possible to our taste buds, that they eat way way more of them than they should.

This book isn't much of an expose as much as it is an exploration of how much science and research and planning goes into making these foods, and how much we know about the effects of salt, sugar, and fat in our desires to eat and on our bodies. I feel like my eyes are opened a little bit to some industry machinations behind the scenes--I mean, obviously these foods don't just appear out of thin air, but I don't think I had ever thought that much about them. I feel really motivated after reading this to try and avoid these foods a little more. I feel like we do a pretty good job--we eat a LOT of fruit and a decent amount of vegetables, and we don't usually have TOO many processed snacks at our house. I never drink soda and rarely buy chips (except for special occasions like fun BBQs). But I think I have been taken in by claims about foods that claim they are "healthy" but actually are loaded with tons of sugar or salt and should be avoided more often than not. Eating a low-processed-food diet is a lot more work but really worth it in health benefits