Hooked: Your Brain on Junk Food

by MICHAEL MOSS

I came to the question of food and addiction inadvertently with the 2013 publication of my book Salt Sugar Fat. In it, I argued that grocery manufacturers were competing with fast-food chains in a race to the bottom that rewarded profits over health. Over the past four decades, salt, sugar, and fat had enabled the industries to engineer products that were immensely alluring. Brilliant marketing campaigns pushed the emotional buttons that convinced us to eat when we weren’t even hungry. Yet the book tried to end on a hopeful note. Knowing all that the companies did to prop up their unwholesome products, I argued, was oddly empowering. We could use that insight to make better choices because, ultimately, we were the ones deciding what to buy and how much to eat.

Then came the media interviews. My optimism was challenged when reporters asked, “But aren’t these products addictive, like drugs?” I hemmed and hawed, not knowing the answer, though aware that the implications could be huge. If food was addictive like cocaine and heroin, or even like cigarettes and gin, that would certainly inhibit our ability to decide what to buy and how much to eat. No matter how much we knew about the food company’s machinations, their products would still have the edge. In the worst circumstances, we wouldn’t be deciding anything at all. The companies would own our choices, and our free will. Which, as the McDonald’s case suggested, might explain why we have careened so sharply to-ward their products.

Thus, the initial imperative for this book: to sort out and size up the true peril in food. To see if addiction is the best way to think about our trouble with food and eating, given what we’ve learned from other substances and habits. And to peer inside the processed food industry to see how it is dealing with what, in its view, would be a monumental threat to the power it holds over us.

My questioners, it turns out, were underplaying their hand. Not only is food addictive. The first part of this book, “Inside Addiction,” examines a wealth of surprising evidence that food, in some ways, can be even more addictive than alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs.

This is partly a matter of language. For centuries, the word addiction has been used to describe our behavior in consuming all manner of things. At times, it has been saddled with criteria that would rule out even some of the most potent drugs; cocaine didn’t meet the strictest standard because, unlike heroin, it doesn’t leave you writhing in pain when you stop using it. Today, however, the purest definition—and the one we’ll use in this book—comes from an unimpeachable source. As a leader in producing both cigarettes and mega brands of processed food, the manufacturing giant Philip Morris was, one could argue, intimate with addiction. In 2000, its CEO was pressed to define the word, and while the context was smoking, the gem he came up with could apply to the company’s groceries just as well: “a repetitive behavior that some people find difficult to quit.”

The word some in that definition is key. For a substance to be considered addictive, we don’t all have to fall hard for it. There are casual users of heroin, and there are people who can stop at a handful of potato chips. Addiction is a spectrum, with the rest of us landing somewhere between being mildly affected and fully ensnared.

This insight comes from another group of uniquely qualified experts who, before turning their attention to food, had examined drugs and alcohol to help establish their habit-forming nature, and for me, this was the most unsettling aspect of food addiction. I’d focused much of my recent work on holding the processed food companies accountable for getting us so dependent on their products. Yet now it was clear from these researchers that much of the explanation for why food is addictive lies entirely within us. We are, quite plainly, built that way.

For starters, we don’t need the harsh compounds found in drugs to get hooked on things. Our brain has its own slurry of chemicals that are exquisitely formulated to get us to act compulsively, dopamine chief among them. Indeed, they’re so good at directing our behavior that drugs are designed to mimic these native substances in our heads. It’s true that, as measured by the stir in our neurology, not even Doritos Jacked can muster the depth of the cravings raised by, say, cocaine. But one hallmark of addiction is the speed with which substances hit the brain, and this puts the term fast food in a new light. Measured in milliseconds, and the power to addict, nothing is faster than processed food in rousing the brain.

Addiction is also deeply enmeshed with memory, and the memories we create for food are typically stronger and longer lasting than any other substance. Childhood memories of food can wield an uncanny power over our eating habits for the rest of our lives, and the reverse is true, too. When a celebrated chef and food writer began losing her memory through Alzheimer’s, it had devastating effects on her senses and passion for food. In this regard, memory is just as potent as food itself in forming the habits that can lead to addiction.

Indeed, our entire body—from the nose to the gut to our body fat—is designed to get us not just to like food but to want more and more of it, which we’re learning now from the fossilized bones of our prehistoric forebears. We have evolved in astonishing ways to seek out not just those foods that are sweet and loaded with calories but also those that are convenient and varied and cost less to produce. We’re hooked on cheap food, a processed food industry official said to me once, but I hadn’t yet realized how much of this aspect of addiction flowed from our own biology, where cheapness translates into saving the energy we need to survive.

And yet, for all of the insight into our evolutionary biology, the dietary trouble we find ourselves in today can only in part be put on us. None of the biology that binds us to food, not even the drive to overeat, used to matter. Indeed, for the first four million years of our existence, it was our addiction to food that enabled us to thrive as a species. It’s only now, for the past forty years, that being hooked on food is causing us so much harm. What happened? The food is what happened. Or, as one of the evolutionary biologists who are probing this aspect of our eating habits put it, “It’s not so much that food is addictive, but rather that we by nature are drawn to eating, and the companies changed the food.”

And oh, how they changed the food.

 

From the book HOOKED: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions by Michael Moss. Copyright © 2021 by Michael Moss. Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

MICHAEL MOSS

Michael Moss is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter formerly with The New York Times, a keynote speaker, and an occasional guest on shows like CBS This Morning, The Dr. Oz Show, CNN’s The Lead, All Things Considered, and The Daily Show.

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