Food as Drugs

Most of us, I hope, wouldn't serve up our kids a few lines of coke or a tumbler of Jack Daniels, but it turns out that giving them a few chocolate chip cookies is, biochemically speaking, roughly the same thing.

Former U.S. Food and Drug Administration chief David Kessler, quoted in a New York Times article entitled How the Food Makers Captured Our Brains, argues that, just as tobacco companies manipulated nicotine content to attain maximum addictive potential, so to have food producers engineered fat, salt and sugar content to create foods that maximize the desire for more. As the article notes

. . . food companies certainly understand human behavior, taste preferences and desire. In fact, he offers descriptions of how restaurants and food makers manipulate ingredients to reach the aptly named “bliss point.” Foods that contain too little or too much sugar, fat or salt are either bland or overwhelming. But food scientists work hard to reach the precise point at which we derive the greatest pleasure from fat, sugar and salt.

The result is that chain restaurants like Chili’s cook up “hyper-palatable food that requires little chewing and goes down easily,” he notes. And Dr. Kessler reports that the Snickers bar, for instance, is “extraordinarily well engineered.” As we chew it, the sugar dissolves, the fat melts and the caramel traps the peanuts so the entire combination of flavors is blissfully experienced in the mouth at the same time.

Foods rich in sugar and fat are relatively recent arrivals on the food landscape, Dr. Kessler noted. But today, foods are more than just a combination of ingredients. They are highly complex creations, loaded up with layer upon layer of stimulating tastes that result in a multisensory experience for the brain. Food companies “design food for irresistibility,” Dr. Kessler noted. “It’s been part of their business plans.”

And in case you think that you can simply follow Michael Pollen's advice to "eat food" and avoid the centre aisles of grocery stores, the Globe & Mail reported yesterday that food companies Monsanto and Dole have launched a project to "improve the nutrition, flavour, colour and aroma" of fresh vegetables, presumably through genetic modification. It will surely be tempting to modify salt, sugar and fat content of produce to capture market share.