Ep. #196: Michael Moss on the “Dark Side” of Food Science

Michael Moss: [00:00:00] The company’s strive to have 50 percent of the calories coming from fat. So you get this phenomena of mouth feel in your mouth and the product melts. But when it does that, the melted product sort of sends the signal to the brain that says that the calories in the product have disappeared as well.

The industry calls this the vanishing Caloric density.

Mike Matthews: Good afternoon, everybody. At least it’s afternoon for me. This is Mike from Muscle for Life and Legion Athletics. And here we are with another episode of the podcast. And this time around I interview Michael Moss, who is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist who works for the New York Times. And who’s also the author of the number one New York times bestselling book, salt, sugar, fat.

Now, this interview [00:01:00] is about the processed food industry, which generates a trillion dollars in sales every year, which even surprised me a little bit. Obviously I knew it’s a huge industry, but I didn’t realize it’s that big trillion dollars a year with a T. And of course. What they specialize in is creating inexpensive, highly processed foods that are hyper palatable and hyper gratifying.

And thanks mainly to the advances of food science. These massive corporations have absolutely mastered the art of making foods and beverages that can just hit the spot in ways that natural, nutritious foods never will. And that’s why these companies products are so much harder to resist than anything you might find on the produce aisle, on the outskirts of the grocery store, and why they’re so much easier to overeat as well.

And as you will hear Michael is going to give us a rather [00:02:00] fascinating glimpse into just how much work goes into engineering and marketing these products, how the leaders of the processed food industry view themselves in relation to the meteoric rise of obesity and disease, like how they view their role in it, their responsibility, how we Might go about breaking our dependency on highly processed foods and much more.

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Michael, thanks for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. 

Michael Moss: Hey, you bet. Great to talk to you. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah. I’m happy to have you in particular because this is a, this is [00:05:00] something that’s been sitting on my list to do an episode on and some episodes. I just do myself and monologue and ramble about things and other episodes like to find people like you who know a lot more than me about whatever it is we’re talking about.

And have you explained to me and everybody else how how it works. So this is going to be good. Thanks. I look forward. So let’s just start at the top. And and it’s, I get on myself. I’m just curious. Can you give us a little behind the scenes take on how food manufacturers, and this has obviously been probably getting progressively worse.

I would assume over the last many decades, but how food manufacturers are creating foods and formulating foods. To make them hyper palatable. And of course, then easier to overeat and maybe even addictive. That’s obviously a word that’s thrown on a lot, thrown around a lot. So what’s your take on that? And, what’s the history too, because it seems like again, from the past many decades, we’re going from foods that used to naturally taste good to foods that don’t really taste that good.

And then we have to add more and more things, trying to make them taste good. 

Michael Moss: Yeah. It’s hard to know [00:06:00] when it started. I write about the Kellogg’s company, which was. Actually started by a physician or rather the precursor to that was was a health spa out in battle Creek, Michigan founded by a physician named Harvey Kellogg who hated sugar and would bring people in and to basically give them a cleanse.

And this is at the turn of the 18th century between 1800, 1900. And, he came up with a few foods that he would serve his clients. And one of them was like a. Breakfast kind of granola thing as a, as an alternative to the heavy meat, heavy fat, heavy foods that people were maybe in grease, heavy food at the time, it was an okay kind of cereal, but.

He had a younger brother. And when Dr. Kellogg was off traveling once the younger brother, Will who was the accountant for the spa, slipped something into the cereal that made it absolutely irresistible to the clientele, and that’s something Of course, with [00:07:00] sugar and you can trace the advent of the processed food industry’s reliance on sugars and fats and salt to that moment in a big brotherly fight broke out that ended up in court a couple of times and ultimately will one and the Kellogg company was born as well as the concept of sugary breakfast cereals.

Some of what makes them popular So successful in getting us to be overly dependent on their products is this extraordinary science that they use in crafting the perfect amounts of salt, sugar, fat, or it’s not just like the dump gobs and gobs of sugar into things without thinking about them.

And I was really fortunate to. So to meet the acquaintance of an icon in the industry, his name is Howard Moskowitz. He was trained in high math at Queens College and then experimental psychology at Harvard. And he walked me through his creation. Of [00:08:00] a new flavor of soda for Dr. Pepper in which he started out with no less than 60 versions of sweetness.

Each one just slightly different than the next one in terms of the sweetness level subjected those to 3000 consumer taste tests around the country and then did his math thing and threw him in his computer and came up with this high math regression analysis formula. And out came charts that look like these bell shaped curves that kids get graded on at school except that the top of the chart is not the dreaded middle C, it’s the perfect amount of sweetness, not too little, not too much, and it was Howard who coined the term the bliss point to describe it.

The perfect amount of sweetness and foods that would send us over the moon and their products flying off the shelf. And when you talk to nutritionists, the problem isn’t that they’ve engineered bliss points and things that we know and expect to be sweet. The food companies have [00:09:00] marched around the grocery store, adding sugar to things that didn’t used to be sweet before.

So now. Yogurt can have as much sugar in it per serving as ice cream. Bread has added sugar for a bliss point for sweetness. And one of my favorite spots in the grocery store is the spaghetti sauce aisle, where some of the brands can have the equivalent of a couple of Oreo cookies where the sweetness in a tiny half cup serving.

And what this has done is created this expectancy in us that everything weed should be sweet. So when you drag yourself or. Lord, help you, your little kids over to the produce aisle and try to get them to eat some of those things. We all should be eating more of and they get some bitter notes or some sour notes.

You’re going to have a rebellion on your hands because they are their taste buds are demanding sweetness 

Mike Matthews: from the, I guess the, Bigger picture. Of course, caloric intake has been rising over the last several [00:10:00] decades as well. And I’m sure that is tightly correlated with your sugar intake on the whole, because you can eat the same foods over time, but they tend to have more and more calories.

Michael Moss: And to be denser and the industry is even figured out ways to do with this. I have to say, I fell in love with the language that they use to describe their efforts to maximize the allure of their products. And they, at one point, they realized this amazing thing happens in your brain.

When you eat something like a cheese puff because when you put it in your mouth and press it against the roof of your mouth with your tongue, it disappears, it melts, and that’s one of the magical equations of snack foods, especially is that they, the company’s strive to have 50 percent of the calories coming from fat.

So you get this phenomena of mouth feel in your mouth and the product melts, but when it does that. The melted product sort of sends the signal to the brain that says the calories in the product have disappeared as well. The [00:11:00] industry calls this the vanishing caloric density. And as far as your brain is concerned, the break is off and you might as well eat that whole bag.

Of cheese puffs, because it’s not going to put any fat on your body. 

Mike Matthews: It’s amazing. And it’s amazing that these are just two examples of this bliss point in this vanish, vanishing caloric density are just two examples of, again, the science of making foods as palatable as possible, which many people maybe don’t.

quite think about that. These food companies are not in the business of promoting your health, really. They’re just in the business of selling food. I want to talk a bit. I’m curious as your take on the morality of it all and how, what some of these people think about that, but that is the reality is there’s there to move as much product as possible.

And when we’re talking food, the more tasty it is, And the faster you go through it, the better that is for them. 

Michael Moss: Yeah. There’s no reason to think of them as this evil empire that intentionally set out to make us overweight or other, [00:12:00] or otherwise ill, these are companies doing what all companies want to do, which is sell as much product as possible to make as much product as possible.

And I think that’s especially useful to think about in terms of grappling with the bigger question, how do we get out of this mess that we’re in? And how do we ease our dependence on highly processed foods? Okay. And can the food giant play a role in that transformation?

That’s one of the biggest questions out there facing us right now. 

Mike Matthews: And what are your thoughts on that? 

Michael Moss: My sense and my thought was always that and I was certainly hoping that the book I wrote wasn’t a scribe on all kinds of processed foods. I’m more about. Finding ways to gain control over them rather than let them control us and to figure out ways to use, not run away totally from processed foods because who can do that?

Who has the time or the financial resources to do that and 

Mike Matthews: processing is. We’re talking about degrees of processing. Oatmeal is a processed [00:13:00] food to some degree. 

Michael Moss: Cheese is a processed food. And let me tell you, there are wonderful cheeses out there that we shouldn’t avoid. So the question is how and what things can you do to avoid overeating and avoid an over dependence on those foods.

And again, going back to the smartest nutritionists I know, figure out ways to fix that. Fill up half of your plate with vegetables and the whole foods, which, which seems to be the agreed upon kind of solution, the path to better health. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah, absolutely.

Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about. Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it.

It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, [00:14:00] definitely tag me so I can say, thank you. You can find me on Instagram at muscle for life fitness, Twitter at muscle for life and Facebook at muscle for life fitness. I’m curious. Are there any other interesting, just what really stood out to you in terms of the science of making foods maximally satisfying and maximally Easy to overeat.

Like the cheese puff example is, again, it’s just that kind of stuff is fascinating because we don’t really hear much about this. We just eat the cheese puffs or eat the Doritos and go, God, these are so good. 

Michael Moss: Yeah, I mentioned, so I mentioned. Fats play a huge role in some ways that they’re almost more powerful than sugar.

They can sneak up to you. And in some products, if you combine fats and sugar, the break inside your brain, and I keep talking about that because that’s the part of you that will help keep you from overeating. It can no longer sense. The fat [00:15:00] intake, if there’s some sweetness added to the product.

The other interesting thing about fats too, is that if you can see the fat, if it’s oily looking in your food, you’re apt to eat less of that food because look, fat has twice as many calories as sugar carbohydrates. So the industry, so pizzerias, for example. Are encouraged by the cheese industry. Cause look, pizzas are basically vehicles for selling more cheese.

That’s why we have, pizzeria selling pizzas with four cheeses in the crust and five more on top. They’re encouraged to hold the pie in the kitchen long enough for the oil. That’s been released by the cheese to congeal before. It comes out to the table because people will eat more of that with the fat hidden inside or rather in solid form.

Salt is one of my favorites so that, the industry calls it the flavor burst because it’s typically the first thing that hits the saliva in [00:16:00] your mouth, which goes to the taste buds and also sends that signal to the reward center of the brain. And the thing about the food companies though, that Really surprised me is that as hooked as we are, I have become rather on their products and the huge amounts of salt, sugar, fat that they use to make them inexpensive and irresistible and convenient the companies themselves were even more dependent on those things because the science of salt, sugar, fat, Go to Beadaholique.

com for all of your beading supply needs! To them goes far beyond the taste of the foods. I’ll give you an example. At one point I went to the biggest companies and I said, look, salt has become like public enemy number one, because of its links to high blood pressure and maybe heart disease. And everybody’s thinking they should cut back on salt.

Why can’t you guys cut back on the massive amount of salt in your products? Because the vast [00:17:00] majority of salt we get in our diet is coming from highly processed foods. And Kellogg’s again raised their hand and said, come on in, we’ll show you. So I went to Battle Creek and sat down and they had prepared for me special versions of some of the biggest icons they sell in the grocery store, except in this case, They left the salt out entirely.

And I have to tell you, it was one of the most awful dining experiences in my life because we started with the cheese it’s right, which normally I could eat day in and day out and without salt, we couldn’t swallow them. They stuck to the roof of our mouth because salt adds texture and solubility to the product.

We moved on to the frozen waffles and they came out looking and tasting like straw because salt. That’s color and taste. And then we moved on to the corn flakes, put them in the bowl, added some milk to the bite. And before I could say anything, the chief spokeswoman [00:18:00] for the company is sitting with us at the table and she gets this look of horror on her face and swallows and blurts out the word metal.

M E T A L. She says, I taste metal. I’m thinking. Yeah, I do too. I felt like one of the fillings in my teeth has come out and it’s like sloshing around in my mouth. And the chief technical officer is there with us. He’s the person in charge of all things scientific. And he chuckles a little bit and he goes, yeah, not everybody will get that.

But one of the beautiful things about salt for us is that it will help mask or cover up some of the. Off notes what they call or the bad taste that are inherent to many processed foods. So salt sugar fat provide these things in these products that enable them to sit on the shelf forever and ever to have kind of the formulations that they do to be.

Incredibly inexpensive in ways that in your home cooking, you don’t need to worry about. And so [00:19:00] that’s why when we cook, we can’t get anywhere near the levels of salt, sugar, fat that the industry uses. 

Mike Matthews: Interesting. And you said inexpensive, and that’s a big point as well, is that. It makes the choice harder for people to make between there’s not just the palatability.

There’s also the time and effort that it takes to prepare your own food. Then there’s the cost. Of course, it doesn’t have to be particularly expensive to eat well, but it can be depending on what types of foods you are willing to eat, what types of nutritious foods you are willing to eat, or you can just go with these cheap, delicious calories.

And, that, that’s an important point for many people. 

Michael Moss: Yeah, I think it’s especially more expensive to eat well in the long term to develop menus for yourself or your family that won’t drive your kids crazy or you nuts after a week or two, that’s where the cost starts rising as you go.

Yeah. Move from carrots, in the produce aisle, the Brussels sprouts or broccoli robbers, some of the more quote unquote exotic kind of vegetables that are going to [00:20:00] cost you more than cabbage. I think that’s where you get hit by the cost and this incredible inequity or rather wrong in, in the world of food, which is that a well meaning person can walk in the store, meaning to buy a basket of fresh blueberries.

And have to pay as much for that as a two pound, four cheese, three meat frozen pizza. That’s gonna feed the whole family. And so over time, who isn’t going to be lured to the frozen aisle for that pizza? 

Mike Matthews: Absolutely. And I wonder how much of that though is due to availability. I think of a story.

I think this was semi recently actually, where CVS decided to stop selling tobacco products because it just wasn’t in line with their values. And it was a projected loss of billions of dollars in revenue, a couple billion that was going to be lost, but they did it anyway. And it actually turned out to be really good for them because of the publicity.

[00:21:00] They ended up making up for the loss by just selling a lot more of other stuff because people thought that was pretty cool. I wonder, would anything like that be possible in the future? in the food space where if some big company were to lead the way and actually educate people on, there’s not that much education that’s needed.

I think everybody knows that smoking is bad. Even smokers know it’s bad. Everything you’re talking about is probably maybe the market awareness isn’t quite as high, but I think it’s definitely rising. Quickly, especially these days, do you think a big food company could lead that charge and say, Hey, we’re not going to make these foods anymore.

I know some people, some people want them, but here’s why we’re just going to stop making them. And this is more on a matter of principle for us. 

Michael Moss: Yeah, I think so. To some extent that can be really hard for companies. Cause again, look, they, as they will point out and they do. They are beholden to shareholders as much as they are to consumers.

So I remember talking to the founder of a big yogurt company, Greek yogurt company who was saying, look, he very much wanted to sell his yogurt [00:22:00] at a lower sweetness, but didn’t feel he could quite get there. So he was hoping that over time he could nudge his customers downward. And I, I think there’s some validity to that, but there’s.

There’s a dozen things you’d want to do if you were wanting to change kind of the food system in a way that would help encourage us to make better purchase decisions. Starting with farmers, I was really shocked to learn that 90 or 90 percent of the farmland in this country is planted in field corn, not the.

Corn on the cob that you eat, but the corn that goes into animal feed or high fructose corn syrup or ingredients as processed foods as well as soybeans, only the rest of 5 percent is planted in fruits and vegetables and nuts and what have you. I think you’d want to change that ratio. And there’s certainly lots of things grocery stores could do to make it more [00:23:00] convenient and more attractive to to go to the produce aisle and fill up on produce.

There’s a chain that started at the Northeast. Where half of the store is produce and it’s the first thing walking in the store and they do things like have cooking demonstrations for asparagus for people who’ve never cooked asparagus before and or got tired of their recipes and they do things like package vegetables that they’ve washed and cut and assembled so you can pick up the package fresh and crisp and bring it home and make a stir fry without it.

The added hassle. So things to make cooking easier. So yes, absolutely. And there are even some stores that are thinking of ways to expand the produce section of the store and maybe put produce in parts of the store where you would never found it previously. So now knowing that people are so vulnerable when they get to the checkout lanes, what you’re seeing more and more of are.

The soda company is putting [00:24:00] coolers there to tempt us with that last mindless decision. But I know some of the big box stores, at least one of them has played with the idea of putting some produce coolers and the in the checkout lane. So people might grab a terrific apple or orange as an impulse buy.

Mike Matthews: There’s something to be said for that. I’m sure, there’s research on it, that availability is huge, especially in grocery stores. 

Michael Moss: Yeah. And everything about the store is designed. To get us to make impulse decisions to get us off the shopping list. If we have one written down or in our heads the soft kind of la music that they play the layout of the store that steers us toward the center of the store and away from the extremes, where that were the more staples of more, the more fundamental foods are sold.

And the end caps of the aisles and the positioning of the foods in the stores. But especially the checkout lane. And that’s a theme that I think your listeners being attuned to their [00:25:00] bodies and to exercising and things that really appreciate it. This notion of mindfulness I keep coming back to that because so much about.

The highly processed food industry and the worst of their products has been engineered to make them mindless. They started to put very sweet yogurt into little plastic tubes that kids could just open up and suck on without even needing a straw. A spoon while they’re doing a good point.

I didn’t think of that actually, and you know what, that’s something else they’re doing is they’re toggling with the computer game. And I think that’s 1 of the, that’s 1 of the big things that got us into trouble was besides snacking in between meals and snacking poorly in between meals was losing that kind of focus.

When we did 

Mike Matthews: so being too Automatic, in a sense, automatic in our shopping, in our eating. 

Michael Moss: Yeah. Cause you know, the primitive part of your brain kind of takes over. By some sense, we are [00:26:00] evolutionarily designed to like food and eats lots of it. And that’s fine. Plays right into it plays right into the hands of the food companies.

Mike Matthews: Definitely. And also to preserve energy, that’s physical and mental. So like the fewer things we have to think about and the more we can just run on automatic, the less energy our brain needs to process things. 

Michael Moss: Yeah. I hadn’t thought about that, but you’re right. One of the. We are also designed to look for things that save energy.

And that’s been true from our earliest days. 

Mike Matthews: So I mentioned this earlier, but I’m curious if there may be nothing particularly interesting on it, but still the morality of it, it just makes me wonder how the people that I guess, pull the biggest levers in these big food companies, can you give us a little bit of just Stepping in their shoes and seeing it from their perspective again, because it is very easy to just label people as, oh they’re just bad people or they’re evil or, but that’s not the case.

Even in the case of true evil, a lot of the people like, that did very bad things throughout, especially the 20th century were like. People like you and me, [00:27:00] but happened to be Nazis or communists or, whatever. 

Michael Moss: Yeah. I was really lucky in doing the research in this area for the books that I’m writing and coming across this trove of documents that put me inside the largest food companies as they’re doing the science and the marketing and the selling of these products, the overwhelming sense you get from that materials are driving day and night.

To get us to not just like their products, but to want more and more of them increasingly inside the companies. There have been people who’ve become alarmed that they went too far. In fact I opened the book, salt sugar fat with this meeting back in the late nineties at the old Pillsbury headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where none other than a cabal of insiders at some of the biggest companies have brought their CEOs to.

Gather to discuss none other than they’re growing culpability, not just for obesity, but for diabetes and other growing health problems in the [00:28:00] country. And these insiders were urging their. There’s CEOs to do something to lessen their dependence on excessive amounts of salt, sugar, fat, and to turn the corner and do something right by consumer health.

And then when I met those people and many of them had spent their entire lives creating and inventing and marketing things that. That are kind of poster childs for obesity and illness from processed foods did in fact come to have misgivings about their work. And they defended themselves in two ways.

One that in their minds, they invented these products at a more innocent time when we were not as dependent on them as we came to be. And then two, they lived in a world where they didn’t have to eat their own products. Their spouses typically didn’t have to work, could feed the family with great cooking [00:29:00] from scratch, and didn’t have to eat and buy their own products.

So they lost touch with what it was like health wise to in fact, be dependent on their products. And it was interesting. Some of those that did eat some of their products when they got into health trouble, they would immediately stop eating their own products, knowing that like many of us, they couldn’t come home in the evening and open up a bag of chips and stop with just a handful.

They would have to eat. the whole bag. And that’s an appreciation they gained late in life, the power of their food to drive us to go beyond what we had 

Mike Matthews: planned to eat. And so that’s obviously a point of cognitive dissonance where you’re like, Oh, wait a minute. Is this what I’m doing to a lot to millions of people?

Is this how it actually goes? 

Michael Moss: Yeah, they’re this incredible, and some of these people have really turned a corner. I spent a whole chapter On Coca Cola not intending to, but I met the former president of Coca Cola for North America, South America. And he walked me through this sort of [00:30:00] extraordinary things that the soda companies do to hook people on their brand at an early age, but he left Coke in the mid 2000s and went to work for one of the.

Two largest carrot farms in the country, not only selling a, a healthy product like that, but taking stealing, if you will, some of the marketing strategies he had learned at Coca Cola in this case to use fun. And excitement to sell vegetables in a way that didn’t preach to kids, but got them enthused about it.

I think the slogan for when the first campaigns was like selling carrots as junk food, which is a really interesting concept. And in a pure world, you would hope you wouldn’t have to advertise or market carrots like Skittles, but we’re not quite in the pure world. So I love how some of these guys and more and more of them [00:31:00] and women are Switching sides and taking some of the skills they learned for the junk food industry and applying them to healthy products and healthy restaurants and healthier lifestyles.

Mike Matthews: That’s interesting. And it’s also even from a, an economic and business perspective. I think that the trend is definitely going in that direction. It’s, Becoming more and more popular to exercise, to care about your health, to be more mindful of everything that you’re doing. And what affects your decisions and your behaviors are having on not just your physical health, but your psychological health, your emotional health, your general wellbeing.

Michael Moss: Absolutely. And it’s just not, it’s not on the West, just the West coast of the East coast. It’s in The heartland too. I’ve given talks in Kansas where people are demonstrating that they are caring more and more about what they’re putting in their mouths. And it’s sad there because Kansas is this incredible food desert.

Some people have to drive dozens and dozens of miles to get to a grocery store and even then the produce selection isn’t [00:32:00] what it is. The meeting of the food giants in, in, in the late nineties, where, by the way, they spurned these efforts by insiders to get them to clean up their act and sell healthier products.

Well, a couple of years ago, they met again in in Florida at an investors conference and one after another of the heads of the companies had to report dismal profit earnings, because not only are we caring more about what we eat, but that’s starting to translate into. Into sales, and it doesn’t take much of a drop in sales, a fraction of a percent for the food companies to really feel it and go in a paddock and Wall Street to start pressuring them to start coming up with healthier ways.

And I think that’s the real crux of it for them is that. Can they turn that corner? Can they make healthier products? They’re all now trying to dial down on salt, sugar, fat, one after another, the products, but I’m not sure that’s enough. And it goes back to the produce aisle. And when you, again, talking to nutritionists, [00:33:00] it’s one thing.

To cut back on the salt, sugar, fat of the hot pocket and the maker of the hot pocket, Nestle had me in to show me all the incredible things they’re doing to reduce salt, sugar, fat using extraordinary science in the other direction. I’m in the hot pocket, but when you say to them can you take that hot pocket and stuff it?

With Brussels sprouts, you get this blank look on their face. Cause it goes back to, those things being more expensive and having less shelf life and being much more challenging. So I think there’s a real question about whether the food giants could really. Play a significant role going forward or whether they will just be able to pretend to be healthier and foolish in that way.

Yeah. 

Mike Matthews: Health washing is what it’s called, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think it’ll probably be a combination, right? You have the market forces and then you also have just. People like you out there educating people. And so as consumers change their [00:34:00] habits, obviously you’re going to have someone in the marketplace is going to take advantage of that.

And yeah, some of these big companies may not really be positioned to take advantage in a way as in the way that others can simply be. By the nature of what kind of stuff they produce. For the hot pocket, I’m sure there’ll always be a market for the hot pocket, but like you said, if people are eh, I used to eat hot pockets every day, but now I’m just going to stick to fruits and vegetables.

Maybe I’ll have a hot pocket a week. If that happens enough I don’t know if there’s any way to resurrect the hot pocket market or go back to the glory days. 

Michael Moss: And going back to whether the industry is evil or not. I think the way forward is to find ways to help the food companies make money selling healthy stuff.

And what does that mean exactly? Like, how does that play out? Look, there’s two ways change are going to happen. Either the government’s going to impose kind of new regulations on the companies and force them to change. Or the market forces and the things you talked about.

And look, this is starting with kids. I wrote about the demise of the [00:35:00] home economic system in school is where we’re girls, but also boys, to some extent, we’re taught how to shop, cook, be mindful of food in their lives fell by the wayside as kind of other societal forces became changes became more important to deal with the school.

Schools are now starting to teach food again to kids. They’re starting to. Plant gardens in the school, which gets kids excited about things they never saw before, like a radish and they take that excitement home and get their parents excited about radishes. So the next time they go shopping, that is an encouragement for the grocer to.

Have asked the farmer to grow those radishes and make them convenient to buy and eat and use in the grocery store. So I think, yeah, I think all of these things can be happening in a way. And that’s all money. One of the, one of the things I was surprised to learn is that the produce aisle is actually one of the best profit centers of the supermarket.

It’s not necessarily a good thing for consumers, but [00:36:00] it’s because. The supermarkets can set the prices on the packaged goods. It’s more, the prices are set more hand in hand with the food manufacturers themselves, but in the produce, how they have complete control to set the price. And increasingly, the supermarkets are realizing that being one of their biggest problems.

Profit centers, perhaps they should be expanding the produce aisle, paying more attention. They’re finding ways to nudge people into the produce and fill up more of the other shopping baskets. So there you have just economics and profit motive driving the companies, which I think is so much more practical and stronger than government intervention.

Which. Isn’t going to happen. 

Mike Matthews: Yeah. And or, ideological debates again, and coming down to the things where you can make them make the foods more available. And if you can make them easier to buy by, for example, making them less expensive, or you’d mentioned this grocery store that also showing people, Hey, here’s some great way, great things you can do with these foods [00:37:00] that, yeah, that I think that’s definitely the way to go as opposed to trying to force it through regulations.

And that could be at a. I could be at a business level or even an individual level, right? Where, what was it in New York? It was like trying to limit the amount of sugar that can go into certain types of sodas or something like that. Like they just enjoy everything. 

Michael Moss: Yeah. No, that actually backfired for other reasons.

People thought that they would have to pay more for sodas by eliminating kind of the. Very big one, maybe even legally. You mentioned tobacco and the way the tobacco turn and the way that the government had success legally and suing the tobacco companies was to focus on the money. It was when the States got together.

And so look, we’re getting killed on our health costs from tobacco related diseases, and they went after the tobacco companies, not saying smoking was evil or smoking was bad or it’s something people should do is that. There is an inherent cost to smoking and you’re making all the profit, you [00:38:00] should pay or help us pay for the downside, the flip side, the health costs from people smoking, there’s certainly a huge health cost from bad diets, from people being overly dependent on processed foods that can be Part of the equation.

Mike Matthews: Absolutely. And obviously there’s a large body of research to, to support that it’s not as direct and immediate as smoking, but it’s just as easy to show, Hey, people that consume a lot of these foods, here’s where they wind up, start them at this age, and then. Look at them here versus people that, don’t go down that road.

So why don’t you tell people where can they find you find your work? Obviously I mentioned your book in the introduction, but if you want to mention anything about that, or if you’re working on a new project, whatever you want to tell everybody.

Michael Moss: Food and free will, which dives into kind of this question of whether the junkiest food is, in fact, addictive, like some drugs whether that’s a road we should [00:39:00] go down and or whether there are some even other things about. Junk food and highly processed food. That’s even more problematic for us even that addiction.

And hopefully it’ll be out either in 2018 or soon after. 

Mike Matthews: Great. And you have a website that you’d like people to visit or if they want to, obviously they can check out, they can check out your book social media 

Michael Moss: or anything. So my website is Michael Moss books. com. 

Mike Matthews: Okay. 

Michael Moss: And your listeners can find.

My email on that website if they want to reach out to me with anything. Awesome. 

Mike Matthews: Okay, great. This was awesome, Michael. I really appreciate it. 

Michael Moss: Excellent. My pleasure. Great talking to you. 

Mike Matthews: Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don’t mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you’re listening from.

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