The Evolved Eater

by Nick Taranto

  But beyond a basic agreement on the perpetrators, there’s quite a bit of controversy on what exactly we ought to do about it. As I started to read all the popular food books by Michael Pollan, Gary Taubes, Nina Teicholz, Michael Moss, Marion Nestle, William Davis, and many others, just to know what I should do to change my diet, I also began to plumb just how deeply Big Food has influenced our decision making.

  Do you think you understand why you choose to buy and eat certain foods?

  If you answered, “Yes!” then I congratulate you, because you have the same collective knowledge as the thousand-plus food scientists who have been working at the world’s largest food companies studying this exact question, all day, every day, for the last sixty years.

  Choosing food is about much more than calories or nutrition content. Humans pick food and food products based on how we expect them to taste and feel in our mouths, not to mention the signals of pleasure our brains will discharge as a reward for choosing something yummy. Nutrition is rarely the most important factor on our minds when we choose our food. More often it’s the taste, the flavor, the expected sensory satisfaction, the emotion tied up with eating the same snack that your mom served you when you got home from school when you were six. All these conscious, subconscious, and nearly spiritual thoughts and feelings flood the brain in a matter of milliseconds, and you make a decision.1

  How Big Food Targets and Influences the Consumer

  As powerful as riskily altered ingredients can be when fully titrated and tested for optimal mouthfeel and emotional release, the ingredients are just part of the Big Food battle plan. Marketing is equally as important.

  In recent years, the biggest American food companies have been sued for using food marketing terms like natural and all-natural. More than two hundred class-action suits have been filed against Big Food companies, alleging that they misused the adjective in marketing such appetizing oxymora as “natural” Cheetos Puffs, “all-natural” Sun Chips, “all-natural” Naked Juice, and “100 percent all-natural” Tyson chicken nuggets, to name just a few. Many of these products contain artificial flavors, preservatives, synthetic ingredients, and high-fructose corn syrup—not stuff that typically fits the “natural” bill.2

  The pushing of boundaries becomes even more shocking once you realize that kids are one of the main targets of Big Food marketing efforts. Let’s take Kraft’s TV dinner–like tray of meat and cheese, Lunchables, an iconic giant among convenience foods that radically changed the eating habits of millions of American kids, as a case in point.

  My oldest daughter is now almost three years old. She goes to day care, and one of my daily chores at home is getting her lunch ready for the next day. I have gotten my routine down to where it only takes me five minutes to get her lunch ready—grapes, mozzarella cheese stick, yogurt, and some combination of rice or pasta with chicken or fish or veggies. Five minutes might not seem like that much time, but if you multiply five minutes per day by five days per week, that’s almost twenty-two hours per year I spend prepping my kid’s lunch! Would I love a convenient, affordable, and nutritious alternative so that I could spend those twenty-two hours reading, working, watching Netflix, or just zoning out? Yes, please!

  Lunchables are a marketing dynamo designed to make the lives of working parents easier while playing off kids’ burgeoning need for freedom and fun. The ready-to-eat meals include meat, cheese, crackers, and candy, allowing kids to assemble them in whatever combination they desire. Food marketers use psychological targeting to deliver the advertising that surrounds Lunchables.

  If you pay a visit to the Lunchables website, first what you’ll notice is that they split their audience into “Kids” and “Parents”—you have to choose one path before advancing to the home page. At the top left of the Kids page is a banner in small font that sneakily proclaims, “This Is Advertising.” And in even tinier font at the bottom of the Kids section is a little disclaimer that says, “The games and other activities on this website include messages about the products Kraft sells.” The entire kids’ portal is not overtly about food, but rather an app-based game called “K-Catch: An Inter-Dimensional Puzzle Revolution.” The game is filled with flying processed food characters who make Lunchables seem like a lovable character you might find in a bedtime story.

  The parents’ side of the house doesn’t have any video games, but it does have a lot of fantasy-inspired pseudonyms for riskily altered food. Lunchables has expanded their repertoire since I was a kid and now offers several dozen varietals on the original Light Bologna & American Cracker Stackers. In reaction to parental outrage over sugar water and cookies for lunch five days per week, recently Lunchables launched their health-washed “Lunchables with 100% JUICE” line. Their Chicken Popper Kabobbles meal is representative of how riskily altered provisions are often marketed as real, nutritious food.

  First off, what the hell is a Kabobble? This reminds me of my rib-shaped pork patty MRE days—and that is not a good thing.

  Second, Kraft proclaims that the Lunchable is “an excellent source of protein,” and there is a big sticker on the meal box that says, “Made with REAL FRUIT.” You have to read the fine print to see that the JUICE touted in capital letters is actually “Fruit punch flavored 100% juice blend from concentrate with added ingredient and other natural flavor.” No mention of what “added ingredient” or “natural flavor” is or why the grammar is worse than that of the Indonesian eighth graders I taught in Java. If you only had ten seconds to buy the product while shopping with two screaming kids in your shopping cart, fat chance you would have the patience or the time to understand what kind of riskily altered food you were about to feed your children.

  “Your Typical Consumers Don’t Stand a Chance”

  I wanted to understand how Big Food marketers think about marketing to kids, so I spoke with Bruce Bradley. Bruce spent over fifteen years working as a marketing executive at some of the biggest processed-food brands in the world, including Nabisco, Pillsbury, and General Mills. “Only by taking a hard look at the industry and detaching myself from the culture of Big Food did I finally conclude that your typical consumers don’t stand a chance against the marketing muscle of food companies,” says Bruce. “And that realization is what got me actively blogging, agreeing to interviews, and pulling back the curtain on Big Food’s long track record of deception.”3

  I asked Bruce about the most shocking food marketing tactic he ever saw employed, and he immediately started talking about Frosted Flakes. “What gets me the most angry is when I see junk food marketed to kids as a healthy choice. Probably the example that gets under my skin the most is Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes. With the help of Tony the Tiger, Frosted Flakes has been marketed to generations of kids as a good choice for kids to start their day. Honestly, there’s very little nutritionally redeeming about Frosted Flakes, yet Kellogg’s tells kids that Frosted Flakes ‘fuels them up to be their best.’ Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth! And by peddling highly processed, sugary products to kids, food manufacturers are teaching our youth the most unhealthy food habits possible that have the potential to lead to lifelong struggles with weight and a whole host of chronic diseases.”4

  When Bruce elaborates, you can tell he is still paying penance for a career spent convincing kids to consume. Bruce tells me that with the help of advertising agencies, research firms, and brand character specialists, Big Food companies launch advertising smart bombs, disguised as fun-loving characters, straight at kids. Is it a fair fight? “I don’t think so,” says Bruce. “Winning the hearts, minds, and stomachs of consumers is no small feat, so Big Food manufacturers have to pull out all the stops. Unfortunately, kids get caught in the crossfire.”5

  Kids spend more than $200 billion annually, and they influence many food purchases beyond those they make directly. Although kids’ choices are strongly influenced by their parents and siblings, they are increasingly making decisions at younger ages, either in ways that are independent of
parental guidance or as agents influencing the choices and purchasing decisions of their parents and caregivers—“More SpongeBob Cheez-Its, please, Mom!”

  Of the various items that kids purchase and influence, food and beverages—particularly candy, carbonated soft drinks, and salty snacks—consistently represent the leading categories. The food industry spends a massive amount of money—almost $2 billion—to get kids to eat and drink more sugary drinks, sugary cereals, sweet and salty snacks, and fast food. Advertisers spend roughly $950 million annually on television tailored to children under twelve, according to industry estimates.6 Less than $10 million is spent marketing healthy foods like fruits and vegetables to kids.7

  Food marketing to children has been identified as playing a key role in the national obesity crisis facing American children today. The National Academies’ Institute of Medicine, for example, has compiled studies that show the importance of television advertisements in influencing unhealthy food and beverage preferences, requests, and diets of children. A recent comprehensive review by the Institute of Medicine demonstrated that despite efforts to decrease obesity and increase healthy eating, television food advertising was still negatively affecting children’s food choices, diets, and health.8

  Public health professionals are not only concerned about the quantity and types of advertising targeted at children and youth, they are also alarmed about the nutritional quality of products most heavily marketed to children. Despite some improvements in recent years, the overwhelming majority of food and beverage advertising targeted to the young still tends to be for products of poor nutritional quality. For example, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reported that in 2009, food and beverage companies spent $1.79 billion to market their products to kids. Seventy-two percent of this total was spent to market just three types of products: breakfast cereals, fast foods, and carbonated drinks.9

  Teenagers are even juicier targets than the Frosted Flakes– and Lunchables-age crowd. Starting in middle school, kids have more money and freedom. This is also when kids begin to form the preferences and dislikes that will define them for the rest of their lives. Food marketers also specifically target low-income neighborhoods and black and Latino kids. This means that some kids get a “double dose” of marketing—in the media and in their own neighborhoods. As a kid, where your parents live and how much money they make has a direct impact on what marketing you are exposed to.10

  Big Food continues to aggressively market its least nutritious products directly to children. As a recent report on cereal marketing concludes, “Companies do offer more nutritious and lower-sugar cereals for children, like regular Cheerios and Frosted Mini-Wheats, but they are marketed to parents, not children.”11

  “While cereal companies have made small improvements to the nutrition of their child-targeted cereals, these cereals are still far worse than the products they market to adults. They have 56 percent more sugar, half as much fiber, and 5 percent more sodium,” said cereal marketing report coauthor Marlene Schwartz, deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. “The companies know how to make a range of good-tasting cereals that aren’t loaded with sugar and salt. Why can’t they help parents out and market these directly to children instead?”

  “It is obvious that industry regulating itself is a failure. If there is to be any hope of protecting children from predatory marketing, either public outcry or government action will be necessary to force the companies to change,” added coauthor Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center.12

  How Big Food Manufactures Health Claims

  Big Food marketing power becomes clear when you look at the hundreds of millions of dollars that are spent advertising products every year. A few examples:

  1. McDonald’s spent $115 million just to market Happy Meals.13

  2. General Mills spent $73.7 million advertising Honey Nut Cheerios, $29 million for Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and $12.6 million on Lucky Charms.14

  3. Frito-Lay spent almost $150 million advertising Cheetos, Doritos, and other chips.15

  These are astronomical sums. But if you are a Big Food marketing executive, there’s one big problem—the ads are blatantly obvious, and they are becoming less effective as potential target customers migrate from TV to mobile and from magazines to social media. Traditional food marketing still gets the message across and drives sales, but there is increasing resistance and skepticism toward advertising, particularly when it involves marketing to children.

  Michael Mudd is a former executive vice president of global corporate affairs for Kraft Foods. He retired in 2004. In a 2013 opinion piece for The New York Times, Michael wrote, “I was part of the packaged food and beverage business for more than twenty years. As the national waistline grew, the industry sought refuge in the fact that the obesity epidemic has many causes. It has insistently used that fact to fight off government regulators and justify why it should not have to change what it sells or how it sells it.”16

  Big Food often blurs the line between science and marketing. “Objective science” is conducted and then expertly spun into marketing, almost always cloaked by Big Food institutes (e.g., Coca-Cola’s Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness, General Mills’ Bell Institute, and Nestlé’s Nutrition Institute). A doctor’s stamp of approval works magic when you have only a fraction of a second to make a buying decision.

  As a recent New York Times article on the war between the sugar and high-fructose corn syrup trade groups stated, “academic experts frequently become extensions of corporate lobbying campaigns as rival industries use them to try to inflict damage on their competitors or defend their reputations.”17

  With one foot in the world of science and one foot in the world of marketing spin, how is a time-crunched consumer supposed to know which way is up?

  How the Nutritional Guidelines Have Led Us Astray

  In the early 1980s, Luise Light was teaching at New York University when she was recruited to work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). As the director of dietary guidance and nutrition education research, Light was asked to create a new set of guidelines for food in order to help consumers navigate the confusing world of health and nutrition claims.18

  Light and her team developed the concept of the Food Pyramid. Her version of the pyramid promoted a diet based on fruits and vegetables. Lean meats and fish came next. And grains and sugars were placed near the top, where only limited amounts were recommended. Having devoted her life to the study of nutrition, Light knew that the human body is not designed to live primarily on the nutrients from breads and processed carbohydrates. That is how the Food Pyramid was originally submitted to the authorities within the USDA. The USDA loved the idea of the Food Pyramid. And they were thrilled with the simplicity of the design.19

  But when Light saw her pyramid in its final form, she was appalled. As Light recounts, “When our version of the Food Guide came back to us revised, we were shocked to find that it was vastly different from the one we had developed.”20

  The first USDA food guide, “Food for Young Children,” appeared in 1916. Foods were categorized into five groups: milk and meat, cereals, vegetables and fruits, fats and fatty foods, and sugars and sugary foods. This food guide was followed in 1917 by dietary recommendations also based on these five food groups, targeted to the general public in “How to Select Foods.”21

  The USDA guides evolved slowly over the next seven decades, until 1992, when based on Light’s concept, the USDA created a powerful icon: the Food Guide Pyramid. This simple illustration conveyed what the USDA said were the elements of a healthy diet. However, as the Matzner Clinic points out, the information embodied in this pyramid was based on shaky scientific evidence, and it was seldom updated to reflect major advances in our understanding of the connection between diet and health.22

  A healthy diet, by definition, had suddenly become a low-fat diet. Eating too many calories was the problem, and since fat contains more than twice as many calories per gram as e
ither protein or carbohydrates, “people who cut down on fat usually lose weight,” as The Washington Post reported in 1985. As Gary Taubes reported in Good Calories, Bad Calories, beginning in the late 1980s with the publication of the Food Guide Pyramid and The Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health, an entire research industry arose to create acceptable nonfat fat substitutes, while the food industry spent billions of dollars marketing the “less-fat-is-good-health” message. The USDA’s pyramid and booklet on dietary guidelines recommended that fats and oils be eaten “sparingly,” while we were now to eat six to eleven servings per day of the pasta, potatoes, rice, and bread once considered uniquely fattening.23

  The focus shifted from obtaining adequate nutrients through a well-rounded mix of real food, to avoiding excessive intakes of certain food groups (particularly fats) that were spuriously linked to chronic diseases.24 Fat became evil, almost literally overnight. Americans were encouraged to use vegetable oils instead of butter, which prompted food manufacturers to create hardened oils through the hydrogenated process so they resembled butter. Margarine rapidly gained ground in our diets; at the turn of the century, people consumed only two pounds per person per year, but by the 1990s, people were eating around eight pounds.25

  Scientists tried to correlate a fatty diet to fatty arteries, as deaths from coronary artery disease (CAD) began to climb. According to what would come to be known as the diet-heart hypothesis, saturated fat raises blood cholesterol levels and leads to the buildup of cholesterol and other fats as plaques in the arteries. To bolster this theory, a University of Minnesota public health researcher named Ancel Keys showed a nearly direct correlation between calories from fat in the diet and deaths from heart disease among populations across seven countries.26

  According to Dr. David Perlmutter, the only problem with Keys’s analysis is that he ignored countries that didn’t fit this pattern, including many where people eat a lot of fat but don’t get heart disease and others where the diets are low in fat yet their populations have a high incidence of fatal heart attacks. The Japanese, whose diets have only 10 percent of calories coming from fat, showed the lowest CAD mortality—less than one in one thousand. The United States, on the other hand, had the highest CAD mortality (seven in one thousand) with 40 percent of its calories coming from fat. On the surface, it would seem that these patterns point directly to the idea that fat is bad and that fat causes heart disease. Keys made international headlines and even appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Health officials, scientists, and the American public bought the “fat is bad” story hook, line, and sinker. Little did we know then that the data wasn’t telling the whole story.27