Salt Sugar Fat: The Unholy Trinity

Stop!


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Before you fill up that shopping cart, read this book...



In Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, Michael Moss takes us inside the labs where food scientists use cutting-edge technology to calculate the “bliss point” of sugary beverages or enhance the “mouthfeel” of fat by manipulating its chemical structure. He unearths marketing campaigns designed—in a technique adapted from tobacco companies—to redirect concerns about the health risks of their products: Dial back on one ingredient, pump up the other two, and tout the new line as “fat-free” or “low-salt.” He talks to concerned executives who confess that they could never produce truly healthy alternatives to their products even if serious regulation became a reality. Simply put: The industry itself would cease to exist without salt, sugar, and fat. Just as millions of “heavy users”—as the companies refer to their most ardent customers—are addicted to this seductive trio, so too are the companies that peddle them. You will never look at a nutrition label the same way again.

The author shows us the ruthless tactics that food company giants employ to cash in on our cravings. Snack food, for example, is aggressively marketed to lower income families and children.



Yet when food company executives were asked if they feed their products to their own children, the answer was "no."

Some of you Bitches are struggling with weight loss. If you're wondering why the pounds aren't coming off, you might be surprised to find out why. Food companies are going all out to make sure you crave their foods by adding additional salt, sugar and fat to many of the foods you think are good choices nutritionally. Not only is it a deterrent to weight loss, it's a health hazard.


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But let's say you don't eat junk food. Think you're making a smart choice with yogurt or spaghetti sauce? Yoplait contains twice as much sugar per serving as Lucky Charms! Half a cup of Prego Traditional spaghetti sauce has as much sugar as three Oreo cookies AND a third of the daily salt intake recommended for most Americans.

Mistress MJ, who thought she was a wise consumer, had her eyes opened by this book. We hope you will too.

So put down that cupcake and read Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.


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As Michael Moss says, If nothing else, this book is intended as a wake-up call to the issue and tactics at play in the food industry, to the fact that we are not helpless in facing them down. We have choices, particularly when it comes to grocery shopping, and I saw this book, on its most basic level, as a tool for defending ourselves when we walk through those doors.