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Well, if you've ever found yourself saying,
"I just couldn't help myself,"
when you ate too much of the wrong food,
you just might be right.
A lot of people put a lot of work into making sure
we keep on eating.
As our health reporter Kelly Crowe discovered,
it's a highly competitive, highly secretive industry
with one goal: food that is simply irresistible.
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Man:
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And increase the amount of profit they're making
off the food you eat.
I ate to the point that it hurt to move
and I would just lie on my bed and wish I was dead.
[crunching]
Man:
and pure science to understand how we're attracted to food
and how they can make their foods attractive to us.
[crunching]
Kelly Crowe:
Yogurt feels that way in your mouth for a reason.
The food industry is even researching the connection
between the taste receptors on your tongue
and the corresponding chemical reaction in your brain.
The result: carefully engineered combinations
of salt, sugar, fat, and chemicals
deliberately designed so you can't eat just one.
[crunching]
Michael Moss spent four years investigating the science
behind processed food.
Michael:
I spent time with the top scientists
at the largest companies in this country,
and it's amazing how much math and science
and regression analysis and energy they put into
finding the very perfect amount of salt, sugar and fat
in their products that will send us over the moon.
Kelly:
and food industry patents reveals
the extent of the science behind food engineering.
Chemistry, physics, biology: all commandeered
into the service of making profitable food.
Here's a process for enhancing the cheese flavour
without the cheese, where starting materials
are proteins and fats;
which means the amount of expensive cheese
can be reduced substantially.
And if they can replicate that chemical reaction
that may happen on your tongue or an aroma,
they can simulate the taste of something
without it being at all real.
Kelly:
what goes on inside the food industry;
a former executive at several large food companies,
he's now a writer and industry critic.
Bruce:
or troubled by what I was doing,
and I think that's ultimately, you know,
one of the reasons why I left the industry.
And then you see trends like obesity
and health issues that are increasing,
mainly driven by the food that we eat.
It was hard for me not to just
take a more thorough assessment of what I was doing.
Kelly:
competitive, and proprietary.
It took years and hundreds of interviews
before Michael Moss could finish his book.
Michael:
Getting inside the companies with thousands of pages
of inside documents, and getting their scientists
and executives to reveal to me the secrets
of how they go at this.
Kelly:
rests on three pillars: salt, sugar, and fat.
Michael:
And again, when they hit the perfect amounts,
they call it the "bliss point" for sugar,
the "mouth feel" for fat, the "flavour burst" for salt;
they know that their products will be irresistible.
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[crunching]
Salt, sugar, and fat in combinations
nature never intended.
And increasingly, scientists agree that there is evidence
that these highly palatable foods
can be addictive.
Pat:
or whatever, and I'll be thinking,
"I've got to stop, I've got to stop, I've got to stop,"
and I just don't stop.
Kelly:
I was desperate when I was a food addict,
it was really, really devastating
and I felt powerless and ashamed and it was horrible.
Kelly:
every meal a challenge to remember that for her,
even a taste of sugar can set her back.
Pat:
advertising for food will trigger it.
These foods are so,
so addictive, so appealing.
TV Announcer:
There are many food addicts who say
that long after the food stopped causing us joy,
long after it started causing us misery,
we still couldn't stop.
How about one of those chips?
Just one?
So it becomes hardwired and it's very hard to overcome.
TV Announcer:
And while the industry hates the word addiction
more than any other word, the fact of the matter is
that their research has shown them
that when they hit the very perfect amounts
of each of those ingredients, they'll send us over the moon.
That their products will fly off the shelf,
we'll eat more, we'll buy more,
and as they are companies, they will make more money.
We're activating those limbic structures...
Kelly:
As part of a
into a brain imaging machine and fed him chilli.
Man:
squirted on his tongue.
Kelly:
triggered a release of feel good chemicals in the brain.
The consequence of that low level of pain
is that it floods the brain with its own natural opiates.
Kelly:
One of the first neuroscientists to work
in the food industry.
He spent ten years doing neuroscience for
one of the world's largest food companies.
As a basic neuroscientist, I was able to look at the mechanisms
that basically drove preference for various types of food.
Kelly:
with this finding: ice cream tickles the brain.
Just one spoonful lights up the happy zones of the brain
in clinical trials, the company reported.
This is the other part of the body that fascinates
food scientists: the mouth.
The way food breaks between the teeth;
the pressure of the bite force; the sound of the crunch.
Chris:
The noise, of course amplified by the fact
that your jawbone is connected to your years,
and you really hear that crunch quite loudly as you bite.
But it's also the physical requirement to chew on something
and to crunch it. Just distracts you,
it pulls your mind onto what you're eating.
Kelly:
who helps companies come up with foods
that are what he calls "moreish"--
in other words, make you want more.
Chris:
to reach for the next one and put it in again.
And they often achieve that by having a very intense taste hit
right at the front of the mouth,
and then it dies off very quickly.
And so by the time you've finished each mouthful,
you're looking to refind that taste that you've lost.
Kelly:
Chocolate should not have sharp edges.
Absolutely, we're looking for chocolate to be comforting,
to be a really pleasant, lovely experience in the mouth.
Um, melt is a very soft, soft experience,
and if it's got sharp corners, you're really spoiling that
and actually setting the consumer on edge slightly
before they get the melt.
Kelly:
to trigger the brain to stop eating:
they call it:
And that's an expression that says when foods have
one overriding flavour, if it's attractive,
it'll be really attractive to us initially,
but then we'll get tired of it really fast.
And so these companies make a concerted effort
to make their foods not bland, but really well blended.
Kelly:
It's called:
Vanishing caloric density applies to those things
like
and what happens is then that your brain gets fooled
into thinking the calories have vanished,
and you're much more apt to keep eating
before the brain sends you a signal,
"Hey, you've had enough."
[crunching]
[chatter]
Kelly:
at the University of Guelph.
Lisa: Can one person from each group come here for a minute?
This is teaching the students how to set up
a sensory test. So all the students in this class
are learning the basics of conducting sensory evaluation
research, because it's not...
It's not as simple as eating a food.
They are different in an ingredient,
and what we're looking for is to determine
which one is preferred or accepted by people.
So, um... in this case,
it's actually a different sodium level.
So which one did you like better?
I liked the second one better.
The salty one?
The saltier one, yep.
Kelly:
to sit on the shelves for months,
many of the ingredients have nothing to do with taste
but act as preservatives and chemicals
to control the appearance and texture.
And a series of ingredients known as flavour enhancers
to trick the brain into tasting something that isn't there.
There's tremendous amounts of money spent behind creating
tastes and smells that feel real, but in reality,
are completely artificial.
Kelly:
no one would eat it.
It would taste horrible.
You would just, you know, you'd want to spit it out.
Kelly:
for Michael Moss to taste without any salt at all.
It was a god awful experience tasting those things.
Normally, I can eat Cheez-Its all day long,
but the Cheez-Its without the salt,
I couldn't even swallow them.
They stuck to the roof of my mouth.
Kelly:
that something is changing:
suddenly, cookies boast health claims;
chips have whole grain and fibre.
If the food industry can find a way to market it
and make money off of it, I'm sure they will.
But if it long-term is decreasing the amount of food
that they can sell, I don't see it as being an avenue
that they'll go down.
Kelly:
higher in fibre and grains; containing real fruit
or baked with real vegetables;
you will be back for more.
The food industry depends on it.
Kelly Crowe,