Welcome to the diary series "Let's Read a WHEE [Weight, Health, Eating and Exercise] Book Together!" We're on David Kessler's The End of Overeating, Chapter 4, "The Business of Food: Creating Highly Rewarding Stimuli."
The story so far: "[E]ating certain foods only makes us want to eat more of them." Ordinary hunger and out-of-control food-lust emerge from independent processes within the brain. Calibrated amounts of sugar, fat and/or salt achieve the "bliss point" and produce hyperpalatable menu items -– edibles that motivate lab rats, or people, to consume, consume, consume, far past normal satisfaction.
To document that food marketers exploit this phenomenon, Chapter 4 introduces us to a "leading food consultant," who helps to engineer such products. The consultant spoke to Kessler on condition of anonymity. Surely it’s inevitable that we here refer to this insider as Deep Throat?
Deep Throat told Kessler that sugar, salt and fat compose "the three points of the compass" that food marketers use to design their wares. (But surely a compass has four points? Hmmm...I will return to this anomaly later. But first, the housekeeping.)
Even if you can’t get Kessler's book right now, here's the first six chapters on Google books, if you have the right browser. Previous installment, diaried by Edward Spurlock.
WHEE (Weight, Health, Eating and Exercise) is a community support diary for Kossacks who are currently or planning to start losing, gaining or maintaining their weight through diet and exercise or fitness. Any supportive comments, suggestions or positive distractions are appreciated. If you are working on your weight or fitness, please -- join us! You can also click the WHEE tag to view all diaries.
Here's the current WHEE diary schedule, so far as I know. Please volunteer...More participants, more fun! Comment to tip jar and I'll add you wherever you wish.
September 8
Tues PM - ???
September 9
Wed AM - Edward Spurlock
Wed PM - ???
September 10
Thurs AM - ED G
Thurs PM - st minutia
September 11
Fri AM - Circle -- WELCOME NEW DIARIST!
Fri PM - ???
September 12
Sat AM – Edward Spurlock (Kessler, Ch. 5)
Sat PM - ???
September 13
Sun AM –???
Sun PM -???
September 14
Mon AM - NC Dem
Mon PM - ???
September 15
Tues AM - Clio2 (Kessler, Ch. 6)
Tues PM - ???
Deconstructing menu items for Kessler, the culinary man of mystery laid out key tactics to pack more fat, sugar and/or salt into prepared food products. (We spend fully one-half of our food money in restaurants, and that’s where these techniques get most fully exploited).
One: Loading extra fat, salt and sugar directly into a food.
For instance: par-frying breaded items in the factory, freezing them for transport, and frying again in the restaurant, thus loading them with a double dose of cooking oil. Another way to maximize "fat pickup" is to increase the surface area by slicing thin and dicing small. Potato skins slurp up fat really well. (Chicken tenders: "Unidentified fried object.")
Loading ice cream not only with surgar and high-fat cream, but also with mixed-in nuts, candy and cookie bits.
Loading a salad dressing with sugar, as in the popular honey-mustard dressings, or with fat and sugar, as in some slaws. (Many salads: "Fat with a little lettuce.")
Two: Layering different forms of fat, salt and sugar on top of each other in one menu item.
For example: peanut brittle (sweet poured over salt-covered, oily nuts).
Nachos: cheese (fat), avocado (fat), and sour cream (fat) on top of lard-fried beans (fat) on top of corn chips (salt and fat); the lettuce, tomato and salsa would be healthy in another setting.
I can haz bacon cheezburger: bacon (fat, salt) on top of cheese (fat, salt) on top of barbecue sauce (sweet) on top of hamburger (fat) on top of white-flour bun (sugar almost as soon as you eat it).
Many, many prepared food products and restaurant items are both layered and loaded.
Simple example, a sundae: Brownie (loaded with sugar and fat) layered with ice cream (loaded with fat and sugar) containing cookie dough (loaded with sugar, fat and salt) topped with chocolate sauce (sugar) topped with sugared nuts (sugar layered on fat) and then with whipped cream (fat loaded with sugar).
It gets fun to look at food products in the store and analyze them.
Chocolate-covered pretzels: fat and sugar on salt, on an armature of white flour.
Barbecue flavored potato chips: sugar and salt on fat, on a slip of potato.
Feather-light glazed doughnuts: sugar on fat, with a binding of white flour (at 200 calories each. And with coffee, they go to my brain like heroin.)
At Kessler’s request, Deep Throat deconstructed some menu items from popular, sit-down chain restaurants (not fast food). Complex combinations of fat, salt and sugar were engineered to be "highly hedonic": to spark food-lust, causing us to swallow oversize portions and –- marketers can predict -– driving many of us to return for the same experience again and again.
Carefully crafted menu descriptions, with healthy-sounding ingredients like vegetables, fish and chicken, might misdirect diners or sop their consciences. But over and over, such ingredients were smothered in variations on sugar, fat and salt. Here’s just one:
"Chicken Pot Stickers. Oriental dumplings pan-fried in the classic tradition. Served with our soy dipping sauce."
But, Deep Throat reveals:
Frying...replaces the water in the wrapper with fat. The layer of meat inside is loaded with salt, while the outside layer of sauce is rich with sugar and salt. "That’s hitting all the points," my source said...
And "spinach dip"? Forget about it.
That’s the chapter, and what follows is just me.
Based only on experience and intuition, I think there is a fourth point to Deep Throat’s compass. Perhaps, despite his apparent cooperation, he is in fact a triple agent, involved in a deep underworld conspiracy to hide a secret weapon from us. :-) The key word, I suspect, is redolent of foreign intrigue. In fact, there is no English term for it.
Umami. This is a Japanese word, though the Chinese have their equivalent. Merriam-Webster gives the pronunciation as \ü-ˈmä-mē\, if that helps anyone...Greek to me.
Exactly as with salt and sweet, the umami flavor has its own special taste receptors on the human tongue.
The general effect of umami might be described as savory. It characterizes certain cheeses, meats, anchovies, shellfish, mushrooms, kelp (kombu), soy sauce and worcestershire sauce among other items (list compiled by me from various sources). The famous chef Escoffier (born in 1846) -- in effect -- concentrated umami by boiling down veal stock, used this as a foundation for various dishes, and thereby made a revolution in French cuisine.
Umami is chemically is a single substance -– glutamic acid. It is the free L-glutamate ion that does the job. In certain foods, a lot of it occurs naturally. And the amount in foods can be boosted artificially by adding monosodium glutamate (MSG).
In 1907 Japanese researcher Kikunae Ikeda...identified brown crystals left behind after the evaporation of a large amount of kombu broth as glutamic acid. These crystals, when tasted, reproduced the ineffable but undeniable flavor he detected in many foods, most especially in seaweed. Professor Ikeda termed this flavor umami. He then patented a method of mass-producing a crystalline salt of glutamic acid, monosodium glutamate.
Glutamate -– perhaps not coincidentally for our response to it in food -– is a vital chemical in cell metabolism and a potent neurotransmitter. It’s also true that excess glutamate can damage and even kill neurons by a process called excitotoxity. This toxic reaction can occur in certain diseases, or injuries that damage the blood-brain barrier. But can ordinary eaters overdose on glutamate? That’s controversial.
MSG is added to many, many prepared food products. Because the additive got a bad name after being accused of causing "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome," MSG most often appears on labels under rubrics such as "hydrolyzed vegetable protein" and "natural flavor."
Consuming large amounts of glutamate ion may be harmless to most...unlike large amounts of fat, sugar and salt, which clearly can damage our health. But I think we can assume that glutamate increases palatability -– in the technical sense of promoting food-lust.
Put it this way: if glutamate –- umami-– does not make us want to eat more, then why would food processors bother -– and spend money -- to boost it in so many products?
Furthermore, last year, researchers in one study documented direct link between MSG and overweight:
People who use monosodium glutamate, or MSG, as a flavor enhancer in their food are more likely than people who don't use it to be overweight or obese even though they have the same amount of physical activity and total calorie intake, according to a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health study published this month in the journal Obesity. [emphasis added]
Therefore, call me a conspiracy theorist, but I suspect that Deep Throat may have chosen not to mention that the food industry’s compass actually has four points like any other compass: fat, sugar, salt and umami. And that the widespread artificial boosting of umami may contribute to the fattening of America.
To revisit the Chicken Pot Stickers cited above: in addition to sugar, salt and fat, this dish provides a umami boost with soy sauce, a condiment with glutamate levels similar to pure MSG. All four points of the culinary compass are hit.
The lesson I get from this chapter: don’t be seduced by names and menu descriptions. Coolly check against the three (or four) points of the compass. If layered and loaded...don’t pick up the offered weapon. It’s designed to blow away common sense with the very first bite.