Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1557: How Food Is Engineered to Make You Addicted & Fat With Michael Moss

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin speak with bestselling author, Michael Moss about how the processed food industry engineers food to make it addictive. What led him down the path of the addictive properties of food? (2:23) Why it’s not so much that we are addicted to food, but how these companies have changed the definition of food in a way that our biology and genetics haven’t had a chance to catch up. (4:46) The science behind how heavily processed foods hijack our brain. (7:16) The allure of the ‘mouth feel’. (10:24) The hidden dangers of empty calories. (11:50) The money that goes into research development to attract us to these foods. (13:49) The fascinating language these processed food companies use to market their products. (15:39) How what you eat at a young age shapes your food palate. (19:15) How the ‘wanting’ drives our actions. (22:08) Why addiction is something that happens on a spectrum. (26:13) The emerging growth of the obesity epidemic outside the US. (31:20) Do these executives have misgivings on the addictive products they create? (33:05) The startling factors that manipulate our desires. (35:16) The beauty of salt. (39:11) The moment the tobacco guys became alarmed about the food guys. (42:26) Does he support regulations of heavily processed foods? (45:05) Do children have a higher ‘bliss point’ than adults? (52:13) His concerns surrounding artificial sweeteners. (54:23) The techniques behind repetition to build habits. (59:29) Has he gotten any push back from these food companies? (1:02:33) The ways the industry is exploiting our efforts of regaining control. (1:04:15) The guys recap the highlights of their conversation with Michael Moss. (1:08:38) Featured Guest Michael Moss Related Links/Products Mentioned Flash Sale: Intuitive Nutrition Guide 50% off!  **Promo code “HOOKED” at checkout** Visit Felix Gray for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! NIH study finds heavily processed foods cause overeating and weight gain The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food The ‘bliss point,’ or why you can’t just eat one cookie or potato chip Training motor responses to food: A novel treatment for obesity targeting implicit processes Mind Pump #1527: The 3 Step Solution To The Obesity Epidemic How the Trillion-Dollar Processed Food Industry Manipulates Our Instinctual Desires Sugary drink tax - Wikipedia Home - Monell Chemical Senses Center Sydney researchers find artificial sweeteners can tell brain to increase food intake Secrets From the Eating Lab: The Science of Weight Loss, the Myth of Willpower, and Why You Should Never Diet Again The Sugar Wars Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump, right? Today, we interviewed Michael Moss. Now, he's an American journalist and author who has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting in 2010 and he was even a finalist for the prize in 2006 and even in 1999.

Now he's worked with the New York Times, he's worked with the Wall Street Journal, New York News Day, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and many other places. He's an author of some best sellers. One of them is Salt Sugar Fat and his latest book is called Hooked, Food Free Will, and how the food giants exploit our addictions. This is a great interview. We talk a lot about how food companies design their foods to essentially be addictive. So we know you're going to enjoy this particular podcast. Now you can find out more about Michael Moss and his books at mossbooks.us. Now this episode is brought to you by our sponsor Felix Gray. Now Felix Gray makes the best blue light blocking glasses you'll find anywhere. They don't change the color of the room, so they look like normal glasses, but they do block blue light, so you get less of that damaging blue light in your eyes, so you get less headaches, less neck strain,

and you can even get the nighttime blue light blocking glasses to help with your sleep. Go check them out, go to phelix-gray-glasses.com, that's F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y, glasses.com-forward-slash-mind-pump. Now of course in this episode, we talk about nutrition quite a bit. And it's great to hear this journalist kind of echo what we've learned in the decades that we've trained clients. And so what we're going to do right now is we're going to put our intuitive nutrition guide at 50% off. The intuitive nutrition guide talks all about how to work with your behaviors around food,

which is, in our experience, the most effective way to eat, to get lean, and healthy. So it's 50% off. You can find the Intuitive Nutrition Guide at mapsfitinistproducts.com, use the code hooked-h-o-o-k-e-d for 50% off. I'd like to open up by asking you what led you down this path of investigating into the, I guess the addictive properties of food. Well, it's a little crazy. If you go back far enough, 2008, I was in Algeria interviewing Islamic militants when a couple of FBI agents showed up at the New York Times headquarters in York looking for me.

I'd been traveling to Iraq, tormenting the Pentagon for failing to equip American soldiers with armor, and then I was writing critically about the warrant terrorism. According to the FBI, I had managed to land myself on an al-Qaeda hit list. I actually think it was the Algerian government trying to get rid of me. But at any rate, then your time's editor like ordered me home that night. And I came back and I was looking for something

different, safer, maybe, to do. And my editor spotted this outbreak of Salmonella in peanuts being manufactured in Georgia on the Alabama border. And I went down and took a look. And it was like this window on this trillion dollar process food industry that had lost control over its food chain because they were using these peanuts in dozens

and dozens of other products, but they didn't even know it. And so there was like this rolling recall that went on for weeks as people were getting sick all over the country. And then I was kind of writing about E. coli in hamburger, which was having the same problem. When one of my best sources who tests me for the food industry said, look Michael is tragic as these incidents of contamination. Are you really should look at the stuff my industry is intentionally adding to its products over which it has absolute control. And he was concerned about all the salt and process meat, but that led me to look at sugar and fat. And so the first book I wrote came out in 2013 was looking at salt

sugar fat as this unholy trinity, if you will, that on which the food industry relies to get us, you know, hooked on its products. But then I kind of realized that there was more to it than just the additives. And so I looked at this question of whether there isn't something about these products that so many of us seem to be dependent on that would kind of qualify them as true addictive substances like smoking and alcohol and narcotics. Yeah, we, you know, we, the three of us here, we're trainers in the fitness industry for, for two decades, and we often talk about the addictive properties of food. We saw it firsthand with our clients, but sometimes we get pushback from people saying things like, you know,

food can't be addictive. You don't see people, you know, selling their bodies for sugar like they would for cocaine or whatever. What kind of evidence do you have that food or what did you find in terms of the addictive qualities of food and is it comparable to drugs? Well, I have to say, I was one of those people five years ago pushing back on you, right? Like, where were the armed robberies and how come

not everybody loses control even of eating junk food like some people do? And where are the harsh chemicals, right? In these foods that you find a drug. So, here's what I found. And we can just kind of walk through those things. One, people aren't robbing the 7-11 for Oreo cookies because they're so cheap, almost anybody can afford these kinds of foods, and that's one of the things that attracts

us to them. We don't have to have harsh chemicals because our brain naturally makes chemicals like the famous dopamine that attract us to things, whether it's heroin or hot pockets and lunchables. And then finally, by definition, addiction is something that happens on a spectrum. There are casual smokers of cigarettes. There are moderate drinkers. There are people and I would never suggest this just because of the contamination issue for nothing else.

But there are casual users of a hero, which kind of explains or so to get to that question, and the big pushback from the industry is like, why doesn't everybody lose control? So what I found with Hooked, though, is kind of beyond kind of the additives and their ability to use kind of synergistically perfect formulations of Salt Sugar Fat,

they're tapping into our basic instincts that by nature draw us toward food and overeating, but they've changed the nature of our food in the last 50 years so dramatically that overeating has become like this everyday thing. So like one of my scientists said to me, look like it's not so much that we're addicted to food, it's that these companies have changed the definition of food in a way that our biology and our genetics hasn't had a chance to catch up, so we have this mismatch. You know, Michael, I old enough to remember when, you know, fat was public enemy number

one, right? We were all told to avoid eating fat. It's the reason why we're so obese. And then I remember when it changed and became carbohydrates and you should avoid carbs. And that's the reason why we're so obese. And I remember in my later years as a trainer looking at the prevalence of heavily processed foods in our diets and I matched it with a chart on obesity. And they seemed to match up perfectly.

And now we have studies that show that when people consume lots of heavily processed foods, they naturally consume five to six hundred more calories a day. What are they doing in these foods? Because heavily processed just means that they're adding things and changing things. What are they doing to these foods to make them, essentially hijack our systems of satiety or make us want to eat so much more? Yeah, so what are the hallmarks of addiction is speed? The faster substance hits the brain, the more seductive that substance is in the more apt we are to act compulsively as a result. So like cigarettes, smoke, can take about 10 seconds to fully activate the brain, alcohol,

narcotics or somewhat less than that, but still just a few seconds. Well, it turns out nothing is faster than soul sugar fat in some of these hyperpropossus foods and their ability to reach the brain because again they're using our natural hard wiring that has made us be attracted to food because food is life or death or certainly used to be in our four various right. And so they did these incredible experiments where they sat people down and go like okay we want to measure how fast you taste sugar. So they'll put some sugar and when you taste sugar, push this button so that the little sugar

and people's tongues picked up by the taste bud, the sweet receptor within the taste bud, which then sends that signal to the reward part of the brain, the part of the brain people call go that gets us to do things, to act, run from danger or eat or fornicate a scientist, say, right? Have more babies. They've got really essential things that keep us alive. Well, those people were pushing the button, tasting sweet in 7-10s of a second. Same with salt, that can reach the brain as well. So speed, and really, for me, that kind of put the whole term fast food

in a new light. I mean I like to call these foods I write about fast groceries because that's kind of what the process food industry is all about and making these hyper-process foods. Everything about it is fast. But in the manufacturing to reduce the price of the products because that's one of the things that attracts us to food, to the packaging so we can open it up really quickly and get that kind of immediate satisfaction and yumminess to the speed that the ingredients in those products actually are able to sort of hit the brain and cause it to go, go, go, and want more, more. Talk about how, I heard you talk about how, when you, actually, there's some foods that are manufactured to dissolve really quickly,

to where it kinda hijacks the tie-in. Right? Oh yeah, yes, so, you know, Cheetos, right? So, the puffed snacks that you put in your mouth, and you kind of gently press your tongue to the roof of the mouth. And what do they do? They melt because the magic formula in snack products is like 50% of the calories coming

from oils and fats because that creates what the industry calls the mouth feel, right? It's that sensation of biting into a toasted cheese sandwich. And you can probably tell I'm more of a salt than a fat guy myself, because my brain is like lighting. I'm just thinking about that toasted sandwich, right? But so the industry discovered, and they have a great term for this, that win, that puffed snack, Cheeto, what have you, dissolves in your mouth,

the brain gets the wrong idea that the calories have disappeared as well. And so you might as well eat that whole bag of cheetos because you're not getting any calories, right? They're gone. You have to love the language that the industry uses to kind of describe the science of its products and its efforts to maximize the

lurebit. But speaking of calories, that's another way that the food industry has been exploiting our natural attraction to food. So we evolved to like foods that have the most calories in that makes sense? I mean, calories is fuel, which is life or death. And even putting on body fat, right, was a really good thing for most of our existence, it enabled the brain to grow, us to get through hard times to have more babies, which is the most important thing, right? Evolutionarily. And we have sensors in the gut, possibly in the mouth to the tell us how many calories there are in what we're eating or drinking. Scientists can do this really amazing experiment using a sugar called maltodextrin, which

is actually kind of found as a miracle ingredient in a lot of processed foods. Because it's a sugar, but for most people it doesn't taste sweet and yet it has a bunch of calories in it. So they can use it for different, for like adding texture and bulk the things that they don't want to sweeten too much, right? But you do an experiment where you have a glass of plain water and a glass of water with melted dextrin in it. You can't see the difference, taste the difference, feel the difference, but time and again, sort of in experiments, people will choose the maltodextrin. They will like that more than the plain water because the gut and the brain is sensing

the calories. And so what did the industry do? They created this phenomenon of these calorie-packed products, right? That are empty calories, but the brain and the gut can't tell the difference between empty and good calories, good for us calories. And so we end up eating whole days worth of calories and like the bag of snacks, you know, again,

in the way that that, you know, we don't have the biological tools to sort of put the foot down and say, wait a minute, this is not a good thing to do. When you look at some of these massive companies that produce these processed foods, how much money or how much of the resources goes to this research and development that goes into the science of what you're talking about, Is it a big part of their money? Is this a big part of what they do? Yeah.

Yeah, yes and no. I mean, the margins, it's a trillion dollar industry, maybe a trillion and a half if you include fast food restaurants, right? The margins of profit so can be kind of surprisingly thin. And there, I was surprised to learn this. They're incredibly risk averse, right? A lot of what these big food companies do is let mom and pop shops sort of experiment and put out new products.

They wait and see if there's any chance for success and then they sort of buy those up. And you just see this going on all the time. These are like conglomerates, buying smaller companies when they have successful products. And they're actually shy of taking risks. So a lot of what you've seen the grocery store, I mean, when's the last time they actually invented

anything kind of truly new, like, I don't know, microwave popcorn or lunchables or something, it actually doesn't happen that often. What they tend to do is change the color or the name or the texture a little bit or the size of the packaging. Or they just kind of splashed the word new in the front of the package and we think it's new. But it's really not. I mean that said though. They have working for them bench chemists, psychologists, marketing experts, who 24-7 are working on maximizing the lure of their products in any way they can.

Whether it's the attitudes you can see on the label or whether this is these other kind of instinctual things we've been talking about that attract us to food generally. Can you go a little more in depth on a lot of the terminology and what they use for marketing these types of products. For marketing, well, in turn, when they're talking about maximizing the glory, they hate the A-word addiction, more than anything. But they talk about engineering their products to have crevability. Snack ability.

One of my favorite terms is more ischness. These are not English majors. These are like bench class. I said bench chemists and marketing people who were just expressing themselves just talking to one another about their efforts to maximize. But the language goes on and on. It's really the internal language that they use.

I think that it's so of like so, so descriptive and so enlightening as to their efforts. Salt, they call the flavor burst because it's typically on the outside of their snack products and the first thing that touches the tongue. Fats, I mentioned to you, to them, fats are the mouth feel.

It's that sensation, right? Picked up by the trigeminal nerve that goes up to the brain as well. Sugar, they call the mouth feel. It's that sensation, right? Picked up by the trigeminal nerve that goes up to the brain as well. Sugar, they call the bliss point. You know, just to give you one example of the effort they put into things, a gentleman who created some of the biggest icons in the grocery stores, named as Howard Moscow, he was trained in high math and then experimental psychology at Harvard walked me through his recent creation of a new flavor for Dr. Soda in which he started with no less than 60 versions of a of a syrupy flavor flavor flavor vehicle if you will as it calls it. Each one just kind of like slightly

different from the next one subjected those toed those to, I know, 3 or 4,000 consumer taste tests around the country and then took the data and threw it in his computer and did his high math, regression analysis thing. And sort of out came these bell-shaped curves that kind of like kids get graded on in school. But at the top of the curve is not the dreaded middle sea. It's the perfect amount of sweetness, right? Not too little, not too much. It was Howard who coined the

term the bliss point to describe that that perfect amount of sweetness. But here's the thing. When you talk to nutritionist, the problem isn't that people like Howard helped the industry engineer bliss points for things like soda and cookies and ice cream. The companies marched around the store adding sugar to things that didn't used to be sweet before. So that bread got added sugar and a bliss point for sweetness. Some yogurts came to have as much sugar per serving as ice cream, pasta sauce. Right? I've talked about how some of the brands had the equivalent of a couple of Oreo cookies with a sweetness in it.

Tiny half cup serving is spaghetti sauce. And so what happens is, or what happened, I should say, is that it created this expectancy in us that everything should taste sweet. And so, by the way, almost everything is by one estimate, two thirds of the products in the grocery store now have added sugar. And so when you drag yourself over to the produce aisle, right,

that poor little part of the store that nutritionists tell us we should be spending more time and filling up half of our plate with vegetables, and you get those other flavors that Aristotle wrote about, right? Like bitter and sour. Your brain is like rebelling going, like where's the sweetness? Take me back to the center part of the store. Talk a little bit more about that.

So all of us, all three of us are fathers, and I have a one and a half year old right now. And one of my biggest concerns is what you just said right now that two thirds of the grocery store has got added sugars to it. And I know Gerber's baby food has got sugar in it already. And so I imagine that when you introduce things like that to a baby already, you're going to increase the, what is the, the crave ability or the, what did you do?

Yeah, sure. The turn. Yeah, they're liking, they're liking them sugar in the same with salt. I can fess, I mean, I raise two boys. At one point, I caught them in the pizzeria, licking the salt. Shaker. I mean, yeah, we're not, so just an example. We're not born liking salt.

We don't develop a taste for salt until maybe like six months of age. And salt is like it's a miracle ingredient for the processed food. They're using it not just for flavor, but for texture and solubility, and pre-unus a preservative and kind of on and on and on. That's why like three quarters of the salt in our diet

is coming from them, not from the salt checker. But kind of the point of that is that, kind of through a habit. Oh, I should mention too. And there was this great study done by some science scientists who actually do some work for the food industry where they looked at two groups of kids and some kids were raised on like whole foods, cooked at home, right? And then another group processed foods.

And guess who was like my oldest son more apt to be licking the salt checker by the time they were in elementary school it was that the group raised on process food because the nature process food was dictating to those kids what they should value in food and in that case it was salty food in other cases it's sugary food so what they eat value in food. And in that case, it was salty food. In other cases, it's sugary food. So what they eat at a really young age, and possibly even still in the womb, depending on what their mother has been eating,

is a big determinant in sort of shaping their likes and dislikes. Which kind of raises the whole memory, things. I mean, one of the ways that I argue that food is more trouble for us than cigarettes drinking and drugs is that we start forming memories for food at a really young age. And we often associate those memories

with a beautiful great time in our life. And that's why the food company spends so much time advertising, marketing, to us when we're young. And that's why you go to a ballpark with your kids. They're doing everything they can to put a soda in their hands, but knowing that, at that joyous moment, that soda will forever more be associated with that joyous moment.

So when the kid grows up and they want a little joy or comfort in their life, boom, you know, they're thinking of that soda. You know, this leads me to this next question, Michael. We're comparing, we're talking about the addictive properties of these foods and how they're being manipulated to make them even more addictive. And one of the characteristics of addictive properties is this kind of, you build up a tolerance.

For example, caffeine is a very commonly used substance. It's got addictive properties is this kind of, you build up a tolerance. For example, caffeine is a very commonly used substance. It's got addictive properties. I know when I first use caffeine, 100 milligrams gives me a nice buzz, but if I use it every day, I need 200 milligrams next time. Next time I need 300 milligrams, do we see that with food? In other words, do we see that with processed foods

where you eat them and at first it's like, oh, that's a little overwhelming, but then the more I eat, the more I need to get that same feeling. We do see this. And I think generally the answer is kind of no, not in the way that some drugs do that. And in fact, because drugs we discovered

act differently, scientists who kind of define addiction dropped the tolerance sort of thing as a factor, as they dropped withdrawal because there are some heavy narcotics that you can use that don't create withdrawal pains. Like you imagine if you sort of envision a heroin junkie trying to stop heroin and just sort of having it's like tie him or herself to the bed, you know, for days on end and severe pain, right? That's no longer a criteria for calling a substance addictive.

But what is kind of similar in kind of the same vein is that there's kind of a difference between wanting and liking. And what scientists who kind of study people in like, you know, brain scan machines while they're eating or looking at pictures of food. They kind of discovered that, that when you get cravings for this food, the wanting goes up, but the liking doesn't necessarily go up. It can even go down.

It's like, we want this stuff and then we eat it and it's okay, but it's really the wanting that drives our actions and sort of the compulsive eating. And that can change over time. Speaking of scientists, there's this great guy, he's now at Stanford, Eric Stice, who did the first kind of longitudinal study, looking at how people respond to food. Both looking at pictures of food, how the brain responds. Both looking at pictures of food, and then brain responds, both looking at pictures of food and then actually tasting it,

because he picked up on this really cool way, because normally you're in the FMR, you can't chew at blurs, the images, but he pumps in this fabulous, hog and da's milkshake that he makes for people and drips it on their tongue through a plastic tube, and so can watch the brain respond to that. But what he noticed for the first time, and I think this is so important to understand

our vulnerability and why we're so exposed and why this 42% obesity rate is so important and tragic is that as people put on weight body fat, I'm talking about excess body fat, their sensitivity to cues, as psychologists call it, pictures of food, taste of food increases. They want the food more than they did before when they had less body fat, which is incredible. I didn't really understand that until I spent some time with study scientists who were like starting to look at body fat. And it turns out body fat is this incredible organ that's thinking, communicating with the rest of the body and frankly being really devious because it's one mission in life is to protect itself from any effort on your part to sort of get rid of it.

So if you're like trying to like die it to lose weight, your body fat is sending a signal to the brain telling you you're hungry or hungry than you should be or were before you had that body fat. And it's also slowing down your resting metabolism so that your less of a threat to it because you're burning less energy just like sitting around or sleeping. Wow, that is incredibly fascinating. Now this makes me think of the characteristics of the behaviors that I would notice in clients when they would consume these processed foods.

You mentioned the wanting more than the liking, and I even for myself, like, you know, my, I would say the food that, the process food for me that would, that really is the, the most challenging is potato chips. And I noticed when I eat them, it's more about the chip that's in my hand and about the chip that's in my mouth. I'd say I want to get more in my mouth. And it's not necessarily that I'm enjoying the flavor, but rather I want the next one. Does that make sense? Yeah, kind of. Look although speaking of potato chips, I have some of my favorites here, of course, and you notice the bag is like,

somebody's been into these, but, you know, and I usually bring these out to talk about like that flavor burst of salt that's on the surface and the 50% sort of fat or well from calories for the mouth feel, right? Even these kind of melt in your mouth. They, they also, you know, the noise that food products make is really critical because they've discovered that the more noise a potato chip makes, the more apt we are to eat

more chips, right? And what I didn't know too until the spending time of nutritionists is that potato chips are kind of loaded with sugar in the sense that the potato we find sort of potato starch gets converted into sugar in our body actually kind of fairly quickly. So it's got that trifective salt sugar fat. I mean, for me though, I mean, we're all different, right? Addiction happens on a spectrum. Our trouble with food happens on a spectrum. I mean, I'm one of those people who can reach into a bag of potato chips, and eat a handful, and close the bag up,

and put it away, and not like feel compelled to eat the whole bag in one sitting, or even pull it out later in the day. And I like to think that I still sort of wanted and to like it, but we're all different, and we're all vulnerable in different ways at different times of the different times of the day. And I would eat this right now except I'll make a

lot of noise. Do you do you think that's because it's more psychological for the individual and just like we use drugs to medicate for something else that we want to be distracted from? Oh yeah. Do you think that's so? Do you think that's reason? I talk to people. Yeah, no, no, no, when you talk to people, you talk to sort of drug addiction experts, I think the really smart ones out there are looking for that underlying cause, but basically, you know, asking the client why, why you taking the substance and really why? I mean, what's going on

there? And there have been some studies looking at trauma, you know, whether it's spousal abuse or sexual abuse. I mean, there's a lot of bad stuff that can cause people to turn to substances. Again, whether it's alcohol or drugs or food as sort of the attitude to that. It goes back to sort of these deep memories in us too, which associate eating with comfort. So if you're looking for comfort in response to trauma in your life, it's only sort of natural that you might turn to food, to food as that's-

And it's so much more socially acceptable, right? So I think that's part of the issue. If someone's walking around with a bag of chips, we don't think it's a big deal, but if you saw him walk around with a bag of cocaine or heroin, you would think it's a big deal, right? So I think that has a- Yeah, no, this is a guy, there's a guy in Philadelphia

who's been working on like trying to find solutions to our loss of control with food for decades now. And he sort of said to me once that you know Michael It seems like almost there was a day overnight in the 1980s when I became Acceptable socially to eat anything anywhere anytime and that's like or you started seeing people walking down the street eating or going to business meetings with food Or I mean you wouldn't be surprised if I pulled out a luncheables now and started snacking well maybe you'd be surprised by that but in other Zoom meetings maybe not right so and parents parents stop telling their kids don't snack between meals and so today snacking and it's mostly these junk snacks,

they're nothing for a health, and if anything makes things worse, it's become like the fourth American meal. We're getting on average now, I think it's like 550 calories per person per day, from snacking, right? I mean, the French think we're insane to do something that would, you know, at all diminish the joy of one of the most fabulous moments

of the day when you can sit down with family and have a home cooked meal and conversation and linger. I mean, to do something that I'll make ruin your appetite for dinner is like nuts. So, but in this country, so many families aren't even having dinner together. They're grazing all day long, or they're grabbing their dinner

on the go separately individually, or they're watching TV while they're eating dinner distractedly, which can also cause you to overeat. Yeah, although we are now seeing that most modern nations are starting to follow our lead, I know we were the leaders in obesity by long shot, and now we're starting to see these other countries start to creep up. And I even Mexico, for example, is a few decades ago, didn't have an obesity epidemic. And now it's exploding with the introduction

of a lot of these foods. Are we seeing this just grow everywhere as countries adopt more of this kind of modern, Western, I guess, lifestyle? Yeah, I think so. They followed the game plan of tobacco industry, because when tobacco industry was pursued in courts and had to settle that huge case with state attorneys general back in the late 90s, it, the tobacco industry, was already moving overseas into countries where people were paying less attention, knowing that they're marketing dollars were better spent there, and big food

has done the same as more and more of us care about what we put in our bodies and change how we value food and think of it less as instant gratification and yumminess and more as fuel for strength and our brains, these companies have moved over to their marketing to other countries. They started more with emerging places like Brazil with emerging middle classes that again, they hadn't thought about process. They weren't aware of the hidden costs in convenience foods, but also European Union. It's like they're all over the place now, including France.

Because people are facing the same kinds of stresses and changes in social norms there as they were here earlier. Now, you've had a lot of experience going in and meeting with a lot of these CEOs and companies, and I know you've said before too that, you know, you don't demonize them or blame them, they're doing what they're supposed to,

they're a company trying to make money, but have you ran into some of these owners and founders feeling guilty for what has happened and maybe changing sides or changing their mind on how they want to do things. Yeah, I know. I was really lucky. I mean, you know, as you know, as Celtergraph out to the first book, I came across this trove of documents that put me inside the companies and their memos and emails and white strategy papers and marketing plans. And it was those documents that enabled me to identify people who invented many of these products, like the Lunchables and to get to meet and talk to the former president of Coca-Cola for North America.

And I was struck by two things. One, how many of them don't eat their own products because they know better. And they're worried about losing control. They're worried about the health effects, right? But two, how many of them sort of came to have misgivings about their life work? And they could kind of argue that, look, we invented these things in a more innocent era,

1970s, maybe before everyone became so dependent on them. We didn't mean for people to eat luncheables every day or hot pockets to make that your dinner, et cetera, right? And they could kind of excuse that, but seeing our dependence grow. Yeah, they can't not only have they come to have misgivings, but some of them have switched sides. I mean, the former president, Coca-Cola, went to work for a carrot farm and began selling baby carrots with the same kind of cunning that Coke was selling soda to kids, right?

Not preaching about carrots, but kind of like selling them as fun as excitement, which is a really interesting concept. The inventor of the Lunchables began working with a guy who invented fresh salads to sell out of vending machines, and actually you can find them at O'Hare Airport now to help him think about kind of some marketing strategies that worked really well for lunchables but can also work for good food. What are some of the other factors that they manipulate to make these foods so irresistible? I mean we mentioned salt, sugar, fat You said, you know, feel, sound. Yeah, like dissolve.

The bag color. Yeah, sir. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're hitting a lot on color. We get really excited by color. I realized this most when I, the first book Salt Sugar Fat in Commandos, I was at the New York Times Newsroom and this guy from Silicon Valley called me up.

He said, hey, I want to come visit. I'm concerned. So he came in and he had the book, and this guy from Silicon Valley called me up and said, hey, I want to visit unconcerned. So he came in and he had the book and he had like, he had like, underlined a sentence in every paragraph of that. Wow, you're really interested in the food arch here. And he goes, no, I'm interested in helping people, you know, curb their addiction to smartphones. And what the tech industry does is almost in parallel with what the food industry does. And he was the first person who told me that, you know, if you toggle the switch on your iPhone to turn it into black and white, your brain almost goes to sleep. It gets much more, much less excited, rather, over, you know, any of its functions or the apps.

I mean, you're like going like, I paid that much of my money for this like pizza chunk. I'm not even gonna want to use it. It's really incredible how color gets as excited and the same thing is true with foods too. That's why when you go grocery shopping, it's like burst of bright neon colors. I mean, I know that that gets excited.

But yeah, let's go back to the basic instincts, right? So we buy nature and love food that's cheap. You know, in the old days that meant less energy expenditure, or more part, that you can imagine being a hunter-gatherer society, it made a lot more sense instead of running down that antelope for dinner, just grabbing that art of art, that's poor thing that's sitting there, right, and have that.

And so what do the food companies do? They have these chemical laboratories working for them. They're called flavor houses. They mimic the flavors and sort of the natural world in order to enable the processed food industry to make their products. They came up with things like the pumpkin pie spice, right, that you see in a lot of products in the fall from like candy to pop tarts to cereal, what have you. And, but the main thing, using, by the way, as many as 80 ingredients to make that pumpkin pie spice, I discovered when I spent some time at one

of these flavor houses, but their overarching goal is to mix and match those ingredients, those additives to reduce the cost. Because these companies know that we'll get incredibly excited by a box of breakfast pastries that cost 10 cents less than it did the week before. Again, as a basic instinct of ours, we're drawn by nature to variety, because our forebears realize through natural selection that if we ate lots of different things, right, we were more apt to get all of the nutrients we needed to thrive and be healthy and what have you. And also we became really good at eating lots

of different food, because climate used to change in the past. And it would dramatically change our food source. And we would have to adjust to it. Humans became really good at adjusting to lots of food and being able to fall in love with lots of different foods. That's why people could move to the, or emigrate to the Arctic and fall in love with whale blubber, right?

So what happens in the grocery store? You walk in the cereal aisle and there are 200 versions of sugary starch, right? So what happens in the grocery store? You walk in the cereal aisle and there are 200 versions of sugary starch, right? The company's knowing that that will get us excited, sort of, our natural attraction to the variety. And then we talked about calories, which is probably the most significant thing that they're most significant instinct of ours that they're exploiting to sell their products and put us in this biological mismatch. Now, I've seen over the years how fortification of minerals and nutrients and things and all these products have just basically entered into every single food item it seems like. Is this an effort on their part to try and then

inject these nutrients back into the foods as they've been manipulating them? So they have to have to share your Kellogg story for this one. Would you tell about the first time you've been into the Kellogg's without the sodium? Oh, yeah. Oh, right.

So at one point I was looking at salt in particular and I went to the biggest companies and said, what's the deal here? I mean, salt has become like this public enemy number one, because we seem to be eating too much of it in associations with high blood pressure heart disease. Like, why are you using so much salt? And they said, and one of them, Kellogg said, hey, come on in. And they didn't just talk to me. They prepared for me special versions of their products

without using any salt at all, right? They thought they were going to show me. And they did, they did, because it was the most god-awful eating experience I ever had. Right? We started with the Cheetos. I'm no, I'm sorry, the cheese it's, which normally I could sort of eat day in and day out, right? But the ones that they made for me without salt, we couldn't even swallow them. They stuck to the roof of our mouth because salt adds texture and solubility. We moved on to the corn flakes. No, sorry, the frozen waffles were next. And with the ones without salt came out looking and tasting like straw because salt does add some flavor and then color. And then the clincher with a cornflakes,

put them in a bowl, threw in some milk to go buy it before I could say anything. The chief spokeswoman for the company was sitting there in this laboratory and she swallowed and burst out metal. I taste metal, M-E-T-A-L, and I kind of look at, yeah, I thought one of my feelings fell out. I was like sloshing around in metal fillings, right? I'm just like sloshing around in my mouth. And the chief technical officer for the company, right? Who's in charge of like all things scientific?

He's kind of started chuckling and goes, yeah, not everybody will taste the metal in saltless corn flakes and look, I don't even know, corn flakes had salt in them. But he said one of the beautiful things about salt for us is that it will mask, cover up some of the off notes, bad taste that are inherent to some processed foods, which explains sort of why they see salt, and a lot of these other attitudes as these miracle ingredients, that they're not all there to wow your go brain. A lot of them are there just to keep the machinery from getting sticky and these factories making

the food, or as a preservative so they can stay in the warehouse for six months without rotting, or going stale, and on and on. So a lot of these additives are functional things for the industry and not necessarily things we should be concerned about except kind of overall when you ask the question like, what is this stuff? You brought up the tobacco industry a couple of times and then you very quickly mentioned the tech industry with the phones and apps and of course now we're talking about processed foods.

Do we see a lot of carry over? In other words, do we see people moving from one industry to the other? So like for example, does a food company hire people from Big Tobacco because they're so good at making their products, so addictive or vice versa. And are we seeing them now move to tech

to kind of figure out those things? Oh yeah, so here's yet so yes. So one of the things I discovered for the first book and I touched on a little bit, and hooked, is that for the longest time, Philip Morris was also the biggest single producer of processed food in North America because it bought back in the 80s, the old company, General Foods, which used to be here in New York up in Territown, and then craft, and then Nabisco. And in that case, it was kind of the tobacco managers,

guiding the food managers on how to sell their products in the grocery store and in convenience stores where cigarettes had a lot of their sales. Oddly enough, you know, over time starting in the early 2000s, crazy, the tobacco guys became alarmed about the food guys. And they actually warmed them privately that you're going to have as much trouble over salt sugar fat, literally citing those additives, and obesity as we are over like smoking and cancer, you've gotta like do something to reduce your dependency, or we're all gonna get in trouble. Well, by the mid-2000s, Philip Morse had actually bailed

on the food industry and sold its interest in those companies. I think in part because of that alarm that the food, the processed food industry was going, the tech side, we see something different now. We see this phenomenon of like tech food, the meatless burger, right? The something or other made with pea flour instead of soy beans or what have you, right? So there's a lot of folks in Silicon Valley who are trying to reinvent processed food using technology and no doubt the big food companies are starting to acquire some of these products that look like they have the biggest chance of success.

Wow, that is incredibly fascinating. Okay, so the people in the food industry being warned by tobacco because obviously tobacco got heavily regulated. And actually, it's actually one of the very few in my opinion, success stories of regulations, less people smoke now than they did before in America. It's not nearly as big of a problem. OBCD kills, though, way more people than tobacco ever did. Now that you've investigated this and you've been so deep in it, are you supportive of regulations or

maybe state-sponsored education on these foods? Because obviously, there are part of the formula that's causing so many of our health problems. So, if you're asking me what government can or should do. Yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah. So, you know, as a journalist, it's a little bit beyond, it's a little bit beyond me, but there are kind of a couple things that are beyond me to sort of to say, but there are a couple of things happening. One, you've probably heard of soda taxes, right? We're a few cities. I think Philadelphia, I think all of Mexico has imposed a few cents on bottles of soda and it seems to work in nudging people just a little, just

enough to kind of change their eating habits because like, I mean, we love money, it's much as we love cheap food, right? So who wants to spend 10 cents more per bottle of soda? It's almost like it gives us an excuse, right? Or almost like you can turn to your kid and say, look, you really want that soda? Give me your allowance, you know, for the next week. And you could buy it and the kids are gonna,

oh, wait a minute. Well, that was one of the greatest challenges as a trainer is that clients would say that, you know, the processed foods were cheaper. You could go get a whole pizza, you know, frozen whole pizza for your family that would cost the same as like a bag of fruit or something inside the grocery store.

So that's happened. So true. Oh, it's one of the biggest problems and inequities here, which is that what we're talking about, hurts poorer people or people of modest economic means the most, because look, you can be well meaning by your family, walk into the grocery store, and yeah, that basket of blueberries is going to cost as much as a two pound frozen pizza that's going to feed the whole family

and so the whole farm system. And I actually looked at that once and when I looked at it, it was like 90% of the acres in this country are planted in field corn. That's not the stuff you eat on the cob. That's the stuff that goes into animal feed, high fructose corn syrup, but also as ingredient and processed food and soybeans, right? And the rest 10%, all of the 10% is all the vegetables and fruits and nuts and all that stuff we should be eating and the research and development money is largely going toward the ingredients and processed food as well. So I think your clients are right. I think

there are people working on that who will argue that it is possible to eat for even less money than processed food can cost. But I think it's kind of hit or miss. And it's, I found during the pandemic where I had to do most of my cooking as my wife worked for a hospital system and she was, you know, 24 or 7 for the entire year. I found the hard part was kind of not finding some dishes that were affordable and yummy and I could make without a lot of inconvenience,

but kind of doing that week after week after week without boring the family, sort of getting that continuum going. But look, I mean, I have a spaghetti sauce recipe down using a can of whole tomatoes that I'm sure costs less than the prepared sauce And I have it down to like 93 seconds now. Wow. Yeah granted granted if it simmers a while the families were up to eat it But but the actual work part of it 93 seconds at less cost than a jar of Certainly the better kind of you you know, prepared spaghetti sauces out

there. Yeah, well, a couple, I mean, because it is interesting, right? Not only is obesity a problem, but it's poor people and lower middle class that are moral beast and even people in the, in the, make more money, which in the past, it was the reverse in the past. The only people you saw that were obese were the very wealthy and everybody else was under fed or under nourished. I think part of the problem is the subsidies that we have for a lot of these crops that

you talked about makes them kind of cheap. And then the processing the foods and the fact that they have such a long shelf life, they don't have as much waste or should I say, when you're selling fresh fruits, you lose quite a bit because they go bad. But if I'm making frozen pizza, I was like, you know, when you're selling fresh fruits, you lose quite a bit because they go bad. But if I'm making frozen pizza, I was like, I'm not losing very many. Yeah, you know, it's really frustrating at a journalist because the data on what we eat is actually pretty sketchy, right? It's sort of like when the USDA talks about kind of like what we eat, they're mostly

talking about like what's produced and they've only started to recently look at what gets thrown away. How much of that pound of cheddar cheese do you eat? And how much when there's a little mold on it, you check the thing out. And I even thought about that, but that's a really good point, which is that we may be eating more modest, reasonable amounts of like real food because of kind of the waste issue, then process because the process we like never goes bad. You can eat half of that half pocket or just two hot pockets and put the rest in the fridge and ate it later.

It's no problem. Come back a week later. it's going to be fine. Oh, totally. I wanted to go back to kids for a second, because that's the part that I think I'm most concerned with. And I know that as we're developing as children, there's quite a bit of plasticity in the brain, right? The brain is still developing.

And once you hit a certain age, your brain is still plastic, but there's parts of it that are pretty, I mean, that they're permanently developed in comparison. Do we see changes in brain development with children who are exposed to these foods, you know, quite often as children? Do we see that maybe their cravings change because their brains now have molded to want these foods even more than if they had never been exposed to them in the first place. I haven't seen those days because I think you have to slide these kids into like brand scans and follow them over time. It's a little bit, it may be a little expensive and a little bit invasive.

And the best we can do is kind of look at their likes and dislikes as they change. I mentioned salt, right? Sugar too, but other than that one longitudinal study over body fat, and I think he started with people in their early 20s or maybe even their teens and followed them over time. And maybe there are, but I don't recall reading about any kind of really deep dives into the minds of kids to see how their brands might be physically changing. What about their desire for how sweet they want things?

I think I saw you talk about the difference between children and adults, like kids needs an X amount more table spoons of sugar. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, right, there's this amazing kind of think tank research center in Philadelphia called the Monel Center for chemical senses, they call it. They do a lot of work for the food industry,

but they're independent and their scientists don't hesitate to bite the hand that feeds them financially. And a scientist there has been sort of studying, yeah, kind of like she was, what I first met her, she was kind of measuring the bliss point for kids. And again, she would kind of put kids through the drill of tasting, you know, different puttings of various sweetness to figure out what level of sweetness they like. And she discovered that kids basically have a bliss point for sweetness.

It's about double what adults have. So they like, you know, soda isn't even their ideal. It's soda with added sugar is their perfect amount of sweetness. But even she hasn't done she hasn't done sort of studies over time to see if kids like sugar more than they did like 50 years ago. That makes sense when you, because I know children are much more averse to like bitter. You know, like when I was a kid, the taste of coffee was disgusting and I was an adult. I like it. And probably because sweet in nature meant safe, right?

So if you taste something sweet in nature, it's probably not bad for you, it's probably not poison. And so children being obviously smaller and more sensitive or should say maybe more vulnerable to toxins, they probably, I mean, it makes perfect sense that they would have a higher bliss point than adults. Yeah, and that's why sort of non-calorie sweeteners are kind of so interesting and a little bit scary scientifically, right? Because sweet also probably meant calories to us in our evolutionary history. And we're always looking for calories, and so there may be some attraction to sweeteners

for that reason too. What is your thoughts on artificial sweeteners? I know Sal brings up on the show studies around people that switch to Diet Coke, they actually don't necessarily lose any weight by doing that. So what do you do? Yeah, apparently the studies are kind of mixed on that.

I mean, look, I think if you have a client who's struggling with soda, and that's like the one thing that trips them up, and they can eliminate that soda of a switching to diet, so nothing else goes haywire, then it's probably okay for them, right? That's probably like a good thing in that context. I think what's troubling to some scientists is that

because of our concern about all the sugar they're adding to so many products, a lot of these companies are now again marching through the store reducing the sugar by adding no calories, sweeteners, and sometimes cocktails two or three of these substances natural or not natural where you know, not only the studies are

a little ambivalent about whether that's going to help you gain control of your eating habits or not, but it's also not kind of clear what that's doing to us kind of biologically. And there was this, I end Salt Sugar Fat and I refrain from writing about my studies or animal studies because, you know, as they go, we don't necessarily go, but there's this critter

in the animal world called the fruit fly that's incredibly close to us in its eating habits, right? It loves fruit and it loves fermenting things, it loves beer, right? And so scientists study the fruit fly for certain things, thinking that this is a pretty good guess on how humans might react. And these guys out of Australia did this very, very elegant experiment where they took some fruit flies with a control group, fed them their normal chow but added one of these non-chaloric sweeteners. And the fruit flies went into like starvation mode.

They couldn't sleep, they couldn't sit still, they were constantly eating, even though they were still getting their food in the same number of calories. And so the worry is that when we taste something sweet and the brain expects calories from that sweetness, the sugar and the gut expects calories, and those calories don't come in. The brain may like overreact to that and tell us we're

starving, and so conceivably, and the science is totally weak on this still, I wouldn't bank on anything like this, but conceivably one could be drinking dide soda and then feeling hungerier than you would otherwise. Michael, that's exactly the experience that we've had training everyday people for over two decades. I've never had a client. The only times I've ever had anybody lose weight by consuming artificial sweeteners is when their diets were extremely controlled when they knew exactly what their meals were, but everyone else when they just tried to replace their soda with artificial sweetens, you know, soda, so they had no more sugar from the soda, they ended up not losing weight because they made

up for it with calories in other places. Yeah, they may also kind of see like this placebo against, you know, like, okay, I had my diet soda, now I can have the donut, it's not going to like affect me or I've kind of made up for that You know, there's a there's a scientist out of the University of Minnesota Tracy man She hates weight loss diet and she wrote a book about it And I was looking at it the other day and one of the things she urges her clients to do Which I found really fascinating. Maybe look counter-tuitive is like Don't eat healthy food because it's healthy for you.

Find another way to value that food. Like eat that salad because it has like lots of variety and textures to it or eat that cucumber because you grew it in your garden. But if you, if you call it healthy, that kind of sets you up for failure because then you're going to be more apt to turn to that unhealthy thing as like a treat or as a reward, right, for eating the healthy thing, which I'm really, really fascinating.

We have no idea if that works for a lot of people. It works. It works. Terminus, we wrote a book around intuitive eating. Oh, it works. It works. It works. It works. It works. It works. It works. It works.

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It works. It works. It works. It works. It works. It works. It works. It works. It works My skin is better, my stool is better, and help the client connect to those things. And actually when you do a good job of this, you then start to actually crave those foods. It's very similar to how food manufacturers use marketing

to associate food with like parties or summertime or whatever, you can actually do that with, quote unquote, healthy foods and find that you actually start to crave them over time. That's really brilliant. So that reminds me too. I mean, one of the things here, the hopeful things is that we can change habit. It takes time, but habit can work for the food industry or it can work for ourselves. And I'll give you one tiny example, you mentioned you had a one-year-old, I raised two boys. One is just graduating this month from college, right?

And when they were young, we were trying to get them to eat broccoli, right? And my wife kind of out of thin air pulled the numbers 19. Like, if we could just get them to try broccoli 19 times, then they'll like it. And there's some truth to that because one of the scientists I met, Rich Mattis, he said, Purdue, and I was kind of pushing him to say, like, which, what's more problematic? So I'll trigger a fad, you know, this, but he goes, he goes, actually, Michael, I think we'd like what we eat more than we eat what we like, meaning as powerful as these additives are, it's the repetition and the habit that causes us to like things because, you know, that's why people in some countries

love to eat crispy insects, right? It's delicious and we're appalled by, that's just a matter of what they're taught and and include into and become habituated to and as kids. And so I think that's where the that's where the that's where the huge hopefulness lies here is is that we can take some of these things same techniques the industry uses on us and and and turn the tables and use them to our advantage. And one of them is just keep trying keep keep giving your kids taste of this healthy food until it becomes a habit. And what they're doing is they're deepening their

memory channels for those foods. No, that's very true. I did that as an adult in my early 20s. That's how I got myself to enjoy eating fish. I hated fish growing up. And then I, you know, as a fitness, you know, professional, I knew, okay, fish is very good for me. I'm just going to keep trying, keep trying, and I ended up developing a taste for it. And now I enjoy eating it. And it takes time. I mean, I've been a runner, Mr. Mealife, and I have friends who start running. And, you know, often what happens is they'll go for two weeks and then quit.

And I like to often say to them is like, look, look, a really good strategy is to try to keep at it until not doing it feels worse than doing it, right? And kind of what's going on there is you're like getting hooked on a good thing and you're deepening sort of that habit, but it can take time and we've had a lifetime of these big food companies dictating to us what we should value in their products. It's not only makes sense that we're not going to be able to turn that around in a week or 30 days or whatever other hype you see in these kind of quick, fixed diet programs. It can take a couple of months to really change your eating habits to the extent to which

you're no longer vulnerable to the kind of those spontaneous cravings when you're eating habits to the extent to which you're no longer vulnerable to the kind of those spontaneous cravings when you're distracted and not thinking about the food. That's the real key, I think, for people. You know, Michael, you're revealing so much in your books about this, you know, like you said, trillion, trillion and a half dollar industry, how they make their foods so irresistible and the process that goes through it and how they affect our body in terms of how we can get addicted to them. Have you gotten any pushback? Have you gotten any pushback from doing this kind of journal, you know, just where you're reporting on this kind of stuff? Are they getting angry with you? Are you getting threatened?

Or have they been pretty friendly and letting you in and said, yeah, you know, tell people. You know, I mean, I've been feeling they wish I'd never been born. But I also think, I mean, look, I was trained at the Wall Street Journal in the New York Times to be accurate and fair and thorough. And I think they can kind of appreciate the reporting. But also, it's important to remember that there have been within these companies, cabals of insiders who've been trying to change things more than they've been and kind of run up against the problem which is these companies are more addicted to making their food cheap and variable and

convenient than we are. So it's really hard for these companies to change. So I think that privately, they've actually kind of been cheering me on. Because look, again, I don't see this as this evil empire. I think if they could sell good food, you know, they would. They'd make money in it, they kind of would, but they just happen to figure it out, yeah. Right, and it does sound like that they're learning from,

I guess, what happened to past industries, and they're saying, okay, we need to maybe figure out a way to prevent this from getting hyperrated. They warned. I didn't say they were learning from it. They were certainly warned by the tobacco bill. In fact, and toward the last chapters in the hook,

they write about ways that the industry is actually exploiting our efforts to regain control. They quietly bought up the dieting industry, right? You had hines by weight watchers. And even atkins at one point came to me, purchased by, you know, a company that owns process, oh, highly processed foods, right? And so, but also they kind of even turned

to the addiction question in their foods and started fiddling with their formulas in a way that they thought would ease our concern about our inability to control our eating with these products. So they started doing things like adding protein, which you know is kind of this thing can, which in the right kind of diet can maybe help help us feel fuller faster and get satiated and thereby eat less. But they're adding protein to sugary cereal and then splashing the word protein on the

front of the package. Without any sort of proof that that's going to help us eat less of that cereal, whether we should be eating any of it at all, and then fiber, same thing, right? Also, fiber may be that thing in whole vegetables and fruits that's so good for us. It gets us to slow down, right? The antithesis of fast groceries and fast food, slow down the metabolism.

Well, so what are these companies doing? They're starting to add a couple of dozen crazy fibers. They're getting here and there. Some of them are made in the laboratory. And when I looked, in fact, when the FDA looked, the science isn't there. There's hardly any science at all connecting those fibers with any increase in fullness or satiety.

So in one way, it's kind of even worse than them responding sincerely to our concerns about our food and not just pretending or health-washing their products to pretend that they're responding. Yeah, no, as a health professional, I see these cereals and stuff that say, high protein and I look at the back and it's like six grams of protein. Oh my god. Which is nothing.

Or the fiber that they add is not the kinds of fiber that you may find in whole natural foods, but rather, at kinds of fiber that you may find in whole natural foods. But rather, you know, at least they could put on the label, hey, we are also now. It reminds me of, you know, it's funny. You know, back when we could go to the movies, I remember I went to the movies and my son goes, oh, look, those, that bag of candies are fat-free. I remember I'd say the bag says, a fat-free food. You know, it's almost like they're just advertising,

that they're organic, for example, they'll advertise that they're healthy based on what we think is healthy, but in reality, they're just trying to play. Yeah, I mean, look, I tell you a little secret. I mean, look, suppose I am a trained investigator and a reporter, right? But some aspect of this is so easy

because all you have to do is walk in the grocery store and look at the front of the packages because that's the to do is walk in the grocery store and look at the front of the packages because that's the most important real estate in the store. That's where they have our attention. And that's where they're trying to dissuade us from looking at the buying print, right? The nutrition facts box or thinking too much about the product. And it's like totally open as the former president of Coca-Cola, Jeff Dunn's head to me, there really isn't any smoking gun here, Michael.

They're putting this all up front. This is bubbly water, it was sugar. That's what it is. And they're not like, they're not like, mincing words here. And so, if you want to know kind of what the latest trend is in the industry to respond to our concern about something, you just look on the front of the package. It's going to say less sugar or less fat or less salt or added calcium or more protein or bunches of fiber or new or it's all there.

It's really going to amazing how transparent they can be. Yeah, no, you're 100% right. Michael, this has been a great conversation interview. I really appreciate the stuff you're writing about. We talk about this stuff all the time on the show. And like I said, we've worked with people for so long and all of us. It took us a while to really identify that that was the issue. It wasn't that they're eating too much fat or too much carbs or necessarily,

but rather these foods that when you eat them, they just make you overeat. You're eating a food that is engineered to make you do that Yeah, well thanks for having me. It's been great talking and thank you so much for your work Thank you Michael One of my favorite things about listening to him and now that you know, obviously we just got the chance to talk to him but I have also watched several of his videos and listened to his book. And he is not this anti-processed food guy. I mean, he openly admits that he eats it

and he's not dogmatic about it. He really pursues this conversation as an investigative journalist. And I love that he doesn't become the you know like people like Gary Tobs gets a lot of heat because he's right. He's I think he's a little more of an activist around it. He runs a lot of scientists Wrong way. Yes, you know and I feel like He does present the fact that I mean these scientists are out there to try and meet a consumer demand Yes, and then it's really us that want these hyper-palorable foods

and want that flavor to be like it is. And so they're just kind of supplying that to us. Yeah, no, I don't think the answer is to be a zealot. I don't think the answer, and we know this, right? We know this is trainers. It's not about being extreme in one way, direction to the other, but rather being aware and being responsible and having a good relationship with these things.

So that, look, I enjoy potato chips sometimes. I enjoy heavily processed foods sometimes. I love that. He talked about that where I brought up our intuitive eating guide that he was like, I think the key is just changing the relationship. I mean, that's exactly what we talk about all the time. And although we don't have studies to prove the success of it,

I mean, we've got two decades of training clients and have realized over that time that- Right, from our own experience, we've been able to see people change these behaviors, which is, I think, something to highlight is like this cravings and these things that seem like you're super addicted. Like, there's a way to regain control of that.

100%. It's really nice to hear that from someone like him, because it confirms the stuff that we learn. It's not about necessarily counting the calories or the macros, but rather the behaviors that drive some of the things that you do. If you can work with your own behaviors, and oftentimes in many ways that these marketing companies do with you to make you eat their products, you can do to yourself to get you

to eat in ways that are better for you. And again, these are things that we highlight in the intuitive nutrition guide. And it's just stuff that we've learned through decades of training people. Also loved hearing his concern on artificial sweeteners. Yes. And I felt like very similar stances we take on that. It's not trying to demonize it. Yes, there's places where it's maybe help somebody like a competitor.

Like I use Diet Coke when I was doing that. But to caution those like our clients that are using it in hopes that, oh, this is going to help me lose weight. And really, it does not do that. It's a bit alarming. And that's the things we've seen patterns and we've seen these behaviors and what that kind of results into in terms of like the then all of a sudden now there's openings for more calories to make their way. Yeah, and then you know, I'm a little upset that there are any studies to show how this affects children necessarily, but I you know, I'm gonna speculate that because the brain is developing as a child,

if they're exposed to these just these foods that have this crazy pleasure, you know, point or whatever, this bliss point, that it's gonna wire them to find, you know, point or whatever, this bliss point, that it's gonna wire them to find, you know, whole natural foods even more bland, and to find these foods even better or more desirable as they get older. Because I know, look, I tell you what, my own experience with my own kids,

we didn't give them a lot of sugars, because now of course, if we went to birthday parties or events, they would have it, but we never drank soda, we never really had it in the house. And it's funny when my kids would go to a birthday party, if I gave them a piece of cake or a soda, they'd have like half and they put it down and people they, why don't you have the whole thing?

Like, oh, I'm kind of sick of it. And I think it's because it was overwhelming because they didn't grow up having this. I agree with you. This is what I was searching from him when I asked him about. So he does this thing and I've seen him do it at a talk at like a college right where he he takes the the eight tablespoons of sugar mixes in water and he has an adult and he has a kid and supposedly the ratio is like 12 12 for kid eight for an adult as far as but the thing

that that's them testing or playing with that today right now. What I would challenge is the kid that was grew up 30 years ago, would they be the same way? And is that because we have things like Gerber food and so that has sugar in it already and the kids today are getting introduced to not only sugar sooner but more of it sooner and so that they probably crave it more or want it more or need a higher amount of it to your point with like caffeine and things like that as it starts to raise.

And then you bring an example of like your kids and I've had several clients where they actually raise their kids on all whole foods and they will turn down a full cookie. They'll eat half a cookie and give it back. You don't do normal kids don't do that. I have kids that have been introduced to sugar. And again, this is just my experience, but I've seen it enough times that I've made, I've connected the dots

of like, oh, wow, when you give your kids all whole foods, they and too long enough, right? Not just for the first year of their life, but for years when they begin to that age where they can make that choice, a lot of them don't choose to do. Totally. I love the example, you know, he brought up of the crispy insects and you know, how certain cultures, it's like what you grow up with is so formative in your patterns, you know, that you take from there on, you know, the rest of your life.

Dude, I know as an adult, if I have a lot, if I have a lot of, say sugar, for example, that as I have it, I start to want more of it. Initially, if I go from whole foods and don't eat much sugar at all, and then I eat some sugar, it's almost overwhelming. I'll eat some and I'll be like, oh, that's too sweet. But if I have it all the time, it doesn't become too sweet anymore. It starts to become more desirable.

So I definitely think we train ourselves to do these things. And Adam, I love your example of when you competed and you ate a strawberry after having dieted for a bodybuilding show, how sweet the strawberry all of a sudden tasted to you. So I think it definitely affects how we perceive these things the more that we have them. And so we kind of train ourselves to do this. So look, if you like our information, if you like our podcast, you'll love mindpumpfree.com. Go check it out.

We got lots of free guides there that you can choose from also You can find all of us on Instagram so you can find Justin at mine pump Justin me and mine pump salad Adam and mine pump Adam Thank you for listening to mine pump if your goal is to build and shape your body dramatically improve your health and energy and Maximize your overall performance check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at MindPumpMedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes MAPSANABOLIC, MAPSTERFORMENT and MAPSISTEDIC, 9-month of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs. With detailed workout blueprints in over 200

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