Sugar, salt and fat: how the food industry make us eat endlessly

The investigative journalist Michael Moss describes in his book “Salt Sugar Fat”, the secrets of the food industry (1) to make us eat endlessly.

Michael Moss describes all the tricks the big food companies use to sell the perfect food to the consumer’s palate.

Before, your grandmother was adding these three ingredients sparingly in your food. Today, the industrial add them directly into processed food that we are ready to eat. In addition, the change in the consumer’s palate that are eating less fat, request from the manufacturers to change the composition of foods (products with less fat but more salt and sugar to keep them taste good).

In his book, Michael Moss critiques the food industries that drive us to always eat more fatty, salty and sweet. He takes us inside the labs where food scientists use cutting-edge technology to calculate the “bliss point” (2)  of sugary beverages or enhance the “mouth feel” of fat by manipulating its chemical structure.

Fat gives a creamy texture to foods while deceiving consumers about the amount of fat in the product. And there is no known bliss point for fat… This is scary at some point.

The salt give the food not only more flavour but also adjust the taste of a product even if it is one of poor quality.

Refined white sugar or table sugar is the form of sugar that we all use, but there are different sugars (fructose, lactose, glucose, etc). Sugar is a key ingredient because it’s not only flavour but it also helps to thicken, to colour the food.

 

 

Previously on our blog, we saw that excessive sugar consumption leads to diseases such as diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease. This is why the World Health Organization recommends that the daily sugar portion is not greater than 5%. (3)

 

We already mentioned on our blog,  that our products are sugars-free!

These  milk are sugar-free but also unsweetened*.

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These  milks can be claimed as “sugars free” because they contain less than 0.5 g of total sugar per 100 ml or 100 g; and as “unsweetened” because they are free from any kind of ingredient used for their sweetening properties (According to regulation (EC) nº 1924/2006.)

However, they contain naturally occurring sugars up to 0.1 g per 100 ml or 100 g.

 

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Note:

(1)  SALT SUGAR FAT: How the Food Giants Hooked Us
http://michaelmossbooks.com/books/salt-sugar-fat/

(2)  The term “bliss point,” in fact, is used in the soft-drink business to denote the optimal level of sugar at which the beverage is most pleasing to the consumer. As a manufacturer, you don’t want to surpass or come up short of the bliss point because you’ll lose sales.

(3) The WHO opens public consultation on draft sugars guideline
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/notes/2014/consultation-sugar-guideline/en/